Charlie's Charge

With the art market in a slump, the landscape for Seattle’s greatest galleries shifts in unexpected ways.

Why is Seattle’s most-buzzed art scene in Ballard instead of Pioneer Square? Only one Seattle gallery sent artists to December’s big Miami art fair, and only one in the whole Northwest went to last month’s New York Armory Show: Charles and Amanda Kitching’s Ambach & Rice in Ballard. “Howard House had it, James Harris had it, Scott Lawrimore has had a long run,” says one gallerygoer. “Now Charlie is the new hot thing.”

Red-hot center: Alon Levin’s Art for the Masses II at Ambach & Rice. Photograph by André Mora for City Arts. 

The Kitchings’ Armory artists are Seattle’s Roy McMakin, Berlin’s Alon Levin and London’s Abigail Reynolds. “There’s quite a few people going to hang out in New York [during the show],” says Charles Kitching. “Jeffry Mitchell, Joe Park, Claude Zervas, Dan Webb, Grant Barnhart.” All Seattle’s cool kids want in on the Kitchings’ parties.

How come other galleries didn’t go to the Armory Show? One reason is money. “It costs easily twenty to thirty thousand dollars to go,” says top Portland gallerist Elizabeth Leach. But a booth at the center of the art universe is, Kitching thinks, “a stamp of legitimacy.”

Ambach & Rice got legitimate fast for a gallery that began life as a toy store in 2003 – a fact Kitching wishes critics like Regina Hackett would quit stressing. How did they switch from hipster tchotchkes to high culture? “It came out of our beginning to collect art,” he says. “We said, ‘OK, this is something we’re passionate about. We’re not the least bit passionate about retailing.’” 

Though nobody will talk on the record, plenty of people are passionate about the Kitchings’ raids of big names from other galleries. The fact that many are fiscally sinking while the Kitchings have soared has soured the tone. By buying big-name art and scoring Seattle’s big star McMakin, they’ve gotten on the radar of major players (like the selectors for the Armory Show). Charles Kitching has got youth, sharp looks, savvy and savoir faire. So some resentfully dismiss him as “Charlie Ka-CHING!”

“It’s easier to be jealous,” says Leach, “but it makes more sense to be supportive. Northwest galleries that go to fairs are ambassadors for all of us.” She does think hard times have made the Armory “less competitive. One could get into the Armory if one applied.”

“The Armory is important because it’s in New York,” says gallerist Greg Kucera, who is moving away from participating in such shows. “I’ve got art fairs calling me right and left,” Kucera says. “Chicago is really trying to get me and Jim Harris.” Kucera has done thirty-nine fairs. “It’s tiring. On my arches and my smile. And it’s costly and now it’s risky.” 

But now, after “the most interesting year my business has ever had,” Kucera is skipping distant fairs and going aggressively local. The gallery’s April/May show, Made in USA, devotes one wall to each gallery artist, something he’s never done before. “When nothing we buy seems to be made in this country, an art gallery is one of the few businesses that can look you straight in the face and say, ‘Yup, it was made here.’” 

In a January Artslant essay, Kucera diagnosed “collector paralysis” at Miami’s 2008 fair, but green shoots are sprouting in 2010. “With Dan Webb’s show, we had four sales and picked up a fifth on opening night. That feels like momentum.” So is the recession over? “No prognostications. I’ll leave that up to Fox News.”

And does Charlie Kitching expect to earn back his megabuck investment with sales from the four-day Armory Show? “I’m definitely taking a longer view.” •