Review: Washington centennial show traces stages of artist's powerful voice

The story goes that Seattle artist James W. Washington Jr., while on a trip to Mexico City in 1951, picked up a small volcanic rock near the ruins of the pyramids at Teotihuacán. He took it home with him and five years later it became his first stone sculpture: "Young Boy of Athens."

The difference between the found rock shape of the piece and Washington's final artistic product was subtle, even minimal. And that fossillike unity of image and medium would become a constant in Washington's sculpture, as can be seen in "The Spirit in the Stone: A Centennial Celebration and Exhibition Honoring James W. Washington Jr. (1909-2000)," a small retrospective at Gordon Woodside/John Braseth Gallery.

The show, consisting of loans from private and public collections, features 15 small stone sculptures from Washington's artistic maturity (1956 until his death in 2000). A half-dozen paintings, collages and watercolors from earlier in his career hint at the stages by which this self-taught African-American artist found his voice.

Washington was born in segregationist Mississippi in 1909 (the year of his birth, long uncertain, has now been pinpointed). He came to Seattle in 1944 to work as an electrician at the Bremerton Naval Yard. His first art exhibit was a two-man show with Leo Kenney at Frederick & Nelson's Little Gallery. There, his work sparked the interest of artist Mark Tobey, who became a mentor to Washington, giving him informal instruction.

A lifelong civil-rights activist, Washington initially brought a politics of protest directly into his work. "Democracy Challenged" (1949) is a collage in which the hanging weight of three lynching victims tips the scales against the Statue of Liberty. Newspaper clippings are incorporated in the painting, including a Seattle Times article with a headline that reads: "Mrs. Roosevelt says North as Bad as South in Discrimination."

While it has historical importance, "Democracy Challenged" doesn't indicate the deepest places Washington would go in his work. Instead, that's hinted at in "Mountain Range in the West," a watercolor from 1944, in which a winding mountain highway parallels a turquoise-pale, glacial-silt river. The jagged landscape is almost silky in its rendering, potent with a mystery and gravitas rooted in the natural world.

In his sculptures, that mystery achieved its most fertile form. Often working with oval-shaped granite, Washington seemed to "find" creatures already existing in the stone: a hedgehog, a bear cub, birds of all varieties. Their contours didn't deviate far from the original stone shape, and sometimes the features of the animal in question were almost lost in the rough textures of the stone. "Woodchuck" (1965), for instance, is curled and folded in on itself: a dozing shape of dark stone fur.

The most striking piece may be "Bunny Rabbit," also from 1965, in which the features of the rabbit emerge only partially from the stone. Most of the animal's two long ears are still "blanketed" under rock. The wide, watery, sideways-staring eyes and the inquisitive bump of a nose are what identify this creature as the rabbit it is.

Another striking piece is "Dorset Lamb Reclining" (1979). The creature, with its oversized head, rests on its side, nestling in a hollow that Washington's hand-carved wood base provides it. And the wood base itself has a biblical heft to it: the tree bark, left intact, resembles the rough-cut pages of a serious tome. (Washington was a man of faith as well as conscience.)

Almost all these sculptures have hand-carved wood bases to hold them, often with the title and year of the piece engraved on them. But Washington also did bas-relief work — "Two Gull Chicks in the Rain," "Study of Self" — that shows him playing with stone in a different manner. "Gull Chicks" is particularly appealing for the way he uses the natural pale flecks in the stone as raindrops that the birds fold their feathers against.

Along with "The Spirit in the Stone," Woodside-Braseth is showing "James Washington and Friends": a group show, with a number of pieces for sale, by artists of the Northwest School. It's a mixed bag, but with some notable highlights. Works by Jacob Lawrence, George Tsutakawa and Kenneth Callahan are particular standouts.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com