Interview with Vicki Halper, curator for Documents Northwest: The PONCHO Series

Interviewers: Anna R Hurwitz, Digital Collections Intern, Seattle Art Museum; Traci Timmons, Librarian, Seattle Art Museum
Recorded: August 8, 2018
The interview has been edited for length.

Diving into Documents Northwest History

Anna: Why is this collection important? Why did we choose this collection to digitize? For us, it’s really clear when you look at it as a collection but it’s important to put it into context for the greater Seattle, Pacific Northwest, and even international contemporary art community. When we started scanning [the Documents Northwest brochures], we didn’t actually know that Bruce Guenther originated the series.[1] We had no context. We had very little information until I started going through the SAM press clippings file that they have at the library. There were articles that started showing up around mid-1984. And we realized that we needed to talk to Bruce. Then after we sorted everything [digitally], and saw how many exhibitions you had curated, we knew we also needed to talk to you.

Vicki: And you might want to contact Suzanne Kotz who was the editor at the beginning. She was first the slide librarian, then became the editor for SAM and is really a noted editor now. I wasn’t at the museum when Documents Northwest started but I was aware of it from the beginning. I either moved to Seattle or I had seen the first Documents Northwest exhibition. The very first exhibition I curated for Documents Northwest was the Robert Maki show, which Bruce asked me to do it. At that point I was the curatorial assistant and somewhat of a file clerk. But I had a strong art history and craft background. That’s how I got started curating: I got very lucky that it got passed on to me at that point. And I could write and I think that was something that I think was important, at least for how my career went. When I came to the museum from Eugene, I didn’t really know Northwest artists from this area. Bruce had published 50 Northwest Artists [Chronicle Books, 1983]. I have to say that was sitting on my desk the whole time and I would look at it. That book was the background for who got chosen. It was Bruce’s cohort of artists that he particularly liked or thought were important. That was a source book for lots of things that we did at that time in the Modern Art Department, which was at the Pavilion building at the Seattle Center.

Traci: I didn’t realize that when we were talking to Bruce that Documents Northwest started there. I know about the Pavilion but the history with respect to modern art is still somewhat unclear.

Vicki: I don’t know the history of the Pavilion and why the Modern Art Department [ended up there]. It was great, though. We had the whole space. Documents Northwest started in something called The PONCHO Gallery and so there might be something in PONCHO’s historic records about how that series was coordinated with PONCHO. Whether Bruce put in a grant, which is possible, because PONCHO did the Betty Bowen Award...

Anna: That’s what Bruce says happened. It was Betty Bowen[2] and that whole committee who brought PONCHO in to help support it.

Vicki: Some of the people on the Betty Bowen committee were central in the development of PONCHO. So that gallery became dedicated to Documents Northwest. And would also show annually, at least for the first many years, the Betty Bowen winner. When the gallery started, there were four or five shows a year. It was kind of a ridiculous, fantastic turn over. And it was always a solo show. As the years went by it became less frequent. You just couldn’t keep up that pace and eventually started to do group exhibitions.

Anna: Was that you?

Vicki: I don’t think I was the first. I certainly did push for that.

Anna: So then it would have been Rod Slemmons?

Vicki: [Looks through her file]. There was a group photography exhibition in 1988 that I don’t even remember. And then in 1989 there was Crossed Cultures and that was Patterson [Sims]. That was contemporary Native American.

Vicki: I was gone that year. I was on sabbatical at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian in 1989. Figures of Translucence: I don’t think I wrote the document for that but I had something to do with it.

Anna/Traci: [looking at Vicki’s list, which is part of her notebooks on the series that contain all of the Documents Northwest brochures and other information]. That’s the original list that’s in the Documents Northwest box at SAM! We didn’t know where that list came from. [Lots of exclamations and laughter.]

Anna: There’s a very well used photocopy of that list that I retyped. [More laughter.] So wait, I actually had a question an annotation on this list.

Vicki: These notebooks were really useful as my career continued around Northwest artists for a long time. It was before the internet so it was really useful to find out the birth and death date...

Traci: They’re really wonderful.

Anna: Figures of Translucence was Patterson.

Vicki: Ok, so I wasn’t the first one to do group shows. I do remember wanting to. It was sort of forbidden to do group shows. I think probably Bruce didn’t want to do group shows…in my recollection but it was possible once Patterson came, for various reasons. There was some objection from Northwest artists who wanted their solo shows. And that’s the trade-off: you get a solo show or you cover more people. It became important to show a broader range of the artists especially as we moved out of that first generation and the younger artists came in.

Anna: So moving past the Michael Spaffords and into the…

Vicki: Yeah into the Jeffry Mitchells.

Anna: I love Michael. He’s getting a lot of play right now through Kucera.

Vicki: Well, he had that retrospective with the three galleries downtown, Kucera, Davidson and Woodside/Braseth.

Vicki: I think I was the first person to do an installation, though. That was the Jim Pridgeon exhibit. That was in the Garden Court. That was quite the feat to get together because we had to bring in engineers to see how much could be hung in the Garden Court; to see if his original concepts could be hung or not be hung. The Garden Court is the central atrium at Volunteer Park [formerly the Seattle Art Museum, now the Seattle Asian Art Museum][3].

Traci: I remember that installation and what it looked like but was there an additional component somewhere else?

Vicki: No. I can’t remember when the Pavilion closed but that’s when Documents Northwest moved into the first gallery on the left as you entered Volunteer Park. So that became the Northwest Gallery for a while and Volunteer Park became Northwest and Asian. One of the interesting things: Jim Pridgeon is one of the artists who I became acquainted with through the Betty Bowen jury. It wound up that the artists who won the Betty Bowen award, at least initially, got Documents Northwest. I certainly gave two artists who did not get the Betty Bowen award Documents Northwest that I saw through the jury, which was important for that reason also. When I was first there, the Betty Bowen Award was strangely given.

Traci/Anna: Bruce talked about that.

More on the Betty Bowen Award and Committee

Vicki: There’s the Betty Bowen essay that I did that you might not have that talks about it also. But there was tension between the jury and the curators because the curators did not get a vote on the jury and the jury was not necessarily au courant with what was going on. It was a big push not to show the Betty Bowen winner as part of Documents Northwest. That was a major feat that happened when Patterson [Sims] was there. We had been trying for years, but he was the one with the gumption to do it. There was a lot of tension between the committee and the curators at that point. Now since I’ve gone, I know that it’s all changed and there seems to be a lot more involvement with both the curators and people who are savvy about contemporary art so that tension doesn’t exist and the Betty Bowen winner does get coverage at the museum. But to end that there was a big break for a time with the committee.

Traci: That’s really interesting. Before Bruce talked about it, I never made this connection about the overlap between the two.

Vicki: Yeah, it was PONCHO Gallery, Betty Bowen and the series. I don’t know exactly the origins and Bruce may have told you what he remembers and Suzanne might remember more. I’m not sure she was around in the beginning but she might have been.

Anna: Do you know if anyone wrote about any of this?

Vicki: I don’t think so. I wrote about it in a brochure for Betty Bowen that I have. [Vicki shows Traci Betty Bowen Award: Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition (Betty Bowen Committee, 1998; accompanied an exhibition at the Washington State Convention Center).]

Traci: Yes, we have that.

Vicki: That is the closest that anyone ever wrote about the Betty Bowen Award as far as I know.

Anna: How frank is this?

Vicki: It’s truthful to what it says. You sort of have to read between the lines a little bit but it does at least say that there was tension and that the Betty Bowen shows did change, so there is something about it.

Anna: It’s an interesting part of the history. I know that when I look at CoCA’s [Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle] history there have been high points and very low points. We have these conversations about do we whitewash, do we take the low points out, do we really want to remember some of the really bad things. But we know it’s really important, it’s how it evolved, it’s how art evolved, you have to go high and low.

Vicki: You have to remember that when this was written. So anyway there’s a lot of history past that time.

Vicki: At first, the Betty Bowen committee would see everything that was submitted: we had lots of submissions. Then the curators made a sub-selection and they would choose from that subgroup and that helped. Bruce would, I think, try to advise the jury a little in the very early years and sometimes he was successful. But I know that I wound up doing a number of the Betty Bowen winners’ Documents Northwest exhibits because he didn’t want to do them.

Traci: How long did the two of you overlap?

Vicki: I came at the very end of 1983, and then Bruce left in 1987. And then I left not long after Trevor [Fairbrother] came, which was in 1996.

Anna: So one of the things that Bruce mentioned is that because of your background in craft, the exhibitions changed in your hands. Could you talk about that?

Changing the Focus of Documents Northwest

Vicki: I had been a professional potter. This was the 1960s. I left my PhD without finishing it and became a potter. I was one of the few people in the field of craft who had art historical training as well as knowing the field of craft, which at that time was not very historically minded. So I saw that as a place where I could do work that people hadn’t done before. It didn’t affect Documents Northwest as much as other exhibitions. The first big exhibition I did was called Clay Revisions [November 12, 1987-January 10, 1988 at SAM] and that travelled around the country but not through the museum. It travelled through the American Federation of Artists. At that point, this is where I began to say: “I can do things that other people haven’t.” There was Richard Notkin and the Yixing Tradition. That was under Patterson who may have even suggested that show. Perhaps not the Yixing part but perhaps Richard Notkin. It wasn’t originally going to be a Documents Northwest but it became a larger show and that show travelled. I think I'm the only person who had some of the Documents Northwest travel.

Anna/Traci: There are three that we know of.

Vicki: First Impressions: Northwest Monotype went to Portland to a university gallery just south of Portland that had a well-known exhibition space [The Art Gym at Marylhurst College]. Richard Notkin travelled widely. Kumi Yamashita went to Yerba Buena [Center for the Arts in San Francisco]; the show went but it wasn’t through the museum. It was reconstructed and went there.

Traci: Didn’t Fay Jones?

Vicki: Fay Jones was a travelling exhibition and not actually curated in-house. I don’t know how that got to be a Documents Northwest and why.

Anna: She did two. The very first one was Documents Northwest [1985], the second one was her 20th anniversary [1997] and so it came through as a Documents Northwest.

Vicki: I don’t remember a Documents Northwest of hers. Oh, yeah, it was earlier. The 20th came through the Boise Art Museum. I redid the labels with her, though. They were great labels. She wrote the labels and I edited them and if those labels were around, they were really fine.

Vicki: There was a Patrick Siler show which was ceramic but I did not curate that, at least I don’t think so. If I don’t remember it well, I probably didn’t curate it. [Looks through notebook for brochure]. Oh, Patricia [Grieve] Watkinson. This must have been 1987, perhaps about the time that Bruce was leaving.

Anna: So Patricia Watkinson was the curator?

Vicki: Of the Patrick Siler show. Well, I don’t know who curated it but she wrote the introduction.

Anna: Right. That’s a challenge that we’ve had, that there were some guest writers so the brochures don’t say who the curator is.

Vicki: Usually the writer and the curator would have been the same. I know that I did the Bob [Robert] Jones retrospective; I think that was the time Bruce left. Around 1987. The only person who was a guest curator was that Patterson got Glenn Weiss to do the architecture one with Peter Millet. Patterson always like to try to bring other people in and not always successfully because they hadn’t curated and timelines were difficult to stick to and they were various difficulties.

Clarifying Who the Curators Were

Anna: I’m looking through our files, looking for a few Documents Northwest exhibits that didn’t say who the curator was.

Vicki: Some of the group exhibitions were curated by multiple people. For example, 1492/1992 was all of the curators. Holding the Past was different curators; maybe not all of them but at least me and Patterson. Patterson and I did Holding the Past, Rod didn’t have anything to do with it.

Anna: So Norman Lundin; his introduction was written by Patricia Failing.

Vicki: I would assume that Bruce curated it. Sometimes he just didn’t want to write.

Anna: That makes so much sense. He had so much going on. What did he say, that he did 91 exhibitions in the 8 years he was at SAM?

Vicki: And that gallery at the Pavilion was huge, it was an enormous space.

Anna: So same with Nori Sato. Patricia also wrote that one.

Vicki: So he probably had her write a number of them. She was a professor at UW.

Anna: Mark Calderon in 1987. It was introduced by David Berger, the art critic.

Vicki: Really?! I’m sure Bruce curated that one too. He was a Betty Bowen winner.

Traci: Have we crossed referenced the Betty Bowen winners?

Vicki: These are the ones I remember. [Looks in notebook, starts naming names] Debra Sherwood, Mark Calderon, George Chacona, Nancy Mee won but she was in a group show not an individual. Figures of Translucence, by that time I think it was Patterson. 1492/1992, Patterson and I did that. Also Holding the Past, Patterson and I did that. Those are the only ones that I think were group curated.

Anna: What about the Patrick Siler?

Vicki: I don’t know but I think Bruce did that.

Anna: The introduction was by Patricia Grieve Watkinson.

Vicki: That was 1987. That was about the time that Bruce was leaving but I think that he curated it. She’s still around; you can ask her if she curated those shows or not and what the relationship was between her and Bruce. I think she’s pretty easy to get in touch with, she’s in town. Patricia Watkinson had the connection with Pullman that Bruce had in Eastern Washington and she was the curator there. So they knew each other and she also would tend to be the person to pay attention to the Eastern Washington people. Patrick Siler was from the east.

Traci: So we’ll get in touch with Bruce to find out which ones he curated but didn’t write. That’s actually good to know.

Vicki: Yeah, I think he would do the curating but not the writing….

Anna: And then not take any credit anywhere on the brochure?

Vicki: Yes, right.

Vicki: I guess that’s right. I never wrote for anything I didn’t curate but sometimes I curated for things I didn’t write that Patterson would write for and, no, you didn’t get credit for that.

Anna: We’ll get everyone to confirm our list.

Vicki: Yes. And I can also tell you who chose and worked with which artist.

Anna: That would be really interesting. You know it’s funny because we’re coming at it from a curatorial viewpoint which is maybe a little bit different from other collections. But to me that’s such important history.

Vicki: And each of us worked with different artists in the group exhibitions, so in Holding the Past and in 1492/1992 each of us had three people that we worked with: chose their work and made their labels.

Those Wonderful Exhibition Labels

Anna: So tell us more about the labels. I don’t think we have any of that information.    

Traci: We have photographs of the installations but we haven’t started looking closely at the labels.

Vicki: For each show, there should be basic text and title for the gallery. I don’t remember at that time writing extensive labels for Documents Northwest which I certainly did for every other show—partially, maybe because they cycled so fast.

So Many Exhibits

Traci: So when we were compiling the comprehensive list of the exhibitions, we have three big ones a year now. That was amazing…I just couldn’t fathom how you did it.

Vicki: It was run almost like a gallery. I think it was also often the newest work of the artist. I knew when I did Sherry Markovitz I knew I didn’t want to it unless I did more of a retrospective until that time. I'm not sure that the other shows, you’d have to look on the checklist to see what the dates were but my tendency was to do something more historical when I was dealing with individual artists. So I think Sherry was the first sort of long look, but I'm not certain about that. You’d have to look at Mark Calderon and see if everything was recent for his show. But a lot of people were making art for the show, in my recollection. All these younger artists… That was certainly true for the installations such as Jeffry Mitchell which was the all-time high for Documents Northwest from my point of view. He did this massive installation and it was fabulous.

Anna: There was an article from one of the art critics who wrote that they wished that Documents Northwest had a more historic view to put the pieces in context, to exhibit some of the older work. I don’t remember what show he was responding to but it was before 1987 because that’s how far I’ve gotten.

Vicki: I was more likely to be a she rather than a he, like Regina Hackett or Delores Tarzan [Ament].

Anna: It wasn’t one of the regulars, it was a one-off.[4] Generally the reviews are really positive, the exhibitions were really highly regarded. The reviews are great to read. People really loved the work.

Vicki: Well, except for Matthew Kangas.

Anna: But that’s what he was doing then. That’s what he was doing to a lot of people. Are you friends at this point?

Vicki: Oh, well, we say hello.

Anna: I was “you don't get to do that.” But he wrote so much. A lot of people did. You wrote a lot.

Vicki: I did write a lot. Documents Northwest was great. It permitted you to write where otherwise, as a curator, you might have to wait years to have your show because there was one changing exhibition space. All the curators had to have their turn. Documents Northwest meant that there was show after show after show. Modern art changed so frequently and it was such a big department. So I got to curate and write a lot more frequently than if I had gotten into any other part of the museum. That was a huge advantage for me.

More about the Brochures

Traci: I think that one thing that we are generally struck by is that there are these kind of small publications but they’re packed with great information. You’ve got all of the color photos, you’ve got the scholarly essays, cvs, bios; it just gives you the whole picture.

Vicki: At that point, we had great photographers too so there’s a lot more photography of some of the installations. It might be worth it for some of the shows to look at the photos. When you’re putting Documents Northwest online you’re doing the illustrations? You’re doing it page by page?

Anna: Yes, each page has been scanned. We couldn’t do the fold so they’re in order of how you would open it up. There were a couple of places where I had to make a decision about the order because it was the cool 8-page fold.

Vicki: Because if it was more than one person, we added a page and if they were more than a certain number, then we added two pages so you had the double fold so you would open the brochure and see more. I think Nature Studies was one of my favorite shows.

Anna: I love that one too.

Vicki: And that had a nice four-fold.

Anna: Beautiful, the way that it opened. Bruce talked about the fact that you all were the first to do that kind of brochure for a museum or gallery.

Vicki: It was a very good, really useful format to do a publication in because you just enough room to do the essay, to do the check list, and to have the photos. That was really great.

Anna: I do like that there were a few of them that had the artist’s statements in them and even a couple of artist’s photographs, but not too many.

Vicki: Really?

Anna: Yes, there was a man [James W. Washington, Jr.] and a woman [Karen DeWinter] a little later on [Earthly Paradise, 2000]

Vicki: I don’t remember ever having an artist photo.

Anna: Yes, there’s a guy sitting. Perhaps there’s just one. It’s kind of a sidebar: it’s got the artist’s statement and a photo of the artist. I’ll look it up. I’ve been looking at them so much, I don’t remember which one it is.

Vicki: It might have been after I left.

Anna: I think it is.

Vicki: I don’t remember ever choosing a photograph of a person over a work of art because there just wasn’t that much room and you wanted to have the work of art in the brochure. It was important to do that.

Anna: It would be interesting to find out what the reason was for that particular time.

Tell Us a Story

Traci: Do you have any good stories or anything unusual that happened?

Vicki: Well, the opening of Jeffry Mitchell’s show had to be cancelled because there was a huge snowstorm. It’s really interesting because he was installing as the snow was coming down. His installation is a lot about snow or the sense of snow covering plaster. There was a review the next day by someone who hadn’t even seen the show; I thought “so that’s what they do.” [Laughter]. But that night, we had to have some of the people come stay at my house because they couldn’t get home. It was this confluence of doing this installation about coating and whiteness and having the snow come. It was beautiful but we did miss a great opening. The openings used to be really wonderful for Documents Northwest.

One of the things, at least by the time I left, the museum had stopped paying for openings for Documents Northwest. The opening was a time when lots of Northwest artists came to the museum; it was their night. It wasn’t the night for the membership as much as it was a night for the artists. They came to support each other. When those openings ended, a little bit of life went out of the Northwest part of the museum, which had always been under fire for never doing enough. The end of having an opening that celebrated the artists with food and with gathering was unfortunate. It was the one time the museum focused itself entirely on the region rather than on its travelling exhibitions and doing something for membership.

Anna: There’s quite a bit of press about that: the whole regional thing.

Vicki: The museum spent its life trying to disengage from an automatic attention to regionalism. The museum when it started was doing the Annual shows [The Annual Exhibitions of Northwest Artists, aka the Northwest Annual, held at SAM from 1933-1975, the Northwest Watercolor Society Annuals, the Northwest Printmakers, etc.] When the museum stopped doing the Annual it got slammed by the artists in the region. When it stopped doing the annual shows of the Watercolor Society [The Northwest Watercolor Society Annual Exhibitions, held at SAM from 1942-1967], it got slammed. The museum was filled with mediocre works from juried and non-juried shows; if the museum was going to become professional, it had to start paying attention. It always amazed me that the artists weren’t as interested in being inspired by other people’s art as they were at having their own work shown. I thought the role of the museum was to engage and inspire not just to advertise. I don’t know if it’s as much of a continuing issue with the museum now because I’m not a part of it now. There was a time when all of the galleries were closing in town because of 2008 and it was really tough to get shown but now that’s changed again.

Anna: It’s the roller coaster of the art community, in any community, really.

Vicki: There were some opportunities to travel the exhibitions. The Richard Notkin show, Strong Tea, travelled all over. We could travel, well we didn’t travel but AFA could travel: Clay Revisions, it could travel nationwide. But we could never travel the paintings show nationwide. No one even tried.

Anna: Yeah, try moving Buster Simpson around the country.

Vicki: Well, at least he was at the Hirshhorn. At least his work was at the Hirshhorn. He did a big exterior installation there in 1989 (or 1999, look it up). At one time both Sherry Markovitz and Gaylen Hansen had a gallery in New York, the Monique Knowlton Gallery. That gallery closed. Some of the artists had galleries in Berlin. And that ended but there was a flurry of activity for a while. And New York for a while. Kumi Yamashita, whose show I did with the shadows, she’s internationally known now and that was her very first show and I found her.

Anna/Traci: Wow! Oooh!

Vicki: It was her very first museum show. Jeffry Mitchell’s was his very first museum show. Kumi was an applicant for the Betty Bowen Award and I saw her during the jury. I ran the slide machines for the jury.

Anna: That’s excellent. So you got to see it all.

Art Submissions

Vicki: I got to seem them and I was the one who handled all of the arrangements for the Betty

Bowen Award juries during the time I was there. There was an article — I don’t know if you’ve found it anywhere — that I wrote called “Slides.” You should look for it. I’ve been looking for it and I don’t know where it is. It used to be online and it’s disappeared. It was written in my frustration with having to deal with people who didn’t follow the instructions, that didn’t know how to take a slide for a jury. Now nobody knows what a slide is. So I wrote this long thing and we sent it out to people who were applying for Betty Bowen. For years it was part of the Betty Bowen package was this article on slides. I remember Lamar Harrington reading it and laughing and saying “Oh, I could tell you were so frustrated.” If you could find it…

Anna: Do you know where it was published?

Vicki: One of the arts commissions must have published it online. It could have been Artist Trust, it could have been the Seattle Arts Commission. More likely SAC. One day I found it online and then it completely disappeared and I haven’t been able to find it again. It might be in some Betty Bowen files.

Traci: That’s what I was wondering.

Vicki: You know, my files are still at the museum. They’re probably at the University. That was a funny article. That was one page, single space about how to make slides. Still kind of useful. I don't know why I don’t have it. One of the questions: “What is the art? Is the art the picture leaning on the couch or is the art the couch with the picture and the environment?” I used to love those pictures. They came right out of the craft side. Let’s put your pots on the grass with a piece of fabric behind it. Or let’s have someone holding it up. [Laughter]. Or leaning.

Anna: Or jewelry with the model. It’s still the same. The conversation continues. Nichole at CoCA is looking at slides digitally…

Vicki: At least with digital you know which way it up.

Anna: Ha, that’s true.

Vicki: You may not know what the art is, but… So there were three questions: “Which way is up? What is the art? Is this the same artist?” It was the questions that the artists asked: “Do I show a variety of my work or do I show one thing?” My recommendation was to always show one thing.

Final Thoughts

Traci: What are you most proud of with respect to your work on Documents Northwest?

Vicki: Three Documents Northwest exhibitions stand out in my mind—two for writing as well as content (Jeffry Mitchell and Nature Studies), and two for introducing young artists who are now widely shown (Jeffry Mitchell and Kumi Yamashita). I also cherish the relationships I formed with local artists through this series of exhibitions.

Anna/Traci: Thank you for speaking with us.

[1] See “Interview with Bruce Guenther, founder of SAM’s Documents Northwest: The PONCHO Series.” [URL forthcoming]

[2] “Betty Bowen” refers to the Betty Bowen Award Committee, a committee now made up of community members as well as SAM staff members, who administer an award that honors a Northwest artist with an unrestricted cash prize of $15,000, and an exhibition of his or her work at the Seattle Art Museum.

[3] “Volunteer Park” is what SAM staff commonly call the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

[4] The article was: Berger, David, “State of the Arts: For Northwest Art and Artists, 1984 was a year of personal and public milestones,” Seattle Times, Dec 27, 1984, p D1.