Spokane Art School

The Spokane Art School & the MAC

The Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture (MAC) is proud to carry on the legacy of the Spokane Art School. The non-profit art school officially closed its doors in May after nearly 40 years in business. While art class formats will change, the Museum is dedicated to continuing the Spokane Art School’s mission of bringing the arts to our community through an endowment created by the Spokane Art School.

For more information about art programs at the MAC, contact sas@northwestmuseum.org.

closing the Art School

by Samuel Green 

 

Is it enough that one woman recalls

the way light rolled off the glaze

of a cup lifted warm from the kiln,

how it matched the precise shade

of lipstick worn by her mother

in the ‘40s, a permanent blessing

shining from the cup’s rim?

 

Is it enough another can describe

how the smell of paint thinner brings back

that moment when a classmate confessed

his shy desire not to paint geese, nor even the flight

of geese, but the intimate specificity

of emotion the first time he remembered

hearing a flock pass overhead, their joyful

noise louder than his parents’ argument?

 

Is it enough a woman admits

she was bored with talk

of shading, the subtle suggestion

of lines, until she found, in the corner

of a drawing in her sketchbook,

some marks suggesting the features

of her absent father’s face,

how shocked she was to find him

softer than she remembered?

 

Is it enough that couple fell in love

throwing pots together, left streaks

of wet clay on one another’s bodies,

shared wedding wine from cups

the color of freshly turned earth?

 

Is it enough one woman’s hands coaxed

the color of violence from random scraps

of cloth, that the needle stuttered

and shook in her fingers,

but stilled when she took a stitch, until

she finally sewed herself back together?

 

It is enough this man knows of a single painting

left by a woman cancer took in a rush, how it daily

invents the house it inhabits, a woman, he says,

whose two crooked fingers learned

to hold a brush?

 

Is it enough that 40 years of students

could learn how colors aren’t just pine

pollen, basalt, or wheat, but also the dazzle

of grass after rain, the breath of a deer lifting

its muzzle from the edge of a lake?

 

Is it enough they will always know unmistakably

the sound of a palette knife scraping canvas,

the smell of wet boar bristles, the snap

of beads on strings, the rap

of a mallet & chisel on wood, on stone?

 

We hope it’s enough,

this necessary shattering

of the self that moves us forward,
even as we mourn. 

 

Samuel Green is the Washington State Poet Laureate for 2008. He wrote this poem for the dedication ceremony of The Spokane Art School at the MAC. 

Our sincere thanks to Mr. Green for composing and reciting this poem at the dedication ceremony on

August 27, 2008!
The Spokane Art School at the MAC transition committee