By now one of Seattle’s most cherished landmarks, the Seattle Mural is Paul Horiuchi’s daring glass tile departure from the exquisite collages he constructed from soft and translucent materials like rice paper. While it is now called simply “The Seattle Mural” I imagine it as the Buddhist’s “well-packed region” that is everything – eventually. Follow any line through the mural and eventually – or ultimately – you will end up where you began, and then keep going. Have you sat in the grass for a concert there and wound up wondering through the mural?
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During Bumbershoot 2012 the Seattle Mural was mostly covered by adverts, stage decorations, and large built out video screens like the one showing here at the center. Jean's view repeats Frank Shaw's detail below from the fair. These puff-ball erections that were part of the fair's appointments seem makeshift - or make-do - by now. Part of the Bell Telephone Pavilion shows on the left. It sprawled between the Food Circus (the Center House) and the Seattle Mural, and was one of the fair's clumsier designs. We will see a larger depiction of it later in this fair-festival project and elaborate there. Shaw's 1962 puffs two-up remind me of artist-friend Fred Bauer's capture of this small pruned tree, which holds its own against the ivy that once climbed the exterior wall of one of the structures that the Seattle Center inherited from Century 21. I remember it but by now can now longer claim with confidence, which it was. However, I'll venture this: it may have been the east facade of the Flag Plaza Pavilion directly across Third Ave. (or Boulevard East) from the southwest entrance to the Food Circus. Who knows?Catching Jean Capturing a Glimpse of Horiuchi
