For some time, now, the Seattle Arts Museum has hosted a popular event called Remix, a night of pulsating art and culture where hipsters & regular folk rub elbows inside a museum awash with art, music, fashion, food, dancing and drinks. Here’s a chance to experience a major art exhibition while partying down. Sounds like fun to me.
Hammering Man at the Seattle Art Museum
This Friday’s installment, February 24th from 7:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m., coincides with one of Seattle’s most anticipated visual art exhibitions of the year – Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise. Paul Gauguin is one of the true larger-than-life figures in art history. Disillusioned by modern life, he sought out simple societies, such as those he imagined existed in exotic paradises such as Pont-Aven on the coast of Brittany and the South Seas island of Tahiti.
Your ticket also allows you to see, and more importantly to hear, Theaster Gates’ The Listening Room, a visual art installation that utilizes more than a thousand blues, R&B and disco records. On Thursdays and Sundays a DJ spins them, but when there’s no DJ, museum goers can play the records themselves.
As recently quoted in The Art Newspaper, Gates says the records can be used to examine African-American politics through history: “When were our voices radical, when were they pacifist? Do we sing about things we can’t scream about?”
Other happenings during Friday’s Remix include DJ Supreme La Rock spinning global beats, hip hop, soul; Tahitian dancing and drumming by Te’a rama along with a Marquesan haka (a Polynesian traditional welcome); A “cut paper paradise” by artist Celeste Cooning; A live performance by the Big World Breaks ensemble; Self-portrait postcards inspired by Gauguin’s paintings with artists Jeanne Dodds and Elizabeth Humphrey; DJ Riz spinning music in The Listening Room while an archivist records and catalogs his mixes; Harpist and poet Monica Schley improvising spoken word, music and vocals; and Highly Opinionated Tours by exhibition curators Pam McClusky and Chiyo Ishikawa, artist Allyce Wood, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the Rat City Rollergirls.
SAM Remix is co-hosted by 911 Media Arts, AIA Seattle, The American Association of Museum’s Seattle Emerging Professionals Group, Canoe Social Club, French-American Chamber of Commerce of the Pacific Northwest, Frye Art Museum, Future-ish, Gage Academy of Art, Langston Hughes African American Film Festival, Live Aloha Hawaiian Cultural Festival, Longhouse Media/Native Lens, NOMA NW—National Organization of Minority Architects, Out for Sustainability, Rat City Rollergirls, Seattle Chamber Young Professionals Network, Voices Rising, and the World Affairs Council’s Young Professionals International Network.
Click here to visit the Seattle Art Museum’s website for more information.
