Friday at the Frye

FRIDAY AT THE FRYE

WRAPPED IN HUGS

Super Size the Love this Holiday Season
Friday, December 14

Friday at the Frye brings together an array of artistic disciplines in creative, exploratory, and engaging ways. Each quarterly event enlivens the Museum with programs throughout its spaces. For an enhanced social experience, the Museum is open 10 am to 10 pm. The event also features shopping in the Museum Store, dining in the Gallery café, and beverages for purchase at two cash bars. The Museum Store will offer items for sale made by guest artists involved with the hands-on craft projects. All activities and admission are free.

Hands-On Craft Projects

7 pm–10 pm, Frye Art Studio

Local artists will help visitors create gifts for others, or just to keep, with activities that take a contemporary spin on the traditional holiday craft project. Guest artists include Susan Robb, Gretchen Bennett, Kristoffer Kollmer and The Schmancy Station featuring Kristen Rask and Made by Moxie.

* Let it Grow, Let it Grow, Let it Grow
Susan Robb, artist
Visits can create guerrilla gardening gifts with seed bombs—nuggets of soil, fertilizer and regional wildflowers seeds, ready to throw into barren land, parking strips and backyards. The selected wildflowers may attract hummingbirds, bees and other sweet-seeking creatures.

Based in Seattle, Robb is currently working on Sea-Ice Lifeboat, which would equip Alaskan polar bears with a large raft, impervious to the effects of global warming. Robb, who has received many awards and exhibits widely, is represented by Lawrimore Project.
www.susanrobb.com

* ROCKIOSK
Gretchen Bennett and Kristoffer Kollmer, artists
Rockiosk, a digital music kit combining rock riffs, chants, claps and bells, allows users to piece together their own creations from a library of sounds inspired by local heavy rock bands, mixed with drum beats and ambient reverb. Finished compositions may be burned to a CD or downloaded to the visitor’s Mp3 player. Templates for CD sleeves and gift cards are provided.

Bennett holds an M.F.A from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. She has exhibited nationally, most recently at the Kirkland Arts Center, Western Bridge and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; and has a solo show coming at Howard House in February 2008. Bennett has received many awards, including a Fulbright Grant, an Artist Trust Fellowship and a 4Culture Special Projects Grant. She is represented by Howard House.
www.gretchenbennett.com

Kollmer grew up in Olympia, and has been mining the heavy rock sounds of the Pacific Northwest (and other places) since. He values music’s expressive qualities over aesthetics and counts the Melvins, Fuazi, Nirvana and Slayer among his heaviest influences.

* Emotion Clots
The Schmancy Station, featuring Kristen Rask and Made by Moxie, artists
With simple needle felting techniques, visitors can transform wool fiber into an emotive plushy sculpture: the Emotion Clot. These two-inch creatures can embody feelings that are difficult to put into words.

In 2004, Rask opened Schmancy, a small crafts shop in downtown Seattle. Her largest curated show, Plush You, attracts more than 100 applicants from around the world annually. This year f+w published her book Plush You! Loveable Misfits to Sew and Stuff and in 2008 Rask will curate plush-creation exhibitions in Seattle and San Francisco.
www.schmancytoys.com

Fading the line between "art" and "craft," Moxie uses wool fiber to create sophisticated wearable art, detailed replica sculptures, whimsical finger puppets and more. At the 2007 Bay Area Maker Faire, Moxie taught more than 500 people felt-sewing techniques.
www.madebymoxie.com