Tag Archives: Openings

…Innovation

Bezos Supports Innovation at the New MOHAI

(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

“There’s something about Seattle that has made it an unusually good place to innovate, and the MOHAI Center for Innovation will help Seattle continue on that course by showcasing and teaching how industrial innovation can play an important role in human advancement,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Seattle-based Amazon.com. Continue reading »

…the Momentous and the Moment

I’m very lucky in that my office at MOHAI is through our McCurdy gallery. For the last couple of months, I’ve seen every one of the Richard Bennett art pieces on display and that has only deepened my appreciation of a very talented and artistic man.


Now the gallery is host to artists of a different sort. Tomorrow, Now and Then opens featuring photography from Paul Dorpat, Jean Sherrard, Bérangère Lomont and many photographers of yesteryear. In this exhibit, these three photographers have roamed from Paris to Washington State and Seattle in an attempt to re-take a photo from as much the same place as possible, charting the changes that time and humans have wrought.


Of course, being a Seattlite, it is the photos of my city that transport me. The first photos that greet you, jutting from the wall as if eager to make your acquaintance, are two large panoramas of the Seattle skyline from West Seattle. The sheer magnitude of the photos is a little overwhelming, stretching from Seattle Center (gotta have the Space Needle in the ‘Now’ photo!) to SoDo. The modern height of the buildings, the density of the development, seems impossible compared to the 1910 photo, where a much less grand city gradually rises to First and Capitol Hill. More shocking are many of the smaller photos that show the immense changes that Seattle has gone through in many of her nooks and crannies. The oldest photos show a village, hugging the side of a steep hill, small picket fences surrounding proud but humble houses. It is difficult to believe that this same hills are sites of the Columbia Center, City Hall and a freeway. Except, for all intents, that hill is no longer there. Of Seattle’s many hills, few if any have their original grade. This is proven strongly by a photo of Hotel Washington, the largest and (some say) most opulent of Seattle’s hotels of the 1800s. The hotel reigns from the top of Denny Hill, with few structures coming close, either in scale or grandiosity. Now, it is flat Belltown and South Lake Union, denser, more settled, but a bit more demure, though still hosting grand ambitions.


On the other end of the scale, the exhibit includes a slideshow of photos taken in front of a Wallingford QFC over the period of a few years. The photos are taken only days, hours or even minutes apart, and yet they show the innumerable small changes that affect our environment every day. The changes may be small, but they clearly show the passage of time. Instead of skyscrapers being built, the crate of watermelons becomes a crate of pumpkins becomes snow. Instead of leveled hills, the lights go on inside as the sun sets outside. People go about their lives.

Although it may seem like this is an exhibit about buildings and land and lakes, it is really an exhibit about people. People created those buildings, leveled that land, lowered those lakes. People lived here. People live here. Luckily, Now and Then shows this quite well, reminding us that history is both the momentous and the moment.


Now and Then opens April 9th. The exhibit uses ‘repeat photography’ to reveal the changes in our world.Now and then comparisons are proven delights where two images of the same place telescope the time that transpired between them. The repeat photographs include the work of local icon Paul Dorpat and his collaborators, Jean Sherrard and Bérangère Lomont.

…One Step Closer to Moving

South Lake Union Park Opens Today