Sound Transit’s Link Light Rail system opened on Saturday, finally. Forty years after the first vote on a rail system for Puget Sound, nine years after the current system was finally funded and green-lighted, the first train rolled down the track. Well, most of the way. The line still does not go all the way to the airport as promised; that won’t happen till year’s end; and it still doesn’t go all the way to the Unversity– that won’t happen till 2016.

But what it means is that finally, all the really good public art for the system is accessible and visible, including increment, a work in bronze by me.

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Via on old post on Tetrapod Zoology. Here is my question: does this image make you feel sad and empathetic, or do you find it kind of funny? Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday 11 July 2009, Justin Gibbens and I spent the afternoon in Westlake Park in downtown Seattle, looking to interview people who had actually seen Bigfoot. I was worried that we would seem somewhat freakish, but our alotted table, set up as part of an ongoing program of the Seattle Parks Department, was wedged between some break dancers and a group of Hare Krishnas, just down from the millenialist Christian fundamentalist preacher on the corner. As we were setting up, a group of about fifty naked bicyclists came through. We were right at home.

Yes, we had our very own bigfoot mascot for the day, performed at various times by Justin Beckman, Nathan di Pietro, Renee Adams, and Jason Gibbens.

The most interesting people included a man who had frequently seen something like Bigfoot, but he insisted that they were “feral humans.” He claimed to have seen them not only in Washington, but in Louisiana and South America as well. “They seem to have their own culture,” he wrote. “They seem to find me wherever I go.”

The most interesting exchange was also the simplest. A Native American woman came by and said, quite matter of factly, “my dad saw one back in the seventies. At the mouth of the Quinault river. He was sick for two weeks.” Which to me, is fascinating and genuine. Many Native Americans view a Bigfoot sighting as a bad omen that causes illness. And the Quinault reservation on the Olympic peninsula is is the location of quite a number of documented sightings. But what struck me most about her was her complete lack of self-consciousness about it. It was simply something that happened to her father, and she was utterly unconcerned about anyone’s reaction to it, or about what it might imply about her or her father’s credibility; neither did she make any effort to convince me of her sincerity. It was just something that happened.

See more photos here.