♪♪
-Hi, and welcome to the show.
I'm Nancy Guppy, coming to you from Arundel Books in Pioneer--
-We interrupt this program to bring you the following tidbit
of Seattle history.
The building in which Nancy is now standing dates from 1900
and originally housed
the Capital Brewing and Malting Company,
which later became Olympia Brewing Company,
known for their famous jingle, "It's the water and a lot more."
-♪ It's the water and a lot more ♪
-We now return to Nancy,
still in that building I just told you about.
-Arundel Books, founded in 1984 by Phil Bevis,
began as a fine-press publisher specializing in art and poetry,
and has since expanded into rare and out-of-print books.
Arundel also includes an affiliated
indie publishing company called Chatwin Books,
a book-printing and binding operation,
both digital and their very cool vintage letter press,
and in 2023, Phil opened an art gallery,
Chatwin Arts, directly across the street.
Arundel Books is a Seattle treasure
that is well-worth an in-person visit.
For hours, location, and access to their exclusive inventory,
go to arundelbooks.com.
♪♪
We've got a wonderful show for you,
including the eye-popping visuals of Liz Tran.
-I'm a Seattle-based artist.
All of my work is grounded in painting.
But I paint on everything,
from shoes, clothing, giant installations.
-BallardWorks turns 20.
-So, we have right now about 30 artists.
And we have painters.
We have encaustic printmakers.
-And a remembrance of the beautiful Susie Tennant.
♪♪
-And we'll begin with visual artist Baso Fibonacci.
[ Brakes squealing ]
-I am Baso Fibonacci.
I'm a painter who lives in Seattle.
I live right by these train tracks in the Bemis Building,
which is a 100-year-old building
that's filled with mostly artists.
Baso Fibonacci is a pseudonym.
Baso is an old Zen Buddhist from early Zen days in China.
And Fibonacci was a mathematician from Italy.
Zen is a very illogical philosophy,
and Fibonacci is a mathematician,
and math is a very logical thing.
So those two parts of me
are pretty prevalent in my life, I think.
♪♪
Mostly I doodled when I was younger,
but then I got into graffiti when I was around 18
and lived with an artist
who kind of showed me what art could be.
♪♪
A lot of my early paintings were based around nature.
I'd paint, like, a lot of animal life.
Me and this artist, John Nagai,
painted a wolf that's running south
with the city burning behind it.
And it's on SODO Track, so it's like the busway
where the buses run and the light rail runs.
The wolf is the artistic community.
Artists are moving south 'cause it's too expensive.
I grew up on Tiger Mountain.
It's a small community outside of Issaquah.
It's very woodsy. There's trees, ferns, animals.
Kind of an isolated childhood, in some ways.
My brother was, like, living on the streets
of downtown Seattle in the '80s,
and he was addicted to drugs from a very young age
and just lived a life of being an addict.
And so I grew up knowing that that was a thing and knowing
that that could completely destroy someone's life.
And eventually, he was down in Mexico.
I think he was a coyote,
running drugs and Mexicans across the border.
The autopsy said that he was in jail
and he went into an alley and overdosed.
I remember when my dad got the call that he had died.
I remember him just, like, answering the phone
and then, you know, bursting into tears
and running up to his room and crying.
And my dad did not cry.
That was the first time I think I ever heard my dad cry.
And so I was, like, freaking out.
Called my mom. Said, "It must be Eric,"
'cause that's the only thing
that she could think that would make him react like that.
♪♪
What happened -- I was, like, drinking and writing graffiti
and fell off a bridge and broke my back, lost my arm.
I think I was creative before,
but I wasn't really focused on art.
I skateboarded, so I spent a lot of time skateboarding.
And I think not being able to skateboard
and, like, live my life like that,
I kind of, like, found a new outlet for my creativity
and got more focused on painting and creating, being expressive.
Part of, like, the stuff I'm doing right now
is based around the fentanyl crisis and downtown culture.
It's something I see a lot.
Like, I spend a lot of time downtown,
and it's something that has kind of taken over the city.
And, I mean, part of the reason I know what withdrawals are like
is that I was on morphine for 10 years after my accident.
And trying to come off the morphine was extremely hard.
And so I kind of have, like, a small inkling
of what withdrawals are like.
I know they're a lot worse when you're on heroin
or if you're on fentanyl than what I had,
but even with, like, the small amounts of morphine
I was coming off of was really, like, a struggle.
So, these are the foils
that people have smoked fentanyl off of.
You can see the little lines that the blue pills make
as they slide across the foil when they're smoking them.
Each of these will eventually have a painting on them.
I am painting skulls in the foils
'cause people are dying from the fentanyl.
And I'm trying to quantify it. Like, people hear numbers.
They hear 200 people die downtown this year, about.
And that doesn't really tell you anything.
It's just a number that you hear.
When you actually see 200 skulls,
you can start to, like, understand
how many people that is to die
in, like, you know, basically,
like, one neighborhood.
♪♪
But I don't really have a point I'm trying to make,
'cause I don't know the answer.
I'm making art just based on what I see
and what I think is interesting.
I hope just to create some kind of conversation.
There has to be, like, compassion.
They have to, like, look at these people's point of views
and, like, understand that these people are suffering.
They might not have had a nice upbringing.
You know, you have to have compassion for people
that are living on the street for sure.
It's, like, a rough life,
especially going into the wintertimes.
♪♪
This is like a moment in time, and I'm trying
to kind of solidify moments in time with my art.
And I'm just trying to, like,
talk about something individual a way
and hopefully have people have some empathy for these people
that live on the streets.
People just, like, want them to go away.
A lot of people just want them to die.
They want them to be in jail. They don't want them to exist.
For the most part, I'd rather hang out
with people on the streets.
I'd rather have an interesting conversation with them
than, like, drink a beer in a beer hall
and play Ping-Pong, you know?
♪♪
-Follow Baso and see more of his work on Instagram.
♪♪
In the early 2000s, four local artists dreamed big.
20 years later, that dream is still going strong.
♪♪
-20 years ago,
I had a business called Sev Shoon Arts Center,
which was for printmakers,
and I needed a home for the business,
which was on Ballard Avenue.
So I thought that having a bigger building
in a bigger community would be awesome,
and Jay was very interested in developing artist studios.
Joan and John had told me personally
that they had an idea of owning a studio
they would never have to leave.
So that brought us all together.
I was looking for about 2,500 feet,
and this is about 14,000.
It was a lot bigger,
which Jay figured immediately how to deal with it.
[ Both laugh ]
-The economics were a lot better,
but it was a lot bigger problem.
Fortunately, I had a lot of contacts
in the building industry,
and we were able to get the right subcontractors to work
at every level on the project,
and we had amazing collaboration.
♪♪
-So, we have right now about 30 artists.
And we have painters.
We have encaustic printmakers,
large-scale artists, small-scale artists.
We have an artist who does quilts,
and another one who works on glass.
-We have a really nice demographic, too,
from the neighborhood and from the city of Seattle --
young artists starting out and mid-career artists,
and then a few artists who are retired from their job job,
their day job, and are working full-time on their art now.
-This year is our 20th anniversary,
and our tenants are the ones who decided
they wanted to exhibit our work,
so they asked us to have a founders show.
It will be up for two months.
And it's been actually really exciting to have the four of us
come together with old and new work and design a show together.
And that's our way of celebrating our 20th anniversary
of really great 20 years.
♪♪
My work is typically inspired by my travel.
I travel the world on my motorcycle and make friends.
So, then I come back,
and I make a lot of work about the people I met.
So, my last trip was in Tanzania,
and I lived with the Masai for a little while.
So it will be my Masai friends who will be with me.
-It's really important to have spaces
for artists to work in in this city.
-I think the longest we've ever had an empty studio
has been two weeks.
Comes available, and within two weeks,
there's somebody ready to move in.
-Every artistic media needs a place to work.
And we're a really good example to show
that you can invent a place and have other people
get the ball and keep it rolling.
♪♪
-BallardWorks' 20th-anniversary exhibit,
"The Founders," opens March 9
and runs through May 1.
For hours, location,
and special events,
go to ballardworks.com.
Next up, the vibrant world
of multidisciplinary artist Liz Tran.
♪♪
-So, in my creative process,
I'm always trying to get to the point of flow,
because that's when my best work comes out.
And it's extremely challenging to get to that point,
especially now with so much going on in the world
and so many distractions.
But that is always my ultimate goal,
is to work from that inner place that almost feels spiritual.
That's what I'm always searching for within my practice.
♪♪
I'm a Seattle-based artist.
All of my work is grounded in painting.
But I paint on everything from shoes, clothing,
giant installations, canvas -- anything I can get my hands on.
So my practice is very expansive and it's forever growing.
My art is incredibly vibrant.
I'm very drawn to fluorescent pink.
And living somewhere that is so gray
most of the time in the Pacific Northwest,
I really need that color to activate my brain and my heart.
Most recently, I have been doing Rorshachs.
They intrigue me because the viewer
can see their own imagery within,
and it speaks to subjectivity
and how there is no correct or incorrect way to view art.
And now I'm going to fold it.
Even though I've seen the imagery beforehand,
I never know exactly what's gonna come out.
So it's always a fun surprise to open it up.
I grew up in Eugene, Oregon,
and I have memories of my dad putting his paper in the bathtub
to prep it for his watercolors,
and he would periodically make paintings when I was a kid.
So that helped me to understand that art was possible
and it was a thing.
His paintings are beautiful,
and I feel like with my present-day work,
I am very heavily inspired by the watercolors.
But I take it into my own hands
and turn it into something a bit more activated.
♪♪
My inner psychology is a big part
of my artwork and my practice,
and I think of my practice as being medicine.
I have a lot of issues with mental health,
and painting is what helps get me through.
I can't go more than two weeks without painting
or I start getting incredibly depressed.
So, I'm trying to get the bubbles out.
And I have to do that delicately,
because the more saturated this paper gets,
the more it wants to tear.
This goes back to an art professor
that I had very early on,
and he would always say, "Don't be precious."
And that sentence goes through my head a lot
when I'm making my work,
and it's a reminder to just loosen up
and not take things too seriously.
So, during the pandemic, I started harvesting flowers.
And I pressed them,
and I started putting them into my artwork.
The paint itself will keep the color,
but as you can see, the flowers were already starting to fade.
♪♪
Color is definitely what makes my work identifiable,
and, also, the looseness and childlike qualities within it.
When people look at my work,
I want them to be really curious about it.
And, also, I want them to be able to see something in it
that they have within themselves.
♪♪
-Learn more about Liz at liztran.com.
See her work in person at Patricia Rovzar Gallery.
And watch for her original visuals in "Oh Rosie!",
a new music video
by the L.A.-based artist Alexandria Boddie
coming out this fall.
♪♪
We want to take a moment to remember Susie Tennant,
a creative dynamo with a heart of gold
who died January 18, 2024, at the age of 61.
♪♪
A renowned champion, advocate, and cheerleader,
Susie would go the distance for anyone and anything
she felt deserved recognition.
Grounded in a steadfast belief
that great art deserves exposure,
Susie insisted that commercial success
didn't have to clash with integrity.
Musical artists who benefited
from Susie's focused attention and guidance
include Sonic Youth, Weezer, Nirvana, and Beck.
Susie also had an impact on local, national,
and international organizations such as Tower Records,
Music for Marriage Equality,
Sub Pop, Geffen DGC Records,
KEXP, and The Vera Project.
Energetic, hilarious,
and always ready with a kind word and a caring gesture,
what powered Susie at her core
was the deep and profound love she shared
with her beautiful family --
husband Chris Swenson, daughter Ella, son Eli,
along with her mother, siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins,
and hundreds of devoted and cherished friends.
Susie was a bright and shining star,
and the compassion and joy she emanated throughout her life
will continue to resonate in the lives of everyone
who was lucky enough to cross her path.
♪♪
And that's a rap for us.
Big thanks to Phil Bevis and Arundel Books for hosting us.
To plan your visit online or in person,
go to arundelbooks.com.
And we're gonna leave you with some highlights
from the Celebration of Life for Susie Tennant.
The event took place in the lobby
of Seattle's Paramount Theatre,
and it was the perfect balance
of laughing and crying and really great music.
So thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon.
♪♪
-We lost a good one. We lost a good one.
And just looking around the room,
it's obvious how much Susie Tennant was loved.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-♪ I remembered what it is I keep on learning ♪
♪ Somewhere down this tunnel, there is light ♪
-I can't imagine a lovelier way to come together.
And our friend is very much still here.
-Yes. -So thank you.
-Thanks for coming. -Yes.
-We love Susie.
♪♪
-♪ Okay, might as well say ♪
♪ That I'd follow you halfway around the world ♪
-And we wrote a song about Susie,
because everybody knows that...
♪ She likes the sound of rock-'n'-roll ♪
♪ She likes the sounds of rock-'n'-roll ♪
♪ I said that Susie likes the sounds of rock-'n'-roll ♪
♪ She likes the sound, like the sounds of rock-'n'-roll ♪
♪ Yes, she does ♪
♪ She knows she does ♪
-This song is for Susie. Called "K Street."
[ Audience cheering ]
-♪ After all the troubles have come and gone ♪
♪ They were here for so long ♪
♪ Now I've got this sinking feeling ♪
♪ Everyone seems to be leaving ♪
-♪ Oh, whoa-oh-oh ♪
-♪ Can't believe how lonely it is here on K Street ♪
♪ There's no one like me here on K Street ♪
♪ How lonely it is here on K Street today ♪
♪ Today, today, today ♪
-Now, therefore, I, Dow Constantine,
King County Executive, do proclaim February 23, 2024
to be Susie Tennant Day in Martin Luther King County.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Susie would have hated this.
[ Laughter ]
And she would have loved it, actually.
She would have absolutely loved it.
And so this is for her, and it's also for you.
Thank you.
[ Cheers and applause ]