elger bay institoot of aesthetic enlargement
No one is really sure when the Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement first opened. Probably most of those early students are gone now —- starved to death probably or else moved on to actual working lives, the kind of lives you commute to, pay taxes with, pay your mortgage and try to forget that misspent fantasy of your wayward youth. Some say it was a response to the Honey I Shrunk the Art Show down at the old garage gallery by the Tyee Store. The Shrunk Show’s still going strong after more than 25 years, what would be called a quarter of a century to most folks, what we call Quittin Time down on the South End.
The Institoot isn’t exactly flourishing. Nor is it enlarging. But it does still train its students to paint and sculpt and about any other form of artistic skill when it can muster instructors. They’ve taught macramé and basket weaving, duck decoy carving and motorcycle airbrushing. Back in the wilder days they taught body painting — now they offer the occasional tattoo workshop. At the completion of every semester the graduates have a student art show of current work over at the Grange. The instructors bring in their own work and most of the South End attends the gala opening, looking for deals and possibly signing up for the next quarter’s admission.
I’d say most of us have taken a class or three. I took a night class back in 1980 to learn how to make stained glass windows so I could replace the plastic stapled to half my shack’s window-sized holes. Half of us go to meet someone single, which is how, I suspect, the place got its real reputation for more than just artistic license. They had more bacchanalias than baccalaureates at the Institoot and probably twice the orgies the Pilchuck Glass School was famous for. Plus the tuition was about one tenth what the eyepatch crowd wanted to attend.
Admittedly, not many of us moved up to the NY galleries or the Frisko art scene or even the avante-garde of Everett. Most of us never had grandiose ambitions, you want to know the truth. We just wanted to wet our feet, try a little brushwork and rub a shoulder with the artistic crowd. After all, we’re South Enders, not crazies…. Course , that art stuff has a way of weaving up the synapses. Our art might’ve shrunk, but the South End sure got a lot wider.
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