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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 25, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 28, 2024

Beneath downtown, McMahon’s chic characters still tweak vanity

By Clay Eals

When legendary comic Red Skelton played the Puyallup fair in September 1987, he opened with a timeless joke that works for any big burg: “Good to be back in Seattle. Great city — when they get it done.”

His shtick stung because just six months earlier, construction had begun downtown on the Metro Bus Tunnel, disrupting traffic and shopping until its completion in 1990. Buses running in the completed tunnels were replaced later by Sound Transit light-rail trains. But lingering underground today from the late 1980s are eye-popping, publicly funded works by two-dozen artists, including Seattle painter Gene Gentry McMahon.

With “relish and bounce,” McMahon has spent decades poking gentle fun at “stiletto, high-heeled romances in which women on the make mate with underworld thugs,” as one critic opined. That theme was writ large in her 35-by-10-foot transit-tunnel mural installed in 1988 at Westlake Station beneath what was the city’s most elegant department store, Frederick & Nelson.

Today, with Nordstrom above, the mural’s chic characters sparkle in brash juxtaposition as if the piece were brand new. “It’s social commentary about fashion and grooming and how we choose to present ourselves,” McMahon says. “It’s what people wear and bring when they travel, with the mannequins, models and products. I’m playing a little bit on vanity.”

The universal subtext fits a public setting and tweaks an era that is no more, says Greg Kucera, former Frederick’s employee and longtime McMahon champion who after 38 years of operating a Seattle art gallery moved two years ago to France.

“Gene’s art is both literal and very incisive,” he says. “Her mural is an homage to a time of consumerism pre-internet, with the old-fashioned sense of relationship to a salesperson and with products you touch and smell before you buy. The idea of shop-by-mail was quaint. Now everything is delivered to your house.”

These days, McMahon, 81, maintains a studio on Elliott Avenue West, near the P-I globe. There, she conjures lively, provocative art pieces while documenting and cataloguing her countless works. An impish gleam in her eye still conveys edgy enthusiasm.

“I saw the weirdest ad for Nordstrom yesterday,” she says. “It made me want to do [the Westlake mural] all over again. It showed regular white tennis shoes, like Keds. It said they were the most comfortable shoes for the season. Then it showed really high platform heels. Both pairs had gobbledygook flowers. The tennis shoes were $1,200. The platforms were $3,000. I was so revolted. I’m going to use those shoes for something!”

Obviously, neither Seattle nor McMahon is “done.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Greg Kucera and especially Gene Gentry McMahon for their invaluable help with this installment!

No 360 video this week, but below you will find 5 additional photos and, in chronological order, 18 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

And here, to note this column’s lead, we present a couple of 1980s articles about funnyman Red Skelton: