I had some good news to tell you today about one of my own publishing projects. But it’ll wait. For today, there’s just bad news. Quite bad news indeed.
It’s about Su Job. She’s a longtime local artist, specializing in fabric-based works. She’s also designed and made custom scarves and shawls, and taught art classes at the Art Institute of Seattle and elsewhere.
She’s lived in the Tashiro Kaplan artist lofts since they opened in 2004, and played an influential role in getting the Pioneer Square building preserved as artist spaces.
But perhaps her best-known role has been as the longtime queen bee of the 619 Western building. For more than a decade, she ruled its five stories of gallery/studio lofts with a friendly but firm hand. (Artists, and people who claim to be artists, can occasionally be fiscally flaky.)
That’s where I spotted her last night, during the First Thursday gallery openings. She was her usual self—gracious toward friends and patrons, stern toward an artist/tenant who’d allegedly been slow on her rent.
Job did all this from a motorized wheelchair, taversing 619’s levels via Seattle’s second coolest elevator (after that in the Smith Tower). A friend followed closely behind, towing a shopping cart. Inside the cart were flowers and gifts from Job’s tenants and friends, as well as an extra jacket for Job and some emergency medical stuff.
Job’s friend was also passing out postcards with Job’s face superimposed on the classic “Rosie the Riveter” poster. The postcard advertised a benefit art auction to help pay her hospice-care expenses.
Yep: She’s dying.
She’d had a lingering pain in a leg for weeks. Doctors simply advised her to live with it until it went away. It never went away.
Then, as she announced in an email to friends on Nov. 18, she got the real diagnosis. She had a rare, fast-spreading bone cancer. It was incurable and untreatable. All that could be done was to care for her.
But that late-stage nursing care, which she needs in order to stay in her TK space, isn’t covered by her insurance. Thus, the auction on Saturday, Dec. 13 in the former Davidson Contemporary space within the TK, 310 S. Washington St. The 6 p.m. auction’s preceded by an afternoon preview.
(Read this link at CaringBridge.org to learn more about Job’s daily bravery.)
(And here’s P-I arts writer Regina Hackett on Job’s story and the auction.)
