It’s May, and this Izzy Nestegard piece, debuting at The Factory on May 14, is tone-matching all the explosive color and big pistil-and-stamen energy in the air. Nestegard is one third of a group show (also featuring artists Melody Hirsch and Mint) bringing psychedelic Alice in Wonderland vibes t o Capitol Hill Art Walk this month in All the Pretty Things Were Acting Strange. In its tenth year, the Factory remains a place to discover really good (and affordable) work by emerging artists. You’ll feel like you’re mainlining the local underground scene.  Speaking of underground spaces, the Boren Banner series at Frye Art Museum has turned over a new artist. For the next six months you’ll see Chloe King’s Dancing My Way to Drexciya as you cruise down Boren Avenue on Pill Hill. It’s the first time the Oakland-based Cornish alum has shown at a Seattle museum, and the piece is described thus: “Drawing on the dilapidated, improvised, and occasionally illicit spaces that shape ‘the scene,’ [King’s] work considers how the dance floor becomes a stage for radical joy and collective reinvention, where bodies move, histories revise, and new worlds take shape under the pulse of the strobe.” That’s a heavy lift for the dance floor, but it resonates with a subject that’s been circulating: is the museum a place we can rave? As World War III unfolds and the planet hangs in the balance, museums seem to be asking a bit more of themselves. Opening up museums as a secular sanctuary for meatspace communion (the elusive third space) is a la mode. But is it enough?  In brighter gossip: Seattle is getting a triennial! Well, not Seattle exactly. Spearheaded by Ellen Ito, curator of collections and special projects at Tacoma Art Museum, the triennial opens June 2027 and will be spread across two institutions—TAM and the Museum of Northwest Art. Work will be selected by three guest curators via both open call and invitation. Sorry, Canadians (and Idaho): this one will be limited to artists from Washington and Oregon.  More art recs—here’s an incomplete list of things you should have on your radar for First Thursday and beyond. First Thursday (May 7) Actualize Gallery is a compulsory stop during art walk these days. The party is here, thanks to its being one of the biggest centralized hubs of studios for a large number of the city’s hot young art things. This month they’re hosting the group show Conduit, curated by (consistently great curator) Grayson Richter. Then head to Forest for the Trees at Railspur, exhibiting Erlin Geffrard and Spencer Keeton Cunningham on Level 3. The Bay Area–based duo (also concurrently exhibiting at Geheim Gallery) have collaborated for nearly 20 years, making work about colonization in the Americas. (Geffrard is Haitian American and Cunningham is of the Colville Tribe in Washington State.) Their critical commentary on the shortcomings of the American Dream is packed with lavish color and a lot of wit (their satirical aliases are AI Indian and Super Kreyola). Note: an improvisational performance is slated for 8-ish. I regret every performance at Railspur I ever missed.  You’ve got a second chance to catch Norman Lundin’s Landscapes, Mostly, Other Things Too at Greg Kucera. Lundin’s palette is the most sublime, drab gray. His subjects—painted mostly from memory—couldn’t be more banal: a grocery bag left on the table, a quiet view out a window. Yet Lundin’s boring subjects scintillate; his paintings have more in common with Rothko than Whistler’s Mother. To stand in their presence is to be gobsmacked by sheer aura. At Gallery 4Culture, Clare Johnson’s A Life in Sticky Notes offers a sampling of over 6,000 Post-It note drawings she’s amassed over the course of nearly two decades of nightly diaristic drawing. It feels a little dangerous to commit your life’s work to something as ephemeral as these little scraps of paper. Or maybe sticky notes are where the real story of one’s life unfolds. Georgetown Art Attack (May 9) If you missed Gabriel Stromberg’s Earth Sign at studio e, Saturday is your last chance—but with a bonus: an artist talk (3 to 4 p.m.) facilitated by Lauren Gallow, one of our city’s literary luminaries, in conversation with Stromberg about how material and form can serve as containers for memory. Timothy White Eagle’s Once Wild River opens at Mini Mart City Park. White Eagle is an icon. Last year, he was selected as the inaugural artist for the Green-Duwamish Urban Waters Partnership Artist-in-Residence program, a yearlong residency piloted by the EPA. This exhibit marks the culmination of nearly a year’s work, featuring art by a cohort of collaborators including Adrain Chesser, Laura Wright, Epiphany Couch, Crystal Cortez, and Sarah Kavage. Seattle Art Book Fair (May 9–10) Lovers of art books: arrive rested and ready to dive into bookish stuff by 85+ artists filling all three floors of Washington Hall. Seattle Art Book Fair, now in its fourth year, was founded by superstar book designers Jayme Yen and Tom Eykemans, and features hardcovers, softcovers, indie magazines, zines, risograph ephemera, and so much more. And the whole thing is free! The schedule is packed with tutorials, author presentations, and onsite screen printing and letterpress printing as well. Last year I regret not budgeting enough time for a leisurely stroll, but that didn’t stop me from spending a pretty penny on some great stuff as I bolted through. Capitol Hill Art Walk (May 14) In addition to the Factory, stop by Vermillion for Leah Fadness’s Skrimsli, a show of drawings and performances by (really great dancers) Kyrin Grey and Ezra Dickinson, who also posed for the series. “Skrimsli” means monster in Old Norse, and refers to the perception of Loki and his children as monstrosities that must be killed, lest they bring down apocalypse. Fadness uses this mythology to frame the ways in which queerness is often viewed. (Performance on May 14 at 8 p.m.) At Spectrum Fine Art, Sharon Shapiro’s Tender Wild charts contemporary female experience, placing figures in museum dioramas or football fields—settings where women unfold as both mystical beings and assailable prey.  Dee Dee Does Downsizing at the Grocery Studios (May 16) Deborah Faye Lawrence does collage like no other. Objectively beautiful and brimming with barbs, her work is loaded with themes feminist and political. This one-day pop-up at the Grocery Studios is a chance to view over 125 pieces spanning a 45-year practice. Lucky for you, she’s cleaning out the studio and pricing things to move. LAST CALL: Project NW is a new(ish) corner of Tacoma Art Museum carved out to showcase regional artists. It’s curated by Ellen Ito—also responsible for curating the incredible Haunted, as well as putting that triennial together. The current showcase, Project NW: Ralph Pugay, closes soon (May 17), so hurry! Pugay is a Portland-based artist whose world-building is wonderfully bizarre and somehow cohesive (I dare you to find the meaning). His personal mythology involves centaurs, roses, horses, self-portraits of the artist as a praying mantis, pieta configurations (a bird-headed man holding another bird man in its lap). It all comes off a bit uncanny, maybe underscored by a sense of emotional unease (can relate), yet funny as hell.   ICYMI: I don’t think anyone’s told him yet, but Jerry Saltz got the AI treatment. Seattle art-tech thinktank xispa has released Pocket Critic, an LLM trained on the writing of our favorite coffee-loving critic. You can input any image of an artwork and the Pocket Critic returns a waterfall of feedback in Saltz’s snappy, impassioned voice. Is it going to replace the man anytime soon? Doubtful; when xispa unveiled the app on socials, they showcased the bot’s analysis of Horizons, a monumental aluminum-relief sculpture by Barry Johnson that was recently installed at Seattle Airport. AI Jerry offered its observations, but concluded with a sentence that failed so hard at the thing a bot can never do: feel any-fucking-thing at all in the presence of art: “What’s not working for me is that it might be too neat, too contained in its storytelling,” Pocket Critic said. “But there’s genuine craft here and what feels like real feeling.”  The post New Column: Touch the Art appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less