HERE FOREVER Now Here

Our intrepid photographer (also known as our intrepid Operations Assistant, Libby Gerber) captured artist Carolina Silva installing her newest piece into the Publix Hotel lobby this afternoon.

Carolina Silva installs HERE FOREVER at the Publix Hotel

Silva’s work plays with the ideas of home, of residency, of presence and absence… But mostly, her work plays with little red lights. Lots and lots of little red lights.

It’s going to be beautiful! Check it out starting tomorrow at 504 Fifth Avenue South, right across from the Chinatown Light Rail station.

Window Dancers

Spectrum Dance Theater is one of the Pacific Northwest’s only contemporary dance companies to maintain a full-time professional ensemble, and they’ve been presenting engaging new work for 30 years.

Tonight, please join Storefronts Seattle and Spectrum Dance for their free public presentation of The Miraculous Mandarin, choreographer Donald Byrd’s take on Bela Bartok’s Weimer-era ballet about crime and sex at the fringes of society.

Dancers will be performing in the Bush Hotel storefront display windows overlooking Hing Hay Park, with a seated audience on the brick park plaza below. (Bartok’s score will be heard in the park during the performance, thanks to Parks & Rec.)

Donald Jones, Jr and Jade Curtis are electrifying in Miraculous Mandarin

These are some of Seattle’s hottest dancers, assembled from around the country to dance in a season of work from one of Seattle’s most talked-about choreographers. The dancers’ strength and raw talent is electric. Come on down for an 8:30 “curtain” to see how that energy translates through the glass of the storefront itself.

The Miraculous Mandarin

Hing Hay Park in Chinatown

Thursdays through Saturdays

May 17-26, 8:30 pm

Free Admission

By the Numbers

I had to put together a few numbers for a presentation recently and I thought it would make for some nice show-and-tell today.

Storefronts Seattle, Before and After

Storefronts launched as a test-the-waters pilot program in September 2010. In the past 19 months, we have:

• Activated over 25 vacant storefronts
• Presented over 60 arts projects, including installations, artists’ residencies, and pop-up creative enterprises
• Worked with over 150 individual artists
• We have incubated and stabilized three new arts businesses into these neighborhoods, driving creative economic development faster than any program we know of.
• We’ve lost 8 properties from the program to paying commercial tenants, meaning we’ve got a 30% success rate at leasing these chronically empty spaces.
• Using the 2009 Gehl study as a source of raw numbers, we conservatively estimate that over 250,000 people have seen our projects.
• We received a 2011 Best of Seattle award from Seattle Weekly as “Seattle’s Best New Gallery.”

This last is impressive, we think, given that Storefronts isn’t actually a gallery at all, if you use conventional definitions. But as you know, we don’t use conventional definitions. We think that’s why we’re doing so well. 

This is what success looks like.

And We’re Back!

Well!

That was refreshing. Did you miss Storefronts Seattle? Good thing the Seattle Times was covering you this weekend for your Storefronts fix.

Check out their piece about artspace in Seattle from this weekend, and how Storefronts is making downtown Seattle “pulse with energy.” Rrrowr!

Vacation!

Storefronts Seattle is on vacation for a week.

From Wednesday April 25, 2012 through Monday, April 30, 2012, we will be unable to help you, unless you’d like suntan lotion rubbed on your back, or a drink as long as we’re up, in which case we might be able to help you.

See you next week!

Actual vacation may vary.

WAIT! We should point out that the Storefronts projects are all still open this week — you can still see all the beautiful work in and around Seattle — we’re just not answering the phone for a week.

Last Chances

Seattle’s such a last-minute arts town. Closing weekend always sells out in our theaters, the last Thursday of an exhibit is always as packed as its First Thursday.

Anyway, if you’re a perennial procrastinator, then this is the Storefronts week for you.

The Influence Project on Capitol Hill

Winding down up on Capitol Hill is the Rene Ropas Influence Project, hosting fashion events each night this weekend. Be there, darling, for the closing week of a beautiful experiment.

Pioneer Square is BOOMing!

In Pioneer Square, it’s your last chance to see Evan Blackwell‘s BOOM in the Tashiro Kaplan building. Evan engages the street, the building, the neighborhood, and you.

Julie Haack and SOIL will both be de-installing next week in Chinatown, the SOIL residency being cut short by a month, which is not great news for the collective, but is great news for that block, which will finally be seeing a new business move in next month! Storefronts Seattle Strikes Again!

Iole Alessandrini's new work at the SOIL Residency space, 601 South King Street.

Storefronts on the Tee-Vee!

These new televising machines are really something else. Color and sound and everything! And all you have to do is create something revolutionary and they come right out with lights and cameras and make a program about you. Check us out on the Seattle Channel TONIGHT at 7pm, or click through right here and watch it on your computing machine:

Storefronts Seattle in the news again! Click through to watch the Seattle Channel's newest story following our urban experiment.