Michael Howell, Part V

Michael Howell's Homeless Art Gallery was a great success for him. By May 1992 there were displays up for about 7 artists, counting Michael. Michael had half the display space, the rest of us shared the other half. Many more people came in to get free lessons from Michael and ask for space. Michael always said he would "think about it," or he would critique their art, being mostly positive and encouraging, and then end with, "Pretty soon you'll be doing something we can put up." He was a genius at stringing people along with flattery and promises.

He expected flattery in return. Every time I saw him he fished for compliments. When I finished a painting he would always say how interesting it was, or how he liked the use of color, or the composition, sounding quite sincere until the next words out of his mouth were, "So what do you think about the color [or composition, etc.] of this one?" showing me one of his. If my compliment for him wasn't at least as good as his for me, he'd make a sour face, acting offended.

At least he was conscious about it. He freely admitted he liked having me around because I came off as an intellectual and it made him look intellectual to be associated with me.

His desire to be regarded as intellectual clashed with his bigotry at times. An example involved some uncomfortable moments at the Burke Museum in 1993. I was with Michael and Stan Burriss at the U District Burger King. It was after the free meal and Michael had a few hours to kill before an appointment. I told them I was leaving to go to an exhibit of contemporary Maori art at the Burke Museum on campus. Michael decided he had to go to learn what all this Maori art is about. He talked Stan into coming with us.

On the walk over (just 4 blocks) Michael talked about how anything a native can do a non-native can do. It's just a matter of wanting to. I couldn't see any way to argue against that sort of reasoning, but I also couldn't see what the point of reasoning it was.

The exhibit was awesome to me. Two of the artists especially stood out, Cliff Whiting and Manos Nathan. Manos Nathan did beautiful carved clay pots which he allowed to be exhibited for a year and then destroyed to respect the sacred clay they were made from.

Predictably, Michael had no more interest in that bit of cultural trivia than in the art itself. I spent the next hour and a half constantly moving away from Michael to avoid hearing him carp about how he could do better than this or that in half the time, "if he wanted to."

In general Michael was interested in whatever he could trivialize or master. If he could master it, it was genius. If he couldn't, it was beneath him.

By the end of '93 the fact that women at Noel House with clear talent weren't getting display space and growing frustration with Michael's dismissal of crafts (what he called women's art when they weren't listening) led to meetings with Michael and Archdiocesan Housing Authority officials to try to work some arrangement out that would better accommodate the women at Noel House. Michael expressed sharp bitterness about these meetings to me. He told me he planned to stonewall them. He would keep going to their meetings but he would find objections to all their proposals and wear them down.

It didn't work. When he was uncooperative, the AHA simply sent a social worker. Her name was Barbara Brownstein. She was short, thin, darkhaired, energetic, female, and of a suspect orientation. Michael Howell's noncooperation extended to Barbara. He avoided speaking to her as much as possible.

I don't remember how long it took but the next thing I recall is that Barbara and Michael were opening the gallery on different days. I think it was in the Spring or early Summer of 1994. It was maybe a month after Tim Harris came in and told me of his plans to begin a street paper similar to a Boston paper he'd started up a few years earlier.

Barbara took no answer for a yes whenever she consulted Michael about adding members, or rearranging displays, so Michael's sulking noncooperation backfired. By the end of Summer we had a total of twelve artists working in the gallery and displaying, in addition to artists who were old friends of Michael who never had to check in order to get their work displayed.

The new artists included, as I remember, at least 3 women. One of them, Jonna Taylor, had a piece that was an assembly of items on a level board on a table, webbed with string with bits of paper with writing on them. Michael's reaction to it was at first just that it was junk. Then he noticed that one of the items forming the piece was a black dildo. I was watching him when he saw it. His face turned lobster red and he said that it was disgusting, and we had to get it out of the gallery.

[Above Right: Not a good enough picture of it to see the dildo, but at least it conveys how busy it was. Anitra wrote about Jonna when she passed away a few years ago.]

I said I thought it should stay, it's art and it makes a statement. Michael scoffed at that. Then he said, "Well, it has to go. It's offensive to women. Women don't want to see disgusting things like that. The dykes downstairs won't allow it."

He hadn't read the signature. I said, "How can you say it's offensive to women if it was done by one? It was put together by one of the Noel House women. The staff already know about it."

It was true. The staff was fine with it. It was controversial with the residents but the majority liked it. Only two of the residents ever objected. All of the claims that the piece was offensive to women in general came from Michael and from male friends of his he could line up on his side. Michael couldn't get Barbara Brownstein or the Noel House staff to support him in barring the piece.

He could have come in alone after hours and hauled the piece out and trashed it. But he knew he would be the only suspect, so he wanted someone else to take credit with him when the accusations were made. So the next time I was at the gallery he followed me out and tried to persuade me in joining him in a trashing party. I said no.

He became so angry he drew me around the corner at what is now the the Qwest Building at 2nd and Lenora and crowded me up against the wall. A foot from my face he demanded to know why I was supporting that "lesbian garbage." I said I was supporting it because it was art. He said it wasn't art it was offensive. I burst out laughing, as I do sometimes, I can't always help it, and I said, "You know, actually, I like the piece, but even if I didn't I wouldn't trash it." He then told me that I was a disgusting pervert and he would never speak to me again. He was mistaken about that last part.

In the next few days Michael complained to Noel House staff that another of the items in Jonna's piece, a ball peen hammer painted silver (representing Maxwell's) was his hammer. He was missing a hammer, Jonna's hammer looked just like his hammer, therefore she had stolen his hammer.

When those charges were disregarded, a few more days passed, and the hammer disappeared. Michael denied taking it. He convinced staff that just anyone could have walked up and snatched it.

Michael Howell, Part III

Late 1991 was a huge turning point in my life. I used to use email signatures that said things like, "Harnessing Stupidity, Since 1991" and "One Personality To Serve You, Since 1991." Between September and November of that year I resolved the old split personality and broke out of a lot of the problems that PTSD put me through. I quit smoking cold turkey. I felt like a new person. One of the consequences was that I decided I could deal with hanging out with Michael Howell again.

I decided that on the spur of the moment. I was walking by the Burger King on NE 50th on a Sunday and went in, impulsively. Sure enough Michael was there with poet Stan Burriss, who often dropped in to meet Michael without going on to the Blessed Sacrament feed.

After getting through with the "long time no see" business and after I dished up a diplomatic answer to "why haven't you been around?" Michel broke the news that he was about to move his traveling "Homeless Art Gallery" into a physical space downtown.

Michael Howell's Homeless Art Gallery had been a collection of art work done by homeless and formerly homeless artists who trusted Michael to store their art in his apartment so he could haul it out and display it in public places.

The idea for this traveling art show preceded the Seattle Goodwill Games of 1990. But the city's homeless sweeps in advance of the games spurred a revolt. There was a Tent City and associated protest. The protest gave rise to SHARE and WHEEL, Seattle's most active grassroots organizations powered by homeless people themselves. The rallies incident to the protests surrounding the Goodwill Games and to other actions by SHARE brought new life to Michael's art show. Homeless protesters wanted to show the public that homeless people are talented and sensitive human beings. So activists were happy to help haul the art around and set it up wherever public actions were planned.

Meanwhile, the severe winter of 1990 prompted the Archdiocesan Housing Authority to open a severe weather shelter in Belltown which evolved into a permanent women's shelter (Noel House) in a building at 2nd and Bell. Yielding to neighborhood pressures, the AHA agreed that the corner storefront of the building would not be used by the permanent shelter. Instead some other use would be found for it, one which would benefit the entire community, not only the homeless community.

Enter Michael Howell. He offered to run his Homeless Art gallery out of the storefront as a working studio and gallery. It would benefit the wider community by being a place where anyone could come and see the artwork. The studio space would be open to all walk-ins. Even non-homeless could create art in the space.

Michael figured he couldn't sell the idea as "Michael Howell's Private Gallery" open by invitation to other artists. He had to tell AHA that he wouldn't really be the owner of the new gallery. He told them it would be a democratically run cooperative.

Already in the Burger King, December 1991, without having seen me for two nearly two years, Michael Howell couldn't resist bragging to me how he was pulling the wool over the eyes of a "religionist" bureaucracy. The gallery would be open to homeless and formerly homeless artists, but he intended to retain iron control. There wasn't going to be any cooperative.

When he said it would be open to formerly homeless artists I perked up. "Hey, I'm a formerly homeless artist," I said. Even before I first met him I had been doing pen and ink drawings. I had since taken up acrylics. he asked to see some, so the next week I brought a handful of paintings to the Burger King. He admitted they weren't to his taste, but he said they would fill a niche in the gallery. He had been looking for a non-native who did "native" art, because, he said, the natives were too demanding.

I pointed out that my art wasn't really Native American inspired, except insofar that Native Hawaiians are now Native Americans thanks to Hawaiian statehood, and a fraction of my art is Native Hawaiian inspired, although mostly I've been influenced by art from other realms of Oceania, such as New Zealand and New Guinea and Indonesian -- and he said, "Yeah, whatever."

So that's how he accepted my art for display in the Homeless Art Gallery.

[Below: Me in front of my display in the gallery a few years later. Michael was already on the way out when this picture was taken but you can see two of his pieces in this scene. One is the bowed man in blue over my left shoulder. The other is a painting of a woman at my far right, below a couple of landscapes by a third artist. My stuff is around the windows. Michael wasn't able to paint directly on large canvases and boards such as these. One of the reasons he wanted the gallery space was to have a place to set up a projector. He came in nights when the gallery was closed and projected his small drawings onto large boards and traced them.]

There was still a little agoraphobia problem that made it difficult for me to ride crowded buses from the U District to Downtown Seattle. In March 1992 I saw the place for the first time thanks to Michael's gracious agreement to ride with me to keep me distracted and get me past the panic attacks.