Calendar - Discover South Lake Union

Featured Event

August 9, 12:00 pm, SLU Discovery Center

SLU Block Party 2019

SOUTH LAKE UNION’S FAVORITE PARTY IS BACK! Now in its 15th year, the South Lake Union Block Party is the largest and longest running festival focused on celebrating and showcasing our neighborhood with: Over 70 community businesses and organizations Main stage featuring Northwest artists including The Dandy Warhols, Naked Giants, Polyrhythmics, Whitney Mongé, and Sisters Beer garden Local restaurants and food trucks Letterpress salon and poster design competition (produced by School of Visual Concepts) LOCAL BENEFICIARY

Proceeds will benefit FareStart, a James Beard Award-winning nonprofit organization that empowers adults and young people experiencing poverty and homelessness through job training and employment in the food service industry. FareStart operates eight social enterprise businesses that provides hands on training in a real world setting while providing revenue for its programs. Since 1992, FareStart has provided opportunities for more than 9,500 adults and youth, while serving over 10.7 million meals to Seattle area schools, homeless shelters and healthcare facilities.

July 23 Events

July 12 - August 8, School of Visual Concepts

The Soul Box Exhibit

We invite all who live and work in South Lake Union to visit The Soul Box exhibit at the School of Visual Concepts, open now through August 8.

The exhibit features 3,000 origami Soul Boxes made by volunteers from around the country to commemorate gunfire victims and raise awareness of the US gunfire epidemic. Founded by artist Leslie Lee in October 2017 in response to the mass shooting in Las Vegas, The Soul Box Project is a nonpartisan, nonpolitical national community art project based in Portland OR. We’d love for you to check it out and let us know if you have any questions.

The Soul Box Project: Art Revealing the Gunfire Epidemic

at the School of Visual Concepts, 2300 7th Avenue in South Lake Union

10 a.m. – 7 p.m. Monday – Thursday

10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Fridays

10 a.m. – 1 p.m. Saturdays

Now through Thursday, August 8

Free event

June 25 - August 31, MadArt

Each and Every by Beili Liu

Each and Every
by Beili Liu

Open Studio*: June 25 – July 10 (Tuesday – Friday, 12 -5 pm)
*artwork under construction; studio open to the public
Artist performances: July 9 (4pm), July 10 (12pm & 4pm), & July 11 (5pm)

Opening Reception: Thursday, July 11 (5pm)
(including artist performance @ 5pm, followed by Artist Q&A @ 6pm)

Exhibition Period: July 12 – August 31 (Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm & Saturday, 12 – 5pm)

MadArt Studio proudly presents Each and Every, an installation and performance by Austin-based artist Beili Liu. Through her practice, Liu subjects commonplace materials to unorthodox processes, extrapolating complex cultural narratives around the trauma associated with migration and diaspora. In her first major Seattle exhibition, she creates an expanse of hundreds of articles of children’s clothing, flattened and preserved by industrial cement and suspended just inches above the ground by thousands of lines of thread. Additional tension are added through dichotomies within her materials and concepts: lightness and heft, malleability and firmness, fragility and strength.

This installation is Liu’s direct response to the atrocities inflicted on migrant children and their families at the southern border crossing of the United States. As the title and work suggest, Each and Every calls attention back to the individual experiences of these children and their families, generating space for empathy and understanding. Liu also incorporates several performances into her Open Studio period, using the repetitive acts of cutting down and resewing cloth to explore cultural ideas of feminine labor. These performances will take place alongside her physical installation, July 9 – 11 (details above).

July 23, 10:00 am, Day One Playfield

Denny Regrade Pike Place Market

Pike Place Market was founded on August 17, 1907 to provide Seattle citizens direct access to local producers. That first day, farmers arrived with wagons chock full of produce and a grand tradition in public markets was born. Today, we are proud to continue the Meet the Producer tradition, with Washington farmers selling their fresh produce and specialty farm products to shoppers year round. This summer, join us at our Denny Regrade farmers markets at the Day One Playfield each Tuesday this summer and participate in a century-old tradition!

May 31 - August 3, Winston Wachter

Peter Gronquist SEARCHER

Peter Gronquist is a multimedia, multidisciplinary artist. If you ask one to “describe the work,” the answer is never simple. Gronquist uses ceramics, painting, VR, 3d printing and video to express a common thread of exploration. For Gronquist, it is the endless possibilities in the creation of art that interests him most. He has no rules and does not tie himself to any outside expectations. In his exhibition Searcher, Gronquist explores light as an added material to his paintings. Using Plexiglas as part of the work rather than protection for it, he plays with the way light is reflected and projected off the matte surface of the paintings. His paintings seem to glow from within. Further playing with the sense of what is and what is not, Gronquist adds led lighting to some but not to others. With each painting we are compelled to stop and absorb.

Alongside his paintings Gronquist shares his series “A Visual History of the Invisible.” In these works he again uses a natural element, air, to express his curiosity. This series attempts to capture the shapes and constant presence of the wind. His large-scale outdoor fabric installations are filmed digitally, creating a mesmerizing presentation of the rhythm of the wind. Smaller scale fabrics are caught mid flow and preserved in resin and silver nitrate. The forms play with both light and air. They are Gronquist’s limitlessness encapsulated. The wonder of the natural world is clear throughout the Searcher.

Born 1979 in the United States, Peter Gronquist lives and works in Portland, OR. He attended the School of Visual Art New York and received a BA in painting from San Francisco Art Institute in 2001. He has exhibited in New York, London, Miami. Peter’s work has been published in GQ Magazine, Hyperallergic, Wired and he was recently named one of the top 15 new artists to collect by Business Insider.

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