The free Frye: One of my favorite things in town.

I could sing the praises of The Frye Art Museum until the end of time. After all, who can argue with the power of free – especially when you’re talking about a wonderful collection of art and the outstanding rotating exhibitions (see “The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art”) that come through the place?

Last weekend I went over to the museum to peruse the smallest exhibit in the museum (because that’s exactly what you can do when price is not a barrier), “Soft Glowing Light: Viewing Art in the Home of Charles and Emma Frye.” I wanted to learn more about the Seattle power couple who started it all, to understand the genesis of their legacy and a bit more about one of my favorite places in Seattle. What I found out surprised me, although in retrospect it shouldn’t have. The Fryes were incredibly prolific in their art collecting, but they were also undeniably generous with their purchases, opening up their personal home gallery to charity functions and special groups with great frequency, long before they were able to establish a free museum for the entirety of the public. Their house gallery, along with the Henry’s across town, were major cultural outposts in Seattle, bringing art to a much broader audience.

The exhibit itself is quite small – I counted 21 photos and a reproduction of a 1917 Society Page from “The Seattle Sunday Times” – but the passion of the Frye’s is undeniably in every photo, art covers every possible inch of the walls in the Frye home gallery – floor to ceiling, wall to wall.

According to the literature describing the exhibit, the Fryes hung and rehung paintings constantly in order to surface new connections between their paintings; one day might show paintings from given artists grouped together and the next day might show them instead grouped by subject matter or style. Like Rob, the main character from “High Fidelity,” you get the sense that the Fryes were constantly revising their own “Top 10″ lists and finding new connections between the paintings they owned, ceaselessly exploring the narratives created between them on their walls. It’s probably a bit like me and the organization of my book shelves. At least the enjoyment of collecting cannot completely elude we plebeians.

The Morning News (which is day in and day out one of my favorite websites) has an intriguing comparative photo study by Charlie White of teenage girls and adult male-to-female transsexuals. The images place a teenage girl side-by-side with a visually similar transsexual. The photos juxtapose two completely different lives in transition reaching a point where a sort of doppelganger effect is reached. It’s worth checking out.

In the images in White’s series, both figures are blossoming into womanhood, though each along a different path. As observers, however, we have been taught to view the subjects in much the same way: with sheer terror.

I had a fascinating literature course in college which really turned me on to the notion that cities are living and breathing organisms – at least they are up until they die. The inherent challenges of urban design, architecture, and changing patterns of social migration and technology had never really occurred to me. Now, I’m intrigued.

I’m lucky enough to live in Seattle where I look around and see processes of urban renewal and vitality improving a city that’s emerging remarkably unscathed from the recent economic downturn. It’s easy to recognize that this is not the case every else.

Take a look at photos of “The ruins of Detroit,” by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. Beautiful photos of a decomposing city. Many of these places appear to have been abandoned with no thought left to the objects inside.