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Talking art and Fremont with Peter Bevis
By Julie Reinhardt
Peter Bevis in the Foundry. Julie Reinhardt photo. |
Most know him as the Kalakala man, but long before he started this now 13-year work-in-progress, Peter Bevis remembers his first day of moving to Fremont. "As I drove down North 34th street, I saw the crane lowering Richard Beyer's statue Waiting for the Interurban in place. I thought, 'Oh, they're putting art in, I think I like it here.'"
Bevis thinks that sculpture provided Fremont a key beginning, "It was a landmark. People would say, 'Oh, you live by that sculpture where people are waiting for the bus.' 'Well, it's a trollycar' and a conversation begins."
"So you start sharing the things you have in common over these common cultural icons. What would Paris be without the Eiffel Tower, and what would we know about Egypt if it weren't for the pyramids? These big things that humans have created are landmarks. And they are important. Not just for outside cultures to identify us but for you and I to share. It gives us a sense of identity. I think that's been the key thing that Fremont has done to pick itself up over the years--it has identity."
Back in the early '80s, said Bevis, "Fremont was a dark and scary place." He decided it was just a casting in the rough so he stayed and built a bronze foundry, gallery, and 11 live-in studios. "The house where the gallery is had been abandoned for 13 years and the vegetation in the front yard literally grew up and tumbled out into the street. It was an abandoned neighborhood but zoned industrial, which was important."
Bevis built the studios to withstand heavy industrial use so that all art forms can use the space. "You can also cut steel, carve stone, paint, and we have a darkroom. I've tried to build a professional facility for sculpture, painting and other art. This building has staying power, it's got heart."
A community began in Fremont that Bevis strives to continue today. "We did the Troll, the Lenin sculpture, the Rocket, and the ship canal park. I had a hand in all those things so I'm trying to work that same chemistry that was so successful in Fremont, on the bigger community of not just Seattle but Puget Sound and Washington State."
Gallery 154 hasn't held an exhibit for years because all his energy is devoted to the Kalakala, the huge art deco ferry that he and a team chipped out of its ice bed in Kodiak Alaska in 1988 and brought to Seattle: "It's just a big sculpture that needs polishing." Bevis says the chemistry of working on the Kalakala is the same chemistry that made Fremont so special.
As for the recent changes, Bevis says it's disappointing. "I hear it everywhere that Fremont is losing what is special about it. It harkens back to the first Pioneers who said, 'Wow, look at these beautiful forests. I could sell these.' To take away those things that brought you there in the first place is shortsighted. What brought people to Fremont in the first place was the art, so why run the artists away?"
Recent brainstorming by the Meeting of Indigenous Peoples about how to revitalize Fremont fell flat in his opinion. "They suggested we let people pull Lenin's finger and he can fart. I sat there thinking, this is a world-class sculpture, part of an international art exchange that helped transform this neighborhood, and the memory is so short all they can think of are bathroom jokes."
"Part of the role of the artist is to be in touch with those forces and powers that are beyond our physical realm and to come back and translate and help interpret what the universe is about. It's gotten trivialized. Think of Michelangelo--who can forget that painting of touching God's finger? It's so powerful. It's the passing of life from the mythic to the human. It still resonates with you and I today. That's why it has value. People from all cultures with gods of different names can look at that painting and feel that there is a force greater than ours. That's what a professional painting can do. We are too generous, we call everything art. I think art has a higher calling. The best I can do is to provide a space and a facility where people can explore it."
Bevis doesn't have a pat answer to the Fremont question, but is thinking about "what are the qualities that make our community livable, that we like. Let's accept that the buildings are going to change, but aren't there qualities in between the buildings, not just the physical landscape, that we can keep what feels good about Fremont? Or are we going to turn it into a Manhattan where you bump shoulders with people and they're just objects?"
Building a park along the ship canal was like a preventative strike against the recent events in New York and DC. "We can have an effect within the community without a tragedy of trauma. I do think of all the positive ways we have changed Fremont. We get this feeling like we're all in this together. That's our boat, this is our city, that's our air, water, these are my hungry children. You get this sense of ownership in the community and all of our lives are better."
Bevis added, "When we created the Artist's Republic of Fremont (ARF), we asked ourselves where is Fremont, what are the borders? Fremont is a state of mind. That's what I take to heart when I see these changes come."
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