Museum Craft

Celebrating his museum’s fifth anniversary, Stefano Catalani shares the secret that helped him change Bellevue Arts Museum from a disaster area to a hot spot.

Has there been a more startling comeback than that of Bellevue Arts Museum? Its predecessor, Bellevue Art Museum, went broke in 2003. It reopened with a new crafts focus (and an extra s) in 2005, lost about three hundred thousand dollars to a thieving chief financial officer who went to jail, hit the recession and triumphed anyhow, with a string of hit shows seen by fifty thousand people a year. Much of the credit goes to Stefano Catalani, who has recently been promoted from curator to director of curatorial affairs and artistic director. On the eve of the institution’s fifth anniversary, the native Roman took a break to talk about arts, crafts and elegance with City Arts.

Catalani at BAM: “Downtown Bellevue is five, ten times what it was five years ago. And we’re in the new urban core.” Photograph by Young Lee for City Arts.

BAM turns five this month, but last year your budget shrank by 15 percent. What have you got to celebrate? Last year, paid attendance went up 30 percent. We didn’t cut any shows – just extended the Judy Hill show. It gave me a little room to breathe. We didn’t lay off anyone, even when we had to cut half a million dollars. We decided to open every single day, when other museums were closing an extra day. Membership went up 9 percent. Our Finally Friday parties went from thirty people to almost five hundred.

How did BAM manage to come back from the dead? By going back to its roots. Craft has been part of the aesthetic and visual identity of the Northwest. It’s almost part of the cultural DNA of this part of the world.

Didn’t Chihuly get his start at the Bellevue Arts Fair, which BAM runs every July? We’re an offshoot of the Arts Fair. This year the fair celebrates its sixty-fourth anniversary. There are pictures of Chihuly when he wasn’t blowing glass yet, but cutting glass and weaving in textiles – very interesting.

What is BAM’s mission? Arts, craft and design. I want to include artists who blur the lines between these three terms. In two words, “material culture,” whether it’s designed and mass produced or craft and therefore one of a kind. You have people who believe that craft is an art form that has to bring out the material – wood or clay – with an emphasis on making a beautiful object; and at the same time you have this younger crowd with the do-it-yourself aesthetic. They’re the handmade nation everyone’s talking about, where the making is what’s important, the process rather than the final outcome. Although the outcome is usually aesthetically pleasurable. So craft is like an archipelago – many islands, all belonging to the same group.

What’s the difference between art and craft? Painting and sculpture have a sacredness – they cannot be touched. Of course, at BAM I won’t let you touch anything. But there’s an aspect of touch that is sensual, human.

Seattle Times critic Moira McDonald said your hit show Beth Levine: First Lady of Shoes “makes you want to stick your feet in the art – a rare experience in a museum.” I mean, how can you not relate to a shoe? Everyone wears shoes.

You’ve done twenty shows and nine books at BAM. The strategy was to have a lot of exhibitions, like fourteen in a year. That was something we couldn’t keep up. Now we’re doing eight to ten a year. I want to bring artists to national attention, using BAM as a stage. John Grade’s opening his first show in New York, and he just won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award with a piece BAM commissioned.

For your fifth birthday, what presents are you giving BAM visitors? Several shows. The Art of Discovery, showcasing fifty years’ worth of the Junior League of Seattle’s art collection, with everything from Morris Graves to Sherry Markovitz. It’s very family oriented, very playful. I hope also that adults will feel like kids again. Arline Fisch’s Creatures from the Deep, sculptures of jellyfish made from braiding, twining, crocheting wire. The Biennial Throwdown: Clay, with thirty-four artists. Two hundred applied.

How long has it been since you’ve visited Rome? I’ve not been back since 2006. This year for the first time I feel homesick.

In Italy, I always feel underdressed. How do you feel here? I dress in jeans, a dress shirt and a dress jacket. I have to remember to say “dress jacket” – in Italy, we just say “jacket.” People here say, “You look elegant!” I say, “Elegant? What do you mean, elegant? In Italy, this is like wearing Patagonia or a windbreaker.” •

For more information on Bellevue Arts Museum’s fifth anniversary celebration and the sixty-fourth annual BAM artsfair, go to bellevuearts.org.