The new chief curator for The Henry Gallery is Shamim M. Momin of LAND and before that co curator of the 2004 and 2008 Whitney Biennials. A great hire since the Henry hasnt been the same since the Elizabeth Brown days. Momin brings a present and pervasive intellect to what she does, and isnt one of those curators that tries to out vague her audience and subcontract out all the programming (which sadly is par for the course these days). She's a legit intellectual, which is what I expect from art institutions and rarely find these days. Congrats, Seattle will have her for perhaps 5 years but it will be good for contemporary art in the Pacific Northwest since I consider the Henry to be the top Contemporary Art institution in the region. Too often curators here program what they "should be" curating rather than discovering what they could be curating.

Contemporary art takes on the ease of getting guns in Chicago.

One of the world's top architects collaborates with Norway's troublemaker artist for a project to die for.

Too many artists today are doing tarp art, as if the wear and tear + stains of life are enough to make their art appealing to liberal elites who are out of touch with whats really going on. That and the artists of the 1970's like Christopher Hill simply did it better. Add him to the list with Sam Gilliam and Helen Frankenthaler who consistently did far more with tarps sopping up the studio. Now Im not against tarps (Love unstretched Frankenthalers and Gilliam) I just wish today's tarpists werent ingratiation attempts in a supplicant's pose to an art market primed to accept art that fetishes its "nothing specialness." Its a mode, weak era tarp art begone.