Meet the Woman Curating Seattle’s Most Interesting Art Gallery
At Mount Analogue, Colleen Louise Barry takes a multifaceted look at Seattle arts
By Danielle Hayden August 18, 2018
This article originally appeared in the September 2018 issue of Seattle magazine.
This article appears in print in the September 2018 issue. Read more from the Fall Arts Preview feature story here. Click here to subscribe.
“The things I wanted to see in this city either weren’t here or weren’t accessible to me,” says Colleen Louise Barry, an artist, poet and curator who moved to Seattle from Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2016. She opened Mount Analogue (Pioneer Square, 300 S Washington St.) just over a year ago in what was formerly the G. Gibson Gallery in Pioneer Square.
In that short amount of time, Mount Analogue—part of an arts collective in the space that includes indie publisher Cold Cube Press, Specialist, a contemporary art gallery and Gramma, a poetry press, for which Barry serves as editor—has evolved into a magnetic community arts center, bookshop and publishing studio that hosts monthly exhibits across disciplines and forms, sometimes even beyond gallery walls. That was the case with her late-spring exhibit, A Lone, a group show exploring the idea of connection and loneliness in our digitally fragmented world, which was installed on billboards and signposts across the city. It challenged the idea of what a traditional gallery does—or should do—while providing provocative context to explore the exhibition’s thesis.
Other recent shows have featured the poetry of Seattle civic poet Anastacia-Renée; a corporeal mime performance set against a papier-mâché set from musician Jess Joy, aka the Singing Mime; and a BDSM opera (with one $30 performance accompanied by a “whipping from your cast member of choice”).
“I wanted to create a space [where] you have this immersive experience with other people. It’s like when you go to a concert and everybody is singing this song, and you get that feeling like you’re high; I wanted to create that…I ask artists when they come into this space to really think about the experience of it and to really try and transform the space.”
Upcoming fall shows:
Designer, comic, musician and artist Aidan Fitzgerald, Content Aware, 9/6–9/30
Tattoo and performance artist MKNZ, self-titled, 10/4–10/28
Artist and illustrator Tara Booth, self-titled, 11/1–11/25
Painter Sara Long, Building a Body of Light, 12/6–12/30
Follow Us
AANHPI Month: Where to Celebrate, Eat, and Learn Around Seattle
From festivals and museum exhibits to food tours and historic neighborhoods, here are a few ways to mark the month across the region.
Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month—known as AANHPI Month—is observed in the U.S. each May. It began as a weeklong observance in 1978 and expanded to the full month in 1992. Asian, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities in the United States extend back much further, including to the late 16th century, when…
Black Panther Park in Skyway Becomes First Black Panther Park in the World
The new community garden honors the Black Panther Party’s legacy of food justice and the Skyway neighbors who helped bring it to life.
On a sunny Sunday earlier this month, at the corner of 75th Avenue and Renton Avenue South, the community gathered for the opening of Skyway’s Black Panther Park. Inspired by the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast for School Children program that compelled the federal government to provide breakfast in schools, Black Panther Park is a community…
Rearview Mirror: A Family Coming Apart, SIFF, and My First Fashion Show
Things I did, saw, ate, learned, or read in the past week (or so).
The Family House A house can hold a lot, and Seattle Rep’s Appropriate knows that. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Tony-winning play, directed here by Timothy McCuen Piggee, drops the Lafayette siblings into their late father’s hoarded, falling-apart Arkansas plantation home for an estate sale, and lets the whole thing crack open from there. The sibling dynamics are…
Studio Sessions: Raili Jänese
The Kirkland painter brings a playful eye to daily life and the little rituals of being human.
Artist Raili Jänese pays close attention to the small stuff. It might be a goose on the move, a rabbit in the yard, or a person lost in the rituals of coffee or cooking. The Estonian-born artist, now based in Kirkland, makes colorful acrylic works that turn everyday behavior—human and animal alike—into something funny and…