Michael Howell, Part VI

The first issue of Real Change appeared in August 1994. The second issue came out October 1, 1994, and featured a two page article on the art of Michael Howell. It crammed a full 25 of Michael's drawings in together with a half page article describing Michael Howell's art and Michael Howell -- by Michael Howell. He didn't want anybody else interpreting him.

Meanwhile, the other gallery members were meeting regularly with Barbara Brownstein to prepare for a rededication of the gallery under a new name, StreetLife Art gallery, as a genuine cooperative art studio/gallery. Michael Howell was invited to all the meetings, but refused to attend, because his position was that he was in charge of the gallery, therefore decisions made without him had no force. Our meetings were just an opportunity, he thought, for us to exchange so much hot air. The gallery was what he made it. What we said it was meant nothing. If we wanted to change it, WE had to meet with HIM, not HIM with US.

The Archdiocesan Housing Authority, the Dominican Sisters, and A Territory Resource saw it differently. They were funding a cooperative gallery, not a Michael Howell gallery.

Without input from Michael, the other members voted to change the name, reorganize the gallery, put out a book featuring art and biographies of all the artists, and hold a public reopening. The date was set for December 8. Michael didn't make it.

[Above: The StreetLife opening, as pictured in the next month's Real Change.]

About the same time, though, Michael found a reason to get back on speaking terms with me. He wanted to apply for a bus shelter project. He didn't think he could get one on his own. So his idea was to repeat the success of the gallery idea: make a joint application with 2 other artists. The idea was the 3 of us would represent homelessness better than one could. We would offer 3 different kinds of art combined on the same bus shelter.

For the 3rd artist, Michael wanted our poet friend, Stan Burriss. It was the sort of sly choice I'd come to expect from Michael. He knew Stan would only get a small plaque for a poem or two, leaving the rest of the shelter to Michael and I. He got me to agree to do only the bottom third of the shelter, around the bench, while he did the upper two thirds. My incentive was that my share of the money Metro paid us would not be reduced by more than a third of a dollar. Stan and I would each get $333, Michael would get $334.

Getting a design approved was a nightmare. The man in charge of the shelter art program was Dale Cummings, who always seem to me to be on the verge of pulling his hair out in response to talking to us. I didn't blame him.

Michael wanted to use his wall projector to duplicate twelve of his small paintings on the fronts and backs of the six panels he would have. Stan, who, ever since his homeless days has always written his poems on napkins and paper cups he picks up at cafés and meetings, wanted Metro to create plexiglass cases to house cups and napkins so people could see them as they were written. I wanted to create a semi-abstract linear piece that would illustrate the words of one of the poems that Stan submitted.

Mr. Cummings objected, first of all, to the lack of cohesion these plans had. We had very tense meetings in which he basically said, "You guys get together and integrate your design plans, or we'll cancel this project." He objected to Stan's proposal on grounds of cost and practicality. The cases would be one-of-kind, so if they were damaged the cost of replacement would be too high. Stan was told he'd get the same kind of case that holds bus schedules, for copies of his peoms. Those would be easily replaced and cheap.

The biggest objection came when Michael presented the 12 paintings he wanted to use. Dale Cummings wanted women, minorities, and youth. Michael painted older White males, almost exclusively.

Cummings finally gave up on the cohesion issue, but never gave an inch on the demand for diversity of images. He kept reminding Michael that he understood that Michael has to have his own personal vision as an artist, but Metro is paying for this shelter, so Metro has a right to demand that the content be something that reflects well on it.

Michael became defensive. he felt he was being charged with racism. He made the point that he painted old White men because their wrinkles stood out. That was really what his art was about.

He was a landscape artist in effect, not a portrait artist. But he couldn't say it that way because he had spent years promoting his art as portraiture art. His whole rap was that he was depicting the "real" homeless. So Dale Cummings said, by only showing old White men and saying that you're depicting the real homeless you're implying that only old White men are real homeless. That homeless women and homeless Blacks and homeless youths and homeless Native Americans, for examples, aren't real homeless.

I thought it was great. For the first time someone speaking to Michael Howell about Michael's art was really taking it seriously. He was talking to Michael about what his art really was about.

Michael hated it. But after one long tense meeting after another he finally realized that Cummings wasn't going to budge. Michael caved and we went ahead.

[Below: The shelter was originally placed at 7th & Olive. From a photo accompanying a June '95 article about the shelter project taken by Karla Manus.]

Michael Howell, Part I

It suddenly occurred to me that a major anniversary of Michael Howell's passing had itself passed without my noticing, and there is unfinished business.

The Michael Howell of whom I speak is the formerly homeless one who made a career in Seattle of sitting in public doing pen and pencil drawings of wizened old homeless white men, tinting them with watercolors, and selling them not to the subjects but to mostly female concerned idealists. He also, in late 1991, began what he called the Seattle Homeless Art Gallery, which later called itself the StreetLife Art Gallery.

When Michael died over ten years ago I was still very active in StreetLife, had been writing for Real Change, and everyone assumed that I would be the one to write the obituary. I'd known him since the mid-80s, and at one point I was for all practical purposes his principal assistant in running the gallery. But I said then that if by obituary they meant eulogy, forget it. I would not write a eulogy. It turned out it was a eulogy the editorial committee wanted, so fellow editor Michele Marchand wrote it.

I think ten years is long enough to wait. This now is the obituary the editorial committee would have gotten if they'd kept insisting. It's a little long, so they would have cut it. I'm going to run it here in installments -- because I can!

I first met Michael at Ralph's Deli at 4th & Lenora, around 1985, give or take a year. Dates in the 80s are a little hazy because of the divorce, the extreme grief (which resulted when I couldn't see my daughter anymore because she was taken thousands of miles away from me), the two bouts of homelessness, one long, one short, and the intense delayed stress syndrome associated with PTSD that was so bad that between 1984 and 1987 I couldn't look at the front page of a newspaper.

Ralph's Deli was a decent all-night grocery store and deli then. They didn't discriminate against the homeless like they do now. They let Michael and his buddies hang there all night long, only asking what all stores ask, that they occasionally pay for a fresh cup of coffee to justify their occupancy. Michael was there with a chessboard every night and wanted to play anyone who looked at all interested.

I was a cab driver. I came in every night to buy coffee and a sandwich. The sandwich would usually be my only meal in a twelve hour shift. I'd use the purchase to justify the use of the men's room. Sometimes I'd sit down and take a break, sometimes not.

One night I stopped to gaze at a chess game Michael was playing with a friend. The brief attention I gave induced Michael to introduce himself and spend the next several days twisting my arm to play a game with him.

While he was prevailing on me to play chess, I got to know him as an artist. Whenever he had no one to play the sketch book would open and he try to sketch the most wrinkled white man in the room.

The choice of white men as art subjects was not racist. Michael was racist -- I'll be getting to that -- but his choice of art subjects was NOT a manifestation of his racism. Michael was fascinated with wrinkles and the shadows they cast on faces. With white people the shadows are more pronounced because of the contrast to the white skin. Early on he would draw wrinkled old women, too, but there aren't as many wrinkled old white women around as white men because the women use makeup to hide the wrinkles. Eventually when he caught on to the fact that women were more likely to buy his art he convinced himself that it was old men they wanted to see. He thought old women would disturb them because they might identify. But they could just feel sorry for the old men.

Finally I caved in and played a game of chess with Michael. I lost. I played another and lost. And another. Over the next few weeks I lost 30 games in a row to Michael, winning none, tying none.

Michael was an insufferable gloating prick when he won. He was also hypocritical about the game. He bragged that he would never be a "book" player, but he never played any opening as White but P-K4, and he whined if you didn't follow with P-K4, saying you were "ruining" the game. On top of that he whined whenever he had to play Black so much that just to shut him up I agreed to play Black all the time. [Pictured: The start of a "good" game, as seen by Michael.]

So heading into the 31st game I was getting pissed at his petty whining and gloating and general unsportsmanlike behavior. I did something nasty: I went to the Seattle Public Library and found a big thick opening book that analyzed lines of his favorite opening to 20 and 30 moves. I found an obscure trap in the 12th move that was described as "unsound, but very difficult for an unprepared player to counter over the board." I memorized it and sprang it on him the next time we played.

As soon as he realized he was about to lose a rook to a knight (as the trap promised) he panicked. He started whining that I'd spoiled the game by playing a "weird" move. He tried to get me to take it back. When I wouldn't he started to get that it was a deliberate trap, and began to get hostile about it.

He had a friend who usually hung with him who was a tournament player. Michael got his friend to help him solve the problem posed by the trap. So I was playing two people now.

Michael might have pulled off a tie in spite of the trap by just exploiting his superior experience in the endgame, but he couldn't stand the thought of giving up his unbroken streak of wins against me to a tie so he took a rash risk that cost him the game, and I finally won one.

When losing a game it's customary for a chess player to tip his King over, acknowledging defeat. Michael Howell acknowledge his one and only loss to me by yelling, "SHIT, GOD DAMN IT, FUCK!" and hurling his King half-way across the grocery.

So I never played him another game. It pissed him off that I would stop playing after a win and not let him "settle the score." That the score was 30 games to 1 in his favor meant nothing to him. I guess he had to win the last game or he was a loser in his mind. I didn't care. I didn't want to be bothered playing such a sore loser again.