Real Change News | Artist’s legacy lives on in Pioneer Square grant

May 26, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 22

Feature

Artist’s legacy lives on in Pioneer Square grant

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

Remembering Su Job

Artist Su Job working in her studio in Pioneer Square’s Tashiro-Kaplan Artist Lofts in 2008, just months before her diagnosis of cancer.

Photo by: Lynn Schirmer , None

Lynn Schirmer cared for fellow artist Su Job before her death in 2008. Job’s legacy includes a $3,000 grant that will go each year to one Pioneer Square artist.

Photo by: Adam Doody , None

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In the summer of 2008, Su Job had a problem that, for once in her life, she could not power through, laugh off or fix: A pain in her back had gotten so bad that she needed a cane to walk, but every time she went to Group Health for help, they told her it was just a yoga injury and sent her home.

One night in November, despairing at her decline, a few of her neighbors and fellow artists at Pioneer Square’s Tashiro-Kaplan Artist Lofts took matters into their own hands. They bundled Job in a car and took her to Seattle’s Virginia Mason Hospital, where the next day, Job got some very bad news.

Lynn Schirmer was holding her hand when the doctor told Job that she had cancer throughout her body and, at most, had six months to live. Just 52, Job took the news calmly, asking the doctor questions. Then, Schirmer says, “She looked at me and squeezed my hand and she said, ‘Well, I had a good life.’”

It was typical of Job. She had faced many struggles, including leaving home as a teenager and escaping an abusive husband to become an artist, entrepreneur and teacher – one known and loved for her passion and boundless energy. In short order, Job had Schirmer call two dozen of her closest friends for a champagne toast to her life that turned her hospital room into a party that very night.

By Christmas Day, Job was gone. But she would plan for and meet her death the way she had lived, fully embracing it on her own terms and insisting that she die among friends at the Tashiro-Kaplan, an artists-only low-income building that she had fought for. She spent her final days working feverishly to establish what is now an annual $3,000 grant for Pioneer Square artists to carry on her legacy of making art a living part of the community.

The grant comes from $30,000 raised at a benefit art auction that Job’s friends organized for her at the Tashiro-Kaplan shortly before her death. She called the grant the Conductive Garboil, a word, Schirmer says, that reflects Job’s intentions and her wish not to emulate wealthy art patrons who egotistically put their names on things.

“Garboil is an ancient French term that means upheaval or tumult,” she says. “Su wanted to reward artists who are at least in some way thumbing their nose at the market system and attempting to improve their community with their creative expression.”

It’s not that Job didn’t like to make a sale – she supported herself, in part, by making mod purses and later, hand-painted silk scarves that she sold to pricey boutiques. But she also taught art history at the Art Institute of Seattle and Cornish College of the Arts, Schirmer says, and believed that market forces had co-opted art’s traditional role in society as a form of individual communication. It was a role Job always supported.

“Su came to every single one of my art openings, even from the time she didn’t know me very well,” says Schirmer, a painter and friend who now oversees Job’s estate. “As soon as I [moved] in that TK community, she was right there, supporting me.”

After getting a masters degree in fine art at the University of Washington in 1989, Job set up shop as a fiber artist and purse maker at 619 Western Avenue, a run-down warehouse of art studios where she put up other artists’ work each month at a space she called Ace Gallery. Over time, she leased several floors of the building and continued managing them after moving in 2004 to the Tashiro-Kaplan, a unique, federally subsidized artist building that Job and others advocated for in the wake of artists being driven out of Pioneer Square by gentrification.

Job was a mentor and organizer at the TK, Schirmer says, always lending an ear for creative issues and calming political ones as they came up in the building.
Two of her later projects included “Soft Porn,” a collection of graphic images in needlepoint, and “Urban Equations,” a photographic series of Pioneer Square scenes printed on fabric and embroidered with math equations commenting on the image. In one, for instance, an equation representing error is sewn over a scene of a car accident.

“The amount of work she could get done in a single day, and everyone remarked on this, was so beyond the norm, so stunning,” Schirmer says. “Then she’d be up all night partying and still be going at three in the morning.”

The “Urban Equations” series sold out at the benefit auction organized in December 2008 by Schirmer and other Tashiro-Kaplan residents, who donated their artwork to raise money for Job’s medical expenses. Anything left over was to go to the grant, which Job restricted to artists living or working in Pioneer Square to help maintain the area as an arts center in Seattle, Schirmer says. Artists who receive the grant, however, can do anything they please with it – it is a gift to them, she says, for their previous work in the community.

Job herself chose the first grant recipient, Heath Lambe, based on a political art installation that she had seen two years before. Lambe had projected video imagery of war scenes through second-floor gallery windows of the TK while standing on a soapbox, mouth duct-taped shut, handing out cards with the name and rank of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. On the sidewalk below the window, he had strewn matching cards of red.

Job also selected the panel of judges that chose the 2009 recipient, Sheri Brown. Brown is a Tashiro-Kaplan resident who performs and teaches Butoh, a constricted, other-worldly form of dance that started in Japan after World War II and the devastation of the atomic bomb.

Brown says she still has her $3,000, which she may use this year to study and perform with Japanese Butoh master Katsura Kan, who has invited her to join him on a world tour that starts in July. Brown says she could then bring Kan’s techniques back to share with others in her Seattle workshops, but she’s still weighing the best use of the grant for herself and the community.

It’s a tall order living up to Job, whose portrait Brown sees every day passing through the lobby of the Tashiro-Kaplan.

“She’s a torch to holding true to your principles,” Brown says, “and being intelligent and fun at the same time.”

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