Donald Young Gallery Moving To Capitol Hill

While the local art community is mostly eagerly anticipating the April 24 opening of the Meyerson & Nowinski Art Associates - everyone hopes the new gallery will replace some of the zip the Pioneer Square gallery scene lost when Linda Farris left - there are other gallery maneuverings under way.

Donald Young is moving his gallery from his lonely outpost at 2107 Third Ave. to the much busier south Capitol Hill neighborhood at the end of June. His new space will be a former car showroom on the corner of East Pike Street and 11th Avenue; his new neighbors will be twentysomething hangouts like Cafe Paradiso and Moe's.

Geographically speaking, the Donald Young Gallery has always been out of the Pioneer Square-Seattle Art Museum art walk loop. Situated in a no man's land between The Bon Marche and The Seattle Center, the gallery is an elegant space that you have to work hard to find. Young's mission of showing contemporary, leading-edge work by mostly national and international artists has also set him outside the circle of Seattle galleries, most of whom emphasize the work of regional artists.

Still, Young brings important shows to town that ought to get more attention, and his new gallery in the heart of the one of the city's hippest districts will likely attract plenty of young, art-savvy visitors, even if they never turn into buyers. The Pike-Pine corridor with its tattoo salons, alternative bookstores and fetish shops probably isn't the kind of neighborhood where his clients hang out, but Young has never relied on walk-in traffic to make sales.

Young said he decided to move because he didn't need as much space as he now has, "and because I like the Pike neighborhood better. It's young and lively and there's lots going on. There's not much going on here on Third."

Young, who is now showing the work of Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias, says he will install a show by video artist Gary Hill in his Third Avenue gallery in May, and will probably continue it for a few months on Capitol Hill.

Temporary return for Fuel Gallery

Elsewhere, Fuel Gallery is making a temporary reemergence in April at the small gallery at the Center on Contemporary Art in Belltown. Fuel used to be next door to the Linda Farris Gallery and specialized in risk-taking work by emerging artists. But Fuel's owner, Carole Fuller, closed last year citing lease problems and her general discontent with the personality of Pioneer Square. (She said that Kingdome crowds not only are not interested in art but discourage those who are from making the trip to Pioneer Square.)

Now, however, Fuller is one of several art presenters who will rotate shows at the smaller CoCA gallery, and her first show will be an installation by Edith Carlson, Ingrid Lahti, Harriet Sanderson and Ruth Marie Tomlinson, all of whom collaborated on Seattle installations in the past. The piece will be called "Footprints in the Vacuum" and opens April 5.

Russian snow-sculpting contest

Sculptor Gerard Tsutakawa is well-known in the region for his bronzes, but he apparently also has a talent for sculpting snow. In late February he and three other local sculptors traveled to Perm, Russia, to compete in that city's International Snow Art Festival. And after four days of cold sculpting (the competition took place outdoors in temperatures ranging from 0 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit) Tsutakawa and his team partner George Woodall walked away with third place. Ten teams competed, including two from Switzerland, one from Mexico, one from Germany and two from Seattle. The second Seattle-area team was made up of Douglas Granum and Barbara Wiech.

Tsutakawa and Woodall's entry was an abstract design, and Tsutakawa said the Russians didn't quite know what to make of it. "They're used to more figurative, monumental sculpture," he said. But he said people were eager to talk to all the snow sculptors, and that snow sculpting is considered a spectator sport in Perm. "We were working outdoors for eight hours a day for four days. It was hard, but it was a lot of fun," said Tsutakawa.

The winning team, by the way, were the Mexicans, who made what Tsutawaka described as a large, Diego Rivera-like crouching figure.