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September 2019
Unsettling Femininity: Selections from the Frye Art Museum Collection
From Frye Art Museum: From a young age, we all learn to interpret images of people—from advertisements and fashion spreads to works of art—based on the cultural context in which we live. Portrayals of women are particularly layered with associations that reveal broader social values and expectations. Beginning in the 1970s, feminist scholars and critics led a methodological shift toward a critical examination of representations of women in contemporary Western media. They contextualized the way these representations were conditioned by depictions of women in the tradition of European art, renderings governed by an unspoken assumption: men actively look, and women are objects to be looked at. Unsettling Femininity uses the specific lens of the Frye Art Museum’s Founding Collection to probe the politics of looking and question our habitual ways of viewing images of women. The exhibition presents portrayals of mostly white women created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily by German and Austrian artists. This selection reflects a particular area of interest for the Museum’s founders, Charles and Emma Frye, Seattleites of German descent, who assembled their art collection primarily between 1900 and 1925. The women—drawn from subjects encompassing biblical and mythological figures, celebrities and…
Find out more »November 2019
In Plain Sight At Henry Art Gallery
From Henry Art Gallery: This group exhibition engages artists whose work addresses narratives, communities, and histories that are typically hidden or invisible in our public space (both conceptually and literally defined). The presenting artists approach the exhibition’s theme from a range of directions, varying across all media as well as aesthetic and conceptual contexts. Works encompass deliberately activist endeavors and direct documentation; the unpacking of individual histories excluded due to race, ethnicity, or class; explorations of coded language for protection, secrecy, or both; the illumination of invisible or covert systems of labor, exploitation, and capitalist control; and translation through surreal, oblique, or fantastical frameworks. The exhibition expands into the entire museum, including interstitial/transitional spaces, and activates external sites through programs, performances, and community partnerships. Site becomes a material through which what we have heretofore considered the complete, authoritative story is expanded and retold. Participating artists: Sadie Barnette (U.S., born 1984), Sanford Biggers (U.S., born 1970), Andrea Bowers (U.S., born 1965), Tom Burr (U.S., born 1963), Fiona Connor (New Zealand, born 1981), william cordova (Peru, born 1971), Beatriz Cortez (El Salvador, born 1970), Hayv Kahraman (Iraq, born 1981), Nicole Miller (U.S., born 1982), Alison O’Daniel (U.S., born 1979), Ebony G. Patterson (Jamaica,…
Find out more »March 2020
Opening at SAM: John Akomfrah
From SAM: Weaving a tapestry of moving images, John Akomfrah’s video essays address the questions of our time in an exhibition unlike any before at SAM. Future History brings together three examples of his art that convey a provocative vision of the past, present, and future. Akomfrah combines stunning scenery, archival footage, literary texts, and original interviews. His montages encourage new ways of looking at history and imagining the future. SAM’s galleries are transformed into screening rooms and interactive spaces where Akomfrah’s work takes you from the 15th to the 21st century through three videos that must be seen on the big screen. The elaborate staging of Tropikos (36 min) conveys encounters between the British and people from Africa in the 16th century before the slave trade began. Vertigo Sea (48 min) presents three screens to lyrically explore the sea’s incomprehensible grandeur in our current moment on the verge of climate crisis. The Last Angel of History (45 min) follows a data thief’s voyage to find the keys to the future by listening to artists and explorers. Ghana-born and London-based, Akomfrah uses the screen to introduce new explorations of the experiences of migrant diasporas across the globe, Afrofuturism, and visions of the natural world. Akomfrah’s videos have established…
Find out more »April 2020
In Context: Joseph Steininger Solo Exhibition at J. Rinehart Gallery
From J. Rinehart Gallery: Seattle native, Joseph Steininger is an artist and innovator interested in the constantly changing space found in cities. His work is influenced by a mixture of street art culture and printmaking processes. Using traditional and time-honored forms of fine art, his pieces are remarkably complex and masterfully represent this contemporary medium. Working from photographs taken of rough urban landscapes, graffiti, condemned buildings, and overgrown parking lots, Joseph Steininger elevates typically unnoticed or seemingly decrepit subject matter to the level fine art. His exhibit, In Context will explore Steiniger’sprocess of painstakingly reducing images to abstracted shapes through intricate hand-cut stencils. This not only lays the groundwork for his elaborately spray-painted compositions but the act of rebuilding the image through multiple spray-painted stenciled layers imbues each piece with a new life and context as a work of fine art. In conjunction with the exhibition, a digital catalog will be published with an essay written by arts writer and editor Lauren Gallow. The exhibition of new spray-painted works by Steininger, will be on view April 11–May 23, 2020 at J.Rinehart Gallery. The opening reception is on Saturday April 11, 2020 from 3-6pm, as well as First Thursday, May 7,…
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