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

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