Selma Waldman's life is either a cautionary tale or a miraculous triumph of artistic spirit. It all depends on how a viewer of her art feels about being made a witness to torture in drawings that are anything but pretty.
That, of course, isn't the point, nor was Seattle's 77-year-old grand dame of global justice -- Waldman died of cancer in April -- concerned with what she viewed as the petty vagaries of gallery representation. In charcoal-on-paper works drawn in a seeming frenzy of bright or muted colors, her concern was that observers feel the pain of being strung up, beaten, choked, electric-shocked, starved, or nearly drowned by agents of organized violence from the Balkans to Guant