SAM
Teen Night Out at the SAM is a free event for high school students. This Friday, December 9, mosey down to the museum for an evening of art and music. The Garfield High School Drum Line will be there shaking the art on the walls, and the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra will emanate instrumental melodies throughout the evening. Also, Seattle’s own Blue Scholars will be special guests for the evening.
Seattle Central Community College
Graduating students of the Film & Video program at Seattle Central Community College will have a public viewing of their culminating projects at the Seattle Art Museum tomorrow night. An industry screening committee selected 8-12 films to be featured in the showcase. The works range from narrative shorts to documentaries to public service announcements. Pieces were filmed on a variety of formats including 16mm, Super 8mm film, HD video and standard definition video. Following the show, there will be a reception for attendees to meet the filmmakers and instructors.
Bellevue Reporter
In a recent interview with Bellevue Reporter, local resident Ben Kadie speaks about his experiences as a prominent youth filmmaker over the years and divulges on his creative process. Currently a sophomore at Interlake High School, Ben has been making movies since third grade and has a knack for incorporating green screen and other special effects into his films. Seattle based youth film festival NFFTY has featured Ben’s uber-creative films in every one of their festivals the past four years. His most recent filmic acomplishment, receiving a Scholastic Art & Writing Award from the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, can be viewed at Seattle Art Museum. There, his three-minute film noir, “Sparks in the Night” is being shown with the traveling exhibit ART.WRITE.NOW, which showcases select winners of the national writing award. The event is free and open to the public at SAM from now until April 24 during regular museum hours. Be sure to catch Ben’s latest film and other youth made movies at this year’s NFFTY from April 28 – May 1. You may stumble upon the next Spielberg, Kubrick, Lynch or Shelton! Read the full interview with Mr. Kadie at the link above and learn more about the “15-year-old Oscar winner in training.”
Seattle Art Museum 
As part of the First Thursday art bonanza that happens every month in Seattle, the Seattle Art Museum will hosting a free concert tonight in the Brotman Forum to kick off the summer season and to celebrate their new exhibit, Kurt. Fences are a local indie pop band recently announced to be playing both Bumbershoot and the Capitol Hill Block Party. The concert begins at 5:30 pm and admission is totally free.
Seattle Times
Cobain died 16 years ago, in 1994, and Nirvana’s best-known album, “Nevermind,” was released in 1992, and yet, for many, Cobain remains a force to be reckoned with. Michael Darling, Seattle Art Museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, recognized that Cobain is a potent symbol of the Northwest and began to identify visual artists, both locally and across the U.S. and the world, who continue to use Kurt “as a metaphor for other ideas, especially ideas about artistic struggle, trying to be authentic, trying to keep it real.” So Darling has organized an ambitious show, simply called “Kurt,” which explores the influence of this figure in contemporary art. After learning about so many works being made by artists in different places, curator Darling began to notice thematic threads that run through the work: freedom, longing, loss, desire and alienation. Check out the Kurt exhibit at the SAM now and read the full preview at the above link.
Seattle Times
Call the Seattle Art Museum’s Remix event an unorthodox tour. Call it a pseudo-dance party. Just try not to call it educational, please. SAM started Remix about a year ago to be the museum’s “young contemporary hip night,” Jackson-Dumont said. But the old Remixes ended at 9 p.m., and the feedback Jackson-Dumont received indicated that people wanted more. “They felt they could spend significant amounts of time at the museum,” she said. With that in mind, the creators of the museum’s new, now-quarterly Remix have lengthened the hours from 8 p.m. to midnight, stepped back from some conventional night-at-the-museum ideas and re-crafted others to appeal to the 18-to-35-year-old demographic. “It’s called Remix because it really is about mixing up the institution, making it a place that’s not really what someone would expect,” Jackson-Dumont said.
Seattle PI:
Since the ’70s, noir has become the most popular of all revival genres — especially in Seattle, which can boast the country’s longest-running and most influential film-noir series in the Seattle Art Museum’s annual (and always sold-out) “Film Noir Cycle.” The genre is such a hot ticket in this city, in fact, that in 2007 the new SIFF Cinema saw room for another ambitious noir revival series and launched its own version of the SAM event. So Seattle now has two major film-noir retrospectives every year. The SAM series, which concluded its 31st edition in December, takes place Thursday nights through much of the fall, and the SIFF Cinema version, “Noir City,” which takes place over one intense week in February, kicked off its third edition last week.
