Looks like Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz is stepping down after the 2011-2012 concert season.

This story just moved on the AP wire:

SEATTLE (AP) — Gerard Schwarz, music director of the Seattle Symphony and the longest serving in that position at a major orchestra, is stepping down in three years.

The 61-year-old Schwarz announced Wednesday he will become the symphony’s conductor laureate after the 2011-12 season.

He has been music director of the Seattle Symphony since 1985. During much of that time he also was music director of the New York Chamber Orchestra and of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in New York.

Under his baton the Seattle Symphony has built its audience from 5,000 subscribers to 35,000 and has boosted musicians’ salaries by 500 percent. Ten years ago the symphony opened a glittering new downtown performance center, Benaroya Hall.

John McCuistion, "Blackwater Burka." Image courtesy John McCuistion.

You couldn't look for two more different styles, but in a way, John McCuistion and William Herberholz--in Kittredge Gallery's first show this fall--complement each other nicely, drawing as they each do on social constructs. But while Herberholz is gently playful, McCuistion is ruthless.

McCuistion, who's been art professor at the University of Puget Sound for over 30 years, and department chair for two, shows every few years in the UPS' Kittredge Gallery. This show is a 40-year retrospective, and it's big: 25 small-ish figures in the middle, 28 circular platters and six masks on the walls. McCuistion's been working in clay since 1967, and his skill and attention to texture is continuous. Figures from the '80s--birds, abstracts--play with sparkly movement, their candy pastels and child-like globs playful. Masks from the '90s play with self-image: the flat ones painterly, the sculpted ones humorous, like an African Picasso with a fine sense of self-deprecation. Recent platters build on an earlier line of smooth surfaces where prints of fish and butterflies float over a painted haze.

But it's McCuistion's recent figures that grip you. In the center of the room they stand, grimly facing forward: only a couple of feet high, but chunky, arms and legs bound in the thick clay and dark glaze. There's a POW with haunted eyes, a soldier with blood-targeted chest, Cheney and a Bush supporter with devil's horns, and the bullet-riddled, black-tape-bound "Blackwater Burka."

Go along at 3 p.m. today for an artist talk with McCuistion himself.

Herberholz, meanwhile, pieces together delightfully singing memories of a North Dakota childhood. Bits of vintage tin cans, old toys, piano keys and plastic flowers are nailed together in a series of bright, saturated collages, their juxtapositions of chirpy Disney, June Cleaver types and gunslingers gently poking nostalgic fun at social stereotypes.

"John McCuistion: Forty Years" and "William Herberholz: Playtime" are up through Oct. 8 at Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound, cnr North 15th and Lawrence Streets, Tacoma. Artist talks: McCuistion, 3 p.m. Sept. 10; Herberholz, 3 p.m. Sept. 17. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon-5 p.m. Saturdays. Free. 253-879-2806, www.ups.edu/kittredge.xml