Carmen Winant: Passing On @ Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Carmen Winant: Passing On 

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Through September 25, 2025

CARMEN WINANT

Passing On [detail], 2022

Ink on newsprint

Courtesy the artist and PATRON Gallery, Chicago

Photo: Luke Stettner

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington presents Carmen Winant: Passing On, an exhibition of works by CARMEN WINANT (b. 1983, San Francisco, CA; based in Columbus, OH).

Carmen Winant uses photography to explore collective acts of feminist care, survival, and resistance. Her work highlights the role of images in shaping feminist movements, questioning ideas about women’s power, healing, and liberation. Her large-scale photographic assemblages emerge from a research practice at the intersection of past and living archives, and contain thousands of images collected from libraries, advocacy organizations, instruction manuals, and estate sales. These works reference the importance of visual documentation, collection, and preservation in capturing everyday feminist action and care. 

The Henry presents a focused exhibition featuring works from Passing On (2022), a series of collaged newspaper obituaries of influential feminist activists and organizers. The clippings, presented with Winant’s handwritten annotations, reflect on a lineage of non-biological inheritance and how language shapes memory and history.

CARMEN WINANT is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Winant's recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Sculpture Center, Wexner Center of the Arts, ICA Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. Winant's artist books include My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), and Instructional Photography: Learning How To Live Now (2021); Arrangements, A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (both 2022), and The last safe abortion (2024). Carmen Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 FCA Artist Honoree and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is also a community organizer, prison educator, and mother to her two children, Carlo and Rafael, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner. 

Carmen Winant: Passing On is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant.

HENRY ART GALLERY

University of Washington

15th Ave NE & NE 41st St, Seattle, WA 98195

henryart.org

Carmen Winant: Passing On

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

April 12 - September 25, 2025

Josh Faught: Sanctuary @ Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Josh Faught: Sanctuary

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle 

Through August 3, 2025

JOSH FAUGHT (U.S., b. 1979)

Sanctuary [detail], 2017

Hand-woven, hand-dyed cotton, hemp,

and gold lamé, scrapbooking stikers;

the entire 1999 season of the soap opera

Passions (DVD); the sheet music for 

Peter Hallock's "A Song of Deliverance";

advertisements for The Monastory 

(The Sanctuary); issue six of Pot Pourri,

a sexual questionnaire for the "new age";

an adverstisement for The Date-Record;

giant clothespins, nail polish, and pins.

Henry Art Gallery, Gift of William and 

Ruth True, originally commissioned in 2016 

for Saint Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA, 2020.5 

Image courtesy of the artist

JOSH FAUGHT (U.S., b. 1979)

Sanctuary, 2017

Installation view: 

Saint Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA, 2017

Image courtesy of the artist

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington presents an exhibition featuring the work of JOSH FAUGHT (born 1979, Missouri, based in San Francisco, CA). Know for his evocative multimedia creations that blend weaving found objects, and ephemera, Josh Faught examines craft traditions, queer culture, and personal history in ways that challenge systems of classification and highlight structures of support, visibility, and identity.

This exhibition highlights Sanctuary (2017), a monumental tapestry commissioned by Western Bridge for Seattle’s Saint Mark’s Cathedral and now part of the Henry’s collection. Drawing from Faught’s personal collections and local Seattle archives, Sanctuary reflects on how queer communities have created spaces of safety and connection, and how these practices intersect with themes of faith, devotion, and desire. The tapestry features a rich array of found and archival materials, weaving together spirituality, history, and pop culture. These references evoke stories of connection and isolation in queer history as a means to address ongoing questions about safety, belonging, and well-being.

Accompanying Sanctuary is a selection of Faught's recent basket works. These intimately scaled pieces complement the sprawling height of Sanctuary and highlight the artist's exploration of everyday objects as vessels for human emotions and memories.

This exhibition celebrates Josh Faught's ability to intertwine personal and collective narratives, offering visitors an opportunity to reflect on themes of identity, community and memories.

JOSH FAUGHT explores the conjunction between various histories: the history of textiles, sociopolitical histories, and the artist’s personal history. Recent solo exhibitions include Look Across the Water into the Darkness, Look for the Fog, Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2022); Both Things are True, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2019); Casa Loewe, London (2019); Sanctuary, commissioned by Western Bridge, St Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle (2017); Siyinqaba, US Embassy in Swaziland, Mbabane (2015); BE BOLD for what you stand for, BE CAREFUL what you fall for, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at the Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco (2013); Snacks, Supports, and Something to Rally Around, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2013). Josh Faught has exhibited in group exhibitions at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Yerba Buena Center for Art, San Francisco; The New Museum, New York; ICA Boston; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Pakville Galleries, Ontario; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. He is a professor of textiles and fine arts at the California College of the Arts.

Josh Faught: Sanctuary is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant. 

HENRY ART GALLERY

University of Washington

15th Ave NE & NE 41st St, Seattle, WA 98195

henryart.org

Josh Faught: Sanctuary

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

March 8 - August 3, 2025

Dineo Seshee Bopape, Diedrick Brackens, Ali Cherri, Candice Lin, Christine Howard Sandoval, Rose B. Simpson, Eve Tagny, Sasha Wortzel: Thick as Mud @ Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA

Thick as Mud 

Dineo Seshee Bopape, Diedrick Brackens, Ali Cherri, Candice Lin, Christine Howard Sandoval, Rose B. Simpson, Eve Tagny, Sasha Wortzel 

Henry Art Gallery, Seattle 

February 4 - May 7, 2023 

CANDICE LIN 

Swamp Fat [detail], 2021 

Scagliola, ceramics, earth, clay, mortar, scented lard 

Installation view of Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021-22 

University of New Orleans St. Claude Gallery, New Orleans 

Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery 

Photo: Jose Cotto 

Thick as Mud explores how mud animates relationships between people and place, with works by an international roster of artists: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Diedrick Brackens, Ali Cherri, Candice Lin, Christine Howard Sandoval, Rose B. Simpson, Eve Tagny, and Sasha Wortzel. Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination.

Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. As a medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting finite linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.

Drawing from her Santa Clara Pueblo heritage, Rose B. Simpson (born 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico; lives in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico) engages clay as a medium of ancestral wisdom. Her figural sculptures honor the mutual relationship of the body and the land historically denied within colonial systems.

Similarly, across drawing and sculpture, Christine Howard Sandoval (born 1975, Anaheim, California; lives in Vancouver, British Columbia) uses adobe, a desert building material with close connections to her own familial lineage, to reclaim cultural memory and to address legacies of extractive labor and displacement inflicted by Spanish missions on the Indigenous people of California.

Across her work, Eve Tagny (born 1986, Montréal, Québec; lives in Montréal, Québec) uses the body to investigate the power dynamics inscribed within constructed landscapes. In a new installation for Thick as Mud, Eve Tagny employs both performance video and sculpture—including architectural forms made from cob, a mud-based building material—to explore conditions of alienation and belonging produced through both the visible structures and latent histories of the built environment.

Like Tagny, Ali Cherri (born 1976, Beirut, Lebanon; lives in Paris, France) addresses disrupted landscapes, investigating the political ecologies embedded in these places. In his video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), Ali Cherri traces the history of the Merowe Dam in northern Sudan through the labor and lives of seasonal mud-brick workers displaced by the dam’s construction.

Mud transmits the living memory of enslavement across time and place in the work of Dineo Seshee Bopape (born 1981, Polokwane, South Africa; lives in Johannesburg, South Africa). Her recent immersive installation, Master dHarmoniser (Ile aya, moya, la, ndokh) is an animated video and sound environment made with soil and water collected from places that played important historical roles in the transatlantic slave trade. 

Similarly, in Swamp Fat (2021), Candice Lin (born 1979, Concord, Massachusetts; lives in Los Angeles, California) plumbs mud as a physical archive that traces histories of race and citizenship. Utilizing clay harvested from nearby Saint Malo, the site of an early Asian American community in the bayou of Louisiana also previously inhabited by enslaved maroons and Indigenous people, Lin’s work memorializes the history of a place threatened by climate change and remembers the transgressive possibilities of the swamp as a place of fluidity and fugitivity.

Sasha Wortzel (born 1983, Fort Myers, Florida; lives in Brooklyn, New York) animates the queer ecology of the swamp through the entangled social and environmental histories of South Florida where she grew up. Sasha Wortzel activates overlapping trajectories of desire, loss, and renewal, disrupting hierarchies of value associated with mud. 

So too does Diedrick Brackens (born 1989, Mexia, Texas; lives in Los Angeles, California) in his textiles, which integrate racial histories of the American South with his own personal mythology, reclaiming the catfish, a muddwelling, bottom-feeding creature, as a vessel of transcendence for the Black queer body.

Palpable across the works, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation, a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration.

Thick as Mud is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator.

HENRY ART GALLERY

University of Washington

15th Ave NE & NE 41st St, Seattle, WA 98195

henryart.org

Regina Riveira @ Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle Art Museum - Octopus Wrap

Regina Silveira: Octopus Wrap
Seattle Art Museum, Olympic Sculpture Park
Through March 8, 2020

REGINA SILVEIRA

Installation view of Regina Silveira: Octopus Wrap 

at the Olympic Sculpture Park. 

© Seattle Art Museum. Photo: Natali Wiseman

SAM’s Olympic Sculpture Park presents Regina Silveira: Octopus Wrap, a new site-specific installation for the PACCAR Pavilion. Inspired by the park’s location at the intersection of several busy thoroughfares, Octopus Wrap envelops the building’s walls in a mind-bending tire track pattern that questions our perception of reality. This is the first time the internationally celebrated artist has shown work in Seattle.

Brazilian artist Regina Silveira is renowned for her illusionistic interventions on buildings, city streets, and public parks. These surreal disruptions of public spaces have included exaggerated shadows, swarms of insects, dense clusters of footprints, and nocturnal light projections of animal tracks wandering across building façades. Regina Silveira started her career in the 1950s and has become one of the country’s most revered artists, creating works that investigate the representation of reality and the power of art to transform.

For this installation, Regina Silveira has wrapped the PACCAR Pavilion’s floor, walls, and windows in an improbable pattern of overlapping tire tracks that from a distance recall the arms of an octopus. The installation resolves on the building’s interior mural wall in five toy motorcycles driven by five tiny drivers. Taking the park’s location—zigzagging around busy city streets, railroad tracks, and waterways—as inspiration, Octopus Wrap upends the viewer’s perception of a well-known space, disrupting its austerity with boisterous visual noise.

“Silveira is an extraordinary artist who has inspired several generations of artists in Brazil,” says Catharina Manchanda, SAM’s Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Contemporary Art. “Her artistic gesture is political in the sense that she aims to disrupt the familiar. Irreverent and fantastical, her immersive installation is like a noisy parade that stops us in our tracks.”

REGINA SILVEIRA

Installation view of Regina Silveira: Octopus Wrap 

at the Olympic Sculpture Park. 

© Seattle Art Museum. Photo: John Reed

ABOUT REGINA SILVEIRA

Regina Silveira was born in 1939 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. She received her Ph.D. in 1984 at Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil and has taught there since 1974.

Noteworthy recent solo shows include EXIT, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura – MuBE, São Paulo, Brazil, 2018; Todas As Escadas, Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, 2018; Crash, Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil, 2015; and 1001 Dias e Outros Enigmas, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre Brazil, 2011. Regina Silveira’s recent group exhibitions include Mixed Realities, Kunst Museum, Stuttgart, Germany, 2018; Imprint, Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, Poland, 2017; Future Shock, Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, USA, 2017; Radical Women in Latin America, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA, 2017; and Consciência Cibernética [?], Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil, 2017.

Regina Silveira has taken part in over 13 international biennials and received noteworthy grants including Prêmio MASP (2013), Prêmio APCA for her trajectory (2011) and Prêmio Fundação Bunge (2009). The artist also received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1990), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1993) and Fulbright Foundation (1994).

SAM's OLYMPIC SCULPTURE PARK
2901 Western Avenue, Seattle, WA 98121
seattleartmuseum.org

Jeffrey Gibson @ Seattle Art Museum - Like a Hammer

Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer
Seattle Art Museum
February 28 – May 12, 2019

JEFFREY GIBSON

Like A Hammer, 2014

Jeffrey Gibson, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee, b. 1972 

Elk hide, glass beads, artificial sinew, wool blanket, metal studs, steel, found pinewood block, and fur, 56 × 24 × 11 in.

Collection of Tracy Richelle High and Roman Johnson, courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery, New York.

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

Photo: Peter Mauney.

The Seattle Art Museum presents Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer, a major survey of works from 2011 to the present that reflects the artist’s deepening exploration of his Indigenous heritage, legacies of abstraction, and popular and alternative cultures. Organized by the Denver Art Museum, the exhibition features over 65 works produced during a pivotal time in the Jeffrey Gibson’s career, including abstract geometric paintings on rawhide and canvas, beaded punching bags, sculptures, wall hangings, and video. Reflecting the complexity of modern identity, Jeffrey Gibson’s work envisions a more inclusive future.

A contemporary artist of Cherokee heritage and a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Jeffrey Gibson grew up in the US and urban centers in Europe and South Korea. As a young adult, he was involved in queer club culture and interested in popular music, fashion, and design. These experiences inform his vision of exuberant hybridity, in which glass beads, metal jingles, ribbons, song lyrics, and abstract geometric patterns come together. Gibson’s use of materials and references that resonate in modern and contemporary Western art, as well as Indigenous and ancient cultures, establishes a unique visual vocabulary that gives rise to new possibilities and points of connection.

A highlight of the exhibition is 15 punching bags, most of which are from the Everlast series that marked an artistic breakthrough for Jeffrey Gibson. Intricately adorned in beads, fringe, and jingles, and often incorporating text, the punching bags shift gender associations between the masculine and the feminine. They also prompt reflection about the history of violence against Indigenous cultures and signal a call for resilience and perseverance. Like a Hammer also features IF I RULED THE WORLD (2018), which was recently acquired by the Seattle Art Museum for its permanent collection.

JEFFREY GIBSON

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU, 2015 

Jeffrey Gibson, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee, b. 1972

Repurposed punching bag, glass beads, artificial sinew, and steel; 40 × 14 × 14 in.

Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 

Museum purchase, 2015.11.1.

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

Photo: Peter Mauney

Language plays an important role in Jeffrey Gibson's work, with lines from pop songs and other sources adorning vibrant woven and patterned wall hangings and punching bags. Taken from such diverse sources as James Baldwin, Pete Seeger, Culture Club, and Public Enemy, among others, the phrases take on multiple meanings and speak to resistance, reclamation, and celebration.

Like a Hammer features many of Jeffrey Gibson’s abstract geometric paintings on canvas and rawhide, in which he explores pattern, light, and color, prompting the viewer to see abstraction through the lens of Indigeneity. Also on view are midsize and large figurative sculptures. The colorful “club kid” figures are inspired by his experiences in the queer club scenes of South Korea, London, and New York in the 1980s and ’90s and connect to his interest in performance, theatricality, and communal experiences. By contrast, his “ancestor” figures are draped with elaborately ornamented cloaks and topped with clay heads reminiscent of skulls or ancient Mississippian culture effigy heads. While visually fierce, these works are seen by the artist as teachers and culture-bearers.

JEFFREY GIBSON

Someone Great Is Gone, 2013 

Jeffrey Gibson, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee, b. 1972 

Elk hide, acrylic paint, and graphite, 91 x 59 in.

Private collection, New York, courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery, New York 

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

Photo: Peter Mauney.

One gallery is dedicated to the West Coast debut of DON’T MAKE ME OVER, a multimedia installation consisting of cascades of diaphanous rainbow-colored curtains embedded with lyrics from Burt Bacharach’s 1962 song about love and acceptance, made legendary by Dionne Warwick. The curtains encircle an oversized garment adorned with bells and jingles, and a nearby projection plays a video of Jeffrey Gibson wearing the garment, chanting and drumming as he moves within the enclosed curtained space. A series of irregularly shaped diptych paintings on rawhide complete this installation.

At the end of the exhibition is a reading room, where visitors can reflect and read books—including selections for children and young adults—related to the topics explored in Jeffrey Gibson’s work, such as history, politics, culture, and music.

“Jeffrey Gibson’s art is fearless yet playful. His wide-ranging mind transforms myriad influences into provocative work that defies categorization,” says Barbara Brotherton, Curator of Native American Art. “With Gibson, more is more,” adds Catharina Manchanda, Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art. “His work is visually and conceptually exhilarating, full of nuance and complexity. Be prepared for a mind-altering experience.”

A 144-page exhibition catalogue (including 106 color illustrations) published by Denver Art Museum and Prestel will be available for purchase in SAM Shop ($39.95). Also titled Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (ISBN: 978-3-7913-5733-1), it presents six essays on themes found in the artist’s work by Glenn Adamson, Roy Boney Jr., Anne Ellegood, America Meredith, Sara Raza, and John P. Lukavic, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, who curated the exhibition and also edited the catalogue. Like a Hammer also features an interview with the artist by Jen Mergel.

Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer is organized by the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition premiered at the Denver Art Museum (May 13, 2018–August 12, 2018) and then traveled to the Mississippi Museum of Art (September 8, 2018 – January 20, 2019). After SAM, its heads to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (June 7–September 14, 2019).

SAM - SEATTLE ART MUSEUM
1300 First Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101
www.seattleartmuseum.org

Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas @ Seattle Art Museum

Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas
Seattle Art Museum
February 15 – May 13, 2018

MICKALENE THOMAS

Tamika sur une chaise longue avec Monet, 2012 

Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, and enamel on wood panel, 108 x 144 x 2 in. 

Sydney & Walda Besthoff, Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong 

© Mickalene Thomas

The Seattle Art Museum presents Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, bringing together for the first time three leading American artists from three different generations whose work challenges a Western painting tradition that historically erases or misrepresents people of color. While each artist’s paintings are distinctive in style, subject matter, and the historic moments they reference, collectively they critique and redefine mainstream narratives of history and representation. At the heart of these artists’ portrayals are material and cultural histories centered on Black experiences and perspectives.

Organized by the Seattle Art Museum, the exhibition comprises 25 large-scale paintings on loan from institutions and collections across the country. It features a work from SAM’s collection—the recently acquired Les Demoiselles d'Alabama: Vestidas (1985) by Robert Colescott—as well as three paintings made by Mickalene Thomas specifically for the exhibition. She also presents a staged “living room” installation that visitors can interact with and sit in.

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM - SAM
1300 First Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101
seattleartmuseum.org

Beauty and Bounty: American Art in an Age of Exploration - A survey of great 19th and 20th-century American landscape paintings and photographs presented by the Seattle Art Museum

Beauty and Bounty

American Art in an Age of Exploration 

SAM - Seattle Art Museum 

June 30 - September 11, 2011

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) presents a survey of great 19th and 20th-century American landscape paintings and photographs in the exhibition BEAUTY AND BOUNTY: AMERICAN ART IN AN AGE OF EXPLORATION. Through more than 100 works, including an in-depth presentation of the Seattle Art Museum’s painting Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870) by Albert Bierstadt, Beauty and Bounty shows American artists’ responses as they encountered the North American continent’s ever-expanding vastness of natural beauty and nature’s bounty and provides a rare opportunity to view great works of American art from private collections, which have rarely – or never – been seen by the public. 

In the late 19th to early 20th centuries, painters including Sanford Gifford, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran gave form to landscapes of once unimaginable character, as they crossed the continent on expeditions through the plains and the mountains of the Great West. Beauty and Bounty includes about 45 of these majestic works – many of which are held in private collections and were previously unknown to the public. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a gallery devoted to one painting: Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870), which is dramatically displayed to convey its 19th-century context, alongside objects that the artist himself had collected during his travels and used as source material for the painting. 

Also included in the exhibition are approximately 60 landscape photographs, including mammoth plate images by pioneers of the western photography, including Carleton Watkins, Edward Muybridge, and Timothy O’Sullivan. 

“Many would be surprised by the wealth of important American landscape paintings and photographs that exist in private collections in the Seattle area,” said PATRICIA JUNKER, the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art at SAM. “We are so grateful for the generosity of these collectors who have loaned their works, allowing our visitors to deepen their understanding of the American experience, through the eyes and experiences of some of our country’s greatest 19th and early 20th-century artists.” 

The paintings and photographs on view demonstrate that it was often these artist-explorers who were raising important questions about humankind’s place in the world and how best to respond to a continent that many at the time viewed as a divine blessing of beauty and bounty from nature. Naturalists John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had close relationships with painters during this period, and the works of art in the exhibition suggest the distinct philosophical ideals of preservation and conservation promoted by these influential men. 

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTING

Visitors to Beauty and Bounty begin by moving through a suite of galleries filled with nearly 45 grand landscape paintings by some of the late 19th-century’s greatest American artists. This was a time of great fascination with and optimism about westward expansion in the United States. While artists discovered the vast beauty of nature throughout the growing nation, the west – and the Pacific Northwest in particular – was viewed as the “next great thing” for the United States – a land of unspoiled beauty and seemingly boundless natural resources. A number of artists traveled west, where they sketched the largely untouched landscapes they found, often returning to their studios on the East Coast to produce their large-scale oil paintings to be shared with the public. In paintings such as Albert Bierstadt’s Sunrise, Yosemite Valley (1865), Sydney Laurence’s Mount McKinley (1914) and many others, the artists placed themselves – and, subsequently their viewers – right in the middle of these majestic landscapes. Through their paintings, these artists brought home with them the mystique of fabled places such as Yosemite and Yellowstone, the Columbia River and the Pacific coast of Washington State, to be experienced by lay-people across the country. 

The exhibition includes both oil sketches created on-the-spot within these natural surroundings and highly finished works from the artists’ studios. Also on view are a number of partings of landscapes from the eastern half of the United States, such as John Frederick Kensett’s paintings Narragansett Bay (1861) and Lake George (ca. 1865), and Winslow Homer’s An Adirondack Lake (1870). 

ALBERT BIERSTADT’S PUGET SOUND ON THE PACIFIC COAST

The presentation of landscape paintings in Beauty and Bounty culminates in a deep exploration of the Seattle Art Museum’s own grand painting, Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870). New research by SAM curator Patricia Junker has revealed insights into the painting that allow a deeper understanding of the artist’s intent, as well as what the painting would have meant to his American audiences back on the East Coast. Bierstadt, Junker has learned, traveled through Oregon and up the coast of the Washington Territory in 1863, sketching and gathering source material that would inform this painting and others. Including field sketches, native artifacts from Bierstadt’s personal collection, photographs, and popular prints, this gallery brings together much of the material that fueled Bierstadt’s imagination and helped shape his composition. 

Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast will be installed in a manner reminiscent of how it would have been experienced in 1870. At that time, patrons would have visited Bierstadt’s studio to see the painting and learn about the natural wonders he witnessed on his travels. Viewers would spend a large amount of time looking deeply at the image, the artist meticulously walking them through the story and the details of the painting. At SAM, the painting will be accompanied by an audio feature that replicates this experience, using descriptive text taken from nineteenth-century commentary on the painting. 

Rather than a traditional exhibition catalogue, Beauty and Bounty will be accompanied by a book that outlines Patricia Junker’s new findings about this painting from SAM’s collection. Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast: A Superb Vision of Dreamland is co-published by the Seattle Art Museum and the University of Washington Press and was produced by Marquand Books, Seattle. It has been underwritten by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc. 

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

By the late-nineteenth century, the role of photographers as artists, as well as documentarians, was firmly established. Much like their counterparts working in paint, landscape photographers grappled with how to portray the vast landscapes they encountered. They also struggled with similar philosophical issues, as they witnessed the pull between those who desired to maintain the integrity of these pristine natural landscapes and those who felt a balance could be struck between conservation and management of the natural resources these areas harbored. Mammoth plate photographs from the 1880s by Frank Jay Haynes, for example, present stunningly beautiful views of Yellowstone’s canyons and waterfalls, while a series of equally beautiful photographs by Darius Kinsey from the turn of the 20th century document the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest and its toll on the land and forests of the region. Other large-scale photographs on display include works by William Henry Jackson, Carleton E. Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan and more. 

The exhibition also includes a gallery of stereograph images by Edward Muybridge, Charles Bierstadt and others, as well as a rare, 1853 Daguerreotype by Platt Babbitt of a view at Niagara Falls. 

Beauty and Bounty: American Art in an Age of Exploration has been organized by Patricia Junker, the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art at the Seattle Art Museum. 

This exhibition is organized by the Seattle Art Museum. Members of the Visionary Circle (Thomas W. Barwick, Jeffrey and Susan Brotman, Barney A. Ebsworth, Jon and Mary Shirley, Virginia and Bagley Wright, Ann P. Wyckoff) have provided crucial funding to make that exhibition possible. Presenting Sponsor is Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Exhibition Sponsors are Christie's and The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc. Additional support is provided by SAM's American Art Endowment and contributors to the Annual Fund. Media Sponsor is King 5 Television. Airline Sponsor is Alaska Airlines/Horizon Air. 

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM 

SAM Downtown, Fourth Floor, Simonyi Special Exhibition Gallerie

www.seattleartmuseum.org

Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival

Fifth-annual festival, featuring live-action and animation films

 

Experience Music Project|Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (EMP|SFM), in partnership with Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), presents the fifth-annual Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival (SFFSFF) at the renowned Cinerama Theatre in Seattle on Saturday, January 30, 2010. SFFSFF brings together industry professionals from both the filmmaking and science fiction and fantasy genres to encourage and support new, creative additions to science fiction and fantasy cinema arts.

From a field of almost 100 films from all over the world, 20 entries were selected for inclusion in the festival. To meet requirements for entry, all films were produced after January 2005 and were no longer than 15 minutes in length. Entries included animated or live-action films in science fiction (examples: futuristic stories, space adventure, technological speculation, social experiments, utopia and dystopia) and fantasy (examples: sword and sorcery, folklore, urban fantasy, magic, mythic adventure).

This year’s judges consisted of science fiction notables and award-winning film professionals, including filmmakers A.J. Bond, Howard McCain, Daniel Myrick and Vincent Taylor, as well as writer and producer Marc Scott Zicree, director Jesse Harris and producer Susan LaSalle. The judges will award Grand Prize, Second Place, Third Place and the Douglas Trumbull Award for Best Special Effects. The audience will determine the Audience Favorite Award during the festival.

During the festival ten short films will be screened in the first session from 4-6 p.m. and ten more short films will be screened in the second session from 7-9 p.m. An awards ceremony follows the second session.

The mission and objective of the Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival is to promote and encourage an awareness, appreciation and understanding of the art of science fiction and fantasy cinema. Its mandate is to create a forum for creative artistry in science fiction and fantasy film and recognize the most outstanding short films produced. Among notable submissions this year are the locally-made Third Days Child and CC 2010, which feature actors, directors, and even in-film references to the Seattle area. (See complete list of films below.)

Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival 2010 FILMS:

AFTERGLOW
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 11 minutes
Director: Andres Anglade

In the aftermath of a failed alien invasion, two men from the newly formed militia are challenged with determining if the threat died with the invasion or if it lies manifest in a once familiar territory.

ALMA
Country: Spain, USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 5.5 minutes
Director: Rodrigo Blaas

Alma, a little girl, skips through the snow covered streets of a small town. Her attention is caught by a strange doll in an antique toy shop window. Fascinated, Alma decides to enter...

ARTHUR’S LORE
Country: UK
Year: 2008
Running Time: 13.5 minutes
Director: Vincent Lund & Matthew Cooke

Hurling the legend of King Arthur into the present day, ‘Arthur’s Lore’ is a fantasy action adventure combining old myth with contemporary humour and our love for all things spooky!

BEAST OF BURDEN
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 13 minutes
Director: Sam Carter

Wally is having a tough time. He's broke, he's depressed, and he just found out that he's been fired from his job. Oh, and he's a giant lizard monster. It's up to Wally's friend, a rock-a-billy vampire, and the rest of his motley crew of ghouls to rally around their friend and try to bring him out of his slump.

BURDEN
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 10 minutes
Director: Michael David Lynch

Ordered to evacuate Earth on the eve of an Alien invasion, a lone "Hero" named Calik must decide between his sworn duty to flee, or defy his instructions, and battle the imminent threat and attempt to save our world.

CC 2010
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 11 minutes
Director: Travis Senger

Long after her parents have ceased, the remnants of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair still exist for CC Raven. Her life-long mission has been to scatter her parent's ashes inside the Pacific Science Center. After a mysterious crash on her motorcycle, she encounters "Sputnik", an angelic milkman who quickly becomes her sidekick. Together, the two navigate the Pacific Science Center and CC begins a surreal reunion with her long-lost parents somewhere within the cosmic ether.

CHARLIE THISTLE
Country: USA
Year: 2008
Running Time: 15 minutes
Director: Bragi Schut Jr.

Charlie Thistle dreams of a better world, a world in color, a world in which trees grow indoors and sidewalks are made of grass. Alas, Charlie works at the Department of Normality, where change is frowned upon. But there comes a time when every man must stand up for what he believes... and that day is coming for Charlie Thistle!

DIE SCHNEIDER KRANKHEIT
Country: Spain
Year: 2008
Running Time: 10 minutes
Director: Javier Chillon

The fifties, a Russian space shuttle crashes in Germany. The passenger: an astronaut chimp who spreads a deadly virus...

ELDER SIGN
Country: Canada
Year: 2009
Running Time: 2 minutes
Director: Joseph Nanni

A hilarious commercial spoof from the people that brought you Casting Call of Cthulhu. If you suffer from an overwhelming sense of dread brought on by the realization of your own insignificance in the universe, then you need Elder Sign - H.P. Lovecraft's aeons old remedy for cosmic dread.

EXTRA•ORDINARY
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 13.5 minutes
Director: Ian Christian Blanche

What if your best friend had superpowers? Dylan and Alex have been inseparable for as long as they can remember. When an accident reveals Alex's incredible secret, their friendship is put to the test.

HANDS OFF!
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 7 minutes
Director: Patrick Bosworth

When John is visited by an Angel, he learns a disturbing truth about how he spends his time on the internet.

HANGAR NO. 5
Country: USA
Year: 2008
Running Time: 11 minutes
Director: Nathan Matsuda

Two treasure hunting teens activate a cold war weapons system and must fight for survival.

NANSPORIN AI
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 5 minutes
Director: Stephen Hal Fishman

After arriving at his remote research station, a scientist performs experiments with the Nanosporin AI serum, first on grapes, then on himself, causing the host some discomfort as well as some rather intense hallucinations. The experiment culminates in the host becoming a 'living work of art' and then expiring.

S.S. HUMANITY
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 17 minutes
Director: Matthew Ladensack

In the year 2210 humankind is faced with one option for survival: moving to outer space. The most precious of Earth’s natural resources have been depleted; the planet has been ripped apart by war and natural disasters. Survival of the fittest has transformed into survival of the luckiest when a family gets last minute tickets to board the Space Station: Humanity.

SHUTTLE T-42
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 2.5 minutes
Director: Joon Hyung Kim

Shuttle T42 crash lands on an unknown planet leaving young Jay and his mother stranded.

SINGULARITY
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Running Time: 6 minutes
Director: Stephen Griffin

In the year 2029, an ailing scientist transfers his most important memory into an android, in an attempt to merge their consciousnesses.

THE CONTROL MASTER
Country: UK
Year: 2008
Running Time: 6.5 minutes
Director: Run Wrake

Halftone City, USA. A peaceful metropolis of family values and space-age dreams. Mild-mannered blonde Dorothy Gayne secretly protects its citizens from harm. But dangerous new technologies abound. What happens when a powerful device falls into the hands of scientist-turned-villain Doctor Moire? Who will rescue Halftone City from this oversized creep?

THE KIRKIE
Country: USA
Year: 2008
Running Time: 13.5 minutes
Director: James Krieg

Jeff, a self-hating Star Trek nerd, is bumming out his sci-fi geek buddies with his visions of a life beyond fandom. But when their car breaks down on the way to San Diego's famous Comic Con, he is forced to find a payphone in a local bar. There he meets the girl of his dreams... and her knuckle-dragging date! But thanks to countless hours of epic Trek battles, Jeff knows how to handle himself in a fight. Or does he?

THIRD DAYS CHILD
Country: USA
Year: 2008
Running Time: 9.5 minutes
Director: SJ Chiro

Danger lurks in the Blank Days System, incorporated to relieve stress on natural resources in an oppressive future. Will the Third Day Child be reached by the rebels?

TO THE MOON
Country: USA
Year: 2008
Running Time: 9 minutes
Director: Jacob Ospa

A 19th century Englishman goes on a balloon voyage to the moon, and gets more than he bargained for...

 

The Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival is sponsored by Cinerama Theatre, Vulcan Inc. and NORWESCON. For more information, including film stills and director bios, visit www empsfm.org/filmfestival

 

Updated 02-2010

2009 Betty Bowen Award Finalists

Finalists of the Seattle Art Museum 31st Annual Betty Bowen Award have been announced

 

Photo Courtesy of the Seattle Museum of Art

 

The Betty Bowen Committee, chaired by Gary Glant, announces the five artists selected as finalists for this year’s Betty Bowen Award. The Betty Bowen Committee reviewed 494 applications from visual artists residing in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. One of this year’s finalists will receive a cash prize in the amount of $15,000 and will have their work displayed at Seattle Museum of Art (SAM) Downtown beginning on October 23rd. One finalist will also be awarded the Kayla Skinner Special Recognition award in the amount of $2,500 and one artist will receive the PONCHO Special Recognition award in the amount of $2,500.

 

The following artists have been named as finalists:

 

JOVENCIO DE LA PAZ received a B.F.A with an emphasis in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. He lives in Gresham, Oregon. His works are assembled from materials found throughout abandoned suburban construction sites near his home and neighboring Clackamas County. Using canvas drop cloths, found wood, house paint, deck sealant and other construction materials, he creates works that are intended as commentary on the failed promise of Modernism, both in painting and suburban life. In 2008, De la Paz’s work was shown in exhibitions including Full Bleed at Loft3a Gallery and True North at Gallery 2 in Chicago.

 

JOSH FAUGHT received his M.F.A. with an emphasis in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. He also received a degree in Textile/Surface Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, NY, in 2004. Combing the formal concerns of textiles, collage, drawing and sculpture, Faught’s current work explores personal sites of domestic dysfunction through craft, craft making and ornamentation. In 2009, his work was included in Call + Response, at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft and in While the Light Lasts at the Lisa Cooley Gallery in New York, where he is represented. He currently resides in Eugene, Oregon, where he has been the Assistant Professor and Program Director of Fibers at the University of Oregon since 2007.

 

JENNY HEISHMAN received an M.F.A. from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio in 1998. She served as an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center in 2006 and at the Pilchuck School of Glass in 2005. She currently lives in Seattle. Her most recent exhibitions have been at Howard House in Seattle and at The Helm in Tacoma. She was a finalist for the Betty Bowen Award in 2006. Heishman’s aesthetic is strongly influenced by growing up in Florida where she was surrounded by theme parks, beach culture and a lack of seasonal shifts. She thus learned to “construct” the seasons, an approach that influenced her to create objects that are hybridized and disguised in faux surfaces, providing a humorous challenge to perceptions of real and fake.

 

SEAN M. JOHNSON received his M.F.A. from the University of Washington in 2005. He lives in Seattle, where he has most recently shown at Howard House Gallery, in Love Seat a solo show in 2008. He is currently working on an upcoming exhibition with the Off Shore Project in Seattle. Johnson’s sculptures are composed of balanced furniture and everyday objects, which serve as metaphors for relationships and his own life experiences. Often staging objects in arrangements that attempt to defy gravity, Johnson sets up narratives and dichotomies that both humor and disarm the viewer. Johnson has taught Fine Arts at the University of Washington and was a finalist for the Betty Bowen Award in 2005.

 

MATTHEW OFFENBACHER received a B.A. in American Studies from Tufts University in 1994 and currently lives in Seattle. Interested in collaboration, Matt’s work focuses on blurring the boundaries between group and individual and between art objects and the contexts in which they appear. These interests have led to special projects such as the 2008 “Light Show for Unesco” at Howard House Gallery in Seattle andLa Especial Norte, a ‘zine he created for artists’ writings, based in Seattle. Offenbacher’s individual works include digital photographs, videos and paintings. His creations interrogate how modern art sublimated the religious impulse and redirected it towards materialistic ends, although he is currently moving towards a less academic and more explorative approach of how he conceives his own role as an artist.

 

The winner of the 31st Annual Betty Bowen Award will be announced at an award ceremony on October 23rd.

In 2008, the Committee granted a grand prize of $15,000 to Isaac Layman, the Kayla Skinner Special Recognition Award of $2,500 to Eric Elliott and the PONCHO Special Recognition Award of $2,500 to Wynne Greenwood.

 

The 2009 Betty Bowen Committee Members are:

Michael Alhadeff
Jeffrey Bishop
Michael Darling (SAM’s Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art)
Gary Glant (Chair)
Peggy Golberg
Anne Gould Hauberg
Mike Hess
Isaac Layman (Rotating Artist, first year of a 2 year term)
Mark Levine
Llewelyn Pritchard
Greg Robinson
Norie Sato
Bill True
Maggie Walker
Tom Wilson
Dan Webb (Rotating Artist, second year of a 2 year term)

Shirin Neshat and Claude Zervas’ Works at SAM

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) has added two important works to its collection: Claude Zervas’ sculpture Nooksack (2005) and Shirin Neshat’s video Tooba (2002).

Multimedia artist CLAUDE ZERVAS uses technology to abstract landscape in Nooksack, comprising 32 nine-inch fluorescent lights and hundreds of feet of cascading white wire. An expert in computers and digital technologies, Zervas uses their magic to transform the topography of the Nooksack River into a luminous drawing that appears to float above the ground. The composition of this sculpture is inspired by the topography and flow of the river as it winds towards Puget Sound. This work is part of a larger series that includes video and photography, and will be part of the upcoming exhibition Made in Seattle (May 4 – July 23, 2006) at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Nooksack was purchased for the museum by John and Shari Behnke, Rena Bransten, Carlos Garcia, David Lewis, Kim Richter, Josef Vascovitz, Robin Wright, Dawn Zervas, and the Contemporary Arts Council.

Iranian-born photographer, filmaker and video artist SHIRIN NESHAT is best known for videos of archetypal imagery and spare elegance that explore the experience of exile and complexities of contemporary Islam. Her most ambitious works, including Tooba, unfold on two projection screens creating visual oppositions of tradition and modernity, nature and culture, individual and collective and male and female. The video will go on display at the Seattle Asian Art Museum for the reopening on January 14, 2006. Tooba was inspired by the novel Women Without Men by Iranian writer Shahrnoush Parsipour, who was imprisoned for five years for her work. Shot near Oaxaca in Mexico, Tooba contrasts an earthly paradise with a mountainous landscape, and begins by focusing on a central female character nearly merged into a large fig tree set alone in a walled garden. The image of a woman symbolizing the soul of the tree originates in myths of the promised tree in the Koran, commonly known as a “feminine tree.” Over the barren landscape men and women draw near, impinging on this enclosure – the only one within the vast landscape; they threaten the space, solitude and peace therein. As the invading men and women seek refuge in the garden the woman disappears into the tree, called Tooba, which means eternal happiness. In the Koran this tree offers shelter and sustenance. Shirin Neshat explains: “The idea is that they are transcending everyday life and moving into something greater.”

Shirin Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran in 1957, and came to the United States in 1974 at age 17, to study art at the University of California in Berkeley. Her first return to her country in 1990 coincided with the beginning of her career as a photographer, filmmaker and video artist. She established her reputation in 1999, winning the international prize at the Venice Biennale. She has held solo exhibitions in England at Tate Gallery, London (1998), Serpentine Gallery, London (2000) and in the United States at Walker Art Center (2002) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris (1998). Tooba was commissioned by Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany and was the first of Neshat’s pieces to be shown in her native country, at an exhibition in Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It was also exhibited at the Asia Society, New York.

Tooba was purchased by the SAM with generous contributions from Jeffrey and Susan Brotman, Jane and David Davis, Barney A. Ebsworth, Jeffrey and Judy Greenstein, Lyn and Jerry Grinstein, Richard and Betty Hedreen, Janet Ketcham, Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation, James and Christina Lockwood, Michael McCafferty, Christine and Assen Nicolov, Faye and Herman Sarkowsky, Jon and Mary Shirley, Rebecca and Alexander Stewart, William and Ruth True, Bagley and Jinny Wright, Charles and Barbara Wright, and Ann P. Wyckoff.

This important acquisition of works of Shirin Neshat and Claude Zervas has been made to Honor Departing Curator Lisa Corrin. The former Deputy Director of Art/Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, resigned her position to become Director of the Williams College Museum of Art.

William Kentridge: Shadow Procession at Seattle Art Museum

William Kentridge: Shadow Procession 
Seattle Art Museum
July 1, 2004 – October 17, 2004

Seattle Art Museum (SAM) presents South African artist William Kentridge’s video, Shadow Procession (1999). This seven-minute long video was recently added to SAM’s permanent collection as the museum continues to update its collection of international contemporary art.

William Kentridge is widely recognized for his handcrafted animated films, drawings and theatrical productions. Influenced by South Africa’s political policies, Kentridge once stated that it was the job of the artist to escape the “immovable rock of apartheid”. His art forms focus attention less on the specifics of apartheid and more on the disorienting effects of living amidst prolonged violence.

Shadow Procession is an animated film that illustrates how William Kentridge rebels against the seduction of special effects and returns to techniques of shadow-theatre. He depicts a procession of strange shadow figures slowly struggling to advance through a deserted landscape. This haunting parade of figures is made from cardboard cutouts that move across the screen, hauling their belongings—donkeys, carts, chairs, sacks, and even whole towns on their backs—as if in an exodus. Interrupting the exodus is a grotesque strutting buffoon, William Kentridge’s version of Ubu, a ridiculous dictator created by the French writer Alfred Jarry for a play entitled Ubu Roi in the late 19th century. An unexpected musical score accents the visual contrasts as “What a Friend I Have in Jesus” is sung by Alfred Makgalemele.

While Shadow Procession can be seen literally as a statement about the forced migrations of laborers in South Africa, it also questions two urban personalities- the person who stumbles from carrying too much of the world in their minds and the authority figure who doesn’t realize how bumbling his brute force seems to those around him. William Kentridge states, “I am trying to capture a moral terrain in which there aren’t really any heroes, but there are victims. A world in which compassion just isn’t enough.”

Fascination with William Kentridge’s expressive drawing and filmmaking techniques has inspired a documentary entitled Drawing the Passing. This 56-minute documentary, based on a collaboration between a filmmaker and an art historian in 1999, is available for viewing in the 4th floor resource room. Curated by Pamela McClusky, Art of African and Oceanic Curator.

SAM - SEATTLE ART MUSEUM
Seattle, WA 98101
www.seattleartmuseum.org