Seattle artist Anne Focke was the driving force behind the founding and directing of the Pacific Northwest alternative art space called and/or. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s she had worked at the Seattle Art Museum and the newly formed Seattle Arts Commission, where she learned about the emerging world of government arts support. During her time at the Seattle Art Museum she also produced a series for KCTS, the local PBS station then located on the UW campus, called “Meet the Artist.” That show introduced her to the creative uses of television, while the station’s 1969 broadcast of an early video-art show from Boston’s WGBH public television station called “The Medium Is the Medium” introduced her to video art. At the same time, the Henry Art Gallery invited the Everson Museum’s longhaired video-art curator, David Ross, to Seattle with his touring show of artists’ tapes called “Circuit,” introducing the city’s arts community to the spectrum of first-generation video artists and the radical politics of using video as an art-making tool.
Anne Focke at and/or, 1975. Photo: Alan Lande.
In 1974, Anne Focke and her friends started and/or in a former car-parts storefront in the cavernous Odd Fellows Building on Capitol Hill, one of Seattle’s early bohemian neighborhoods. As Focke explained in a local newspaper article, “One of the things that struck me . . . was that a lot of different artists were doing a lot of different things, but they didn’t know what each other were doing. So I decided to do something that would bring people together. That’s why I chose ‘and/ or’ as a name—it was a conjunction.” 3 Focke was part of a community of young artists, many of them art students at the University of Washington, who were interested in exploring new ways of making and presenting art. Ken Leback, Rolon Bert Garner, Jerry Jensen, and a few others were Focke’s core group, which initially came together soon after she helped establish the Artist Television Workshop in 1972 at KCTS, based on the model of the National Center for Experiments in Television in San Francisco. KCTS producer Ron Ciro and engineer Cliff Hillhouse worked with local artists to produce original programs that aired weekly on the channel, and helped introduce video art in all its blurry black-and-white strangeness to Seattle. Focke also bought a Sony Portapak ½-inch reel-to-reel video camera and deck that enabled her circle of artists to make tapes that weren’t bound to a television studio. This first generation of Seattle video artists included Karen Helmerson, Alan Lande, Paul Lenti, Buster Simpson, Norie Sato (who would later become the first treasurer of NAMAC), Ken Leback, B. Parker Lindner, Mike Cady, and others.
NAMAC | A CLOSER LOOK 2005
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