response to John Nichols blog today
In recent years, community resistance to corporate and resource extraction interests has increased, making room for more progressive voices. Four years ago, the election of Mike McGinn, Sierra Club activist, to defeat an established, progressive Democratic mayor, revealed dissatisfaction with the aggressive banking strategy of Washington Mutual/Chase and its effect on establishment real estate development in Seattle. Other radical candidates appeared over the last 20 years to challenge city council coziness with development in the city's core and neglect of vital community interests, including neighborhoods, youth programs, schools, parks and the environment. Real estate interests here, as in many US cities, dominate land use planning. Saving county farmland in favor of urban high rise was a choice made years ago, but it hasn't automatically engendered affordable housing nor community commons. Kshama Sawant and activists ran an exemplary grass roots campaign for city council, resonant with massive voter turnout in my neighborhood for one. On election day, trucks arrived in Ballard to empty the ballot return box near the library. This campaign evoked a vision of the Seattle so many want with fairness, green approaches, artist and intellectual pursuits and compassion, not a cruise ship destination with chain stores, inadequately funded by tourist taxes.
Alice Dubiel has exhibited her work in the US, Asia and Europe for more than 35 years. Since 1994 she has created paintings and prints as well as installations and projects concerned with ecology and the politics of representation. She has worked with community based groups and exhibits in similar spaces. The Landscape Tale and Implode the Dome were conceptual works to stimulate community-based land use dialogue, appearing at Bumbershoot, the Seattle Arts Festival, 911 media arts and in ArtPapers, published in Atlanta. In 2007, she co-curated with artist Deborah Lawrence, Syndicalism: The Art of Tend and Befriend, a group exhibition by Art Cartel at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center.Dubiel has received public funds for artmaking and research including the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2007 she received funds from 4Culture in King County, WA for The Hazel Tree Mother and again in 2014 she received 4Culture funds for travel to Korea. In 2006, she was artist in residence at North Cascades National Park.Ā Her work appears in the collections of the University of Washington and Swedish Medical Centers, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and is represented in private US collections. Her work appears in Women Artists of the American West by Susan Ressler.Born in Berkeley, CA, she received a master's in painting from San Jose State University and an AB in English literature from UC Santa Cruz, and pursued graduate literature studies in medieval literature, art and critical theory. Dubiel works and lives with her family in Seattle where she volunteers as an amateur naturalist.
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