Hit a museum or gallery this summer, and you'll be rewarded with everything from dreamy installations to work by one of the most important figurative artists of the 20th century to Pearl Jam memorabilia. And that's not to mention the art event of the season, the Seattle Art Fair, where you can see all types of art in one place. Below, we've compiled all of those and more critics' picks for art shows and events this season. You can also find a complete list of art shows in Seattle this summer on our Things To Do calendar, or check out the rest of our critics' picks from Seattle Art and Performance.
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Jump to: Museums | Galleries | Art Events
MUSEUMS
Bellevue Arts Museum
Alex Katz: A Life in Print Alex Katz was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn in 1927 and studied under Morris Kantor at Cooper Union, only focusing on painting from life after college. He went on to become one of the most important artists in the figurative mode of the 20th century. The "Selections from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation" include his matte, shadow-less portraits of New York poets and life-size depictions of bathers at the sea. (June 1—Sept 30)
Femail: AMPM (2.0) FEMAIL is Camilla Carper and Janelle Abbott, who collaborate on fashion pieces by mail from their homes in Seattle and Los Angeles. They send their work back and forth, each designer welcome to add to (or subtract from) the garment. In this way, the clothing bears the imprint of their friendship and correspondence. This is their first museum exhibition, developed out of an installation they premiered at the Out of Sight arts festival. Personal mementos and clothing are incorporated into art, tapestry, furniture, and other crafts. (June 1—Sept 30)
José Guadalupe Posada and the Mexican Penny Press José Guadalupe Posada was born in Aguascalientes, Mexico, during the politically tumultuous 19th century. As a teenager, he studied lithography, etching, and relief printing, and also worked as a political cartoonist for a local newspaper. Posada is best known for his broadsides—single sheets of paper, printed on one side, which would be sold on the streets for one penny—filled with biting satire and images of skeletons engaged in a variety of fanciful tasks. Today he is remembered as one of the most important graphic artists of the early 20th century and one of Mexico's most beloved folk artists. (Through Sun Aug 19) EP
Frye Art Museum
Juventino Aranda: Pocket Full of Posies As Kanye West demonstrated by tweeting a photo of himself wearing one, a red MAGA hat is no mere political artifact; it's a potently charged totem, both symptomatic and symbolic of America's deeply racist past and present. In a recent show at Greg Kucera Gallery, Juventino Aranda exhibited a painted cast bronze version of the MAGA hat with all the words removed except "GREAT," imbuing it with a tragicomic sense of resignation. The child of Mexican immigrants, Aranda marries the activist spirit of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta with a cool, conceptual post-minimalism to explore how ideology is communicated visually. Pocket Full of Posies is his first museum show. (June 16—Sept 23) EP
Towards Impressionism: Landscape Painting from Corot to Monet This exhibition traces the development of French landscape painting from the schools of Barbizon and Honfleur through Impressionism, featuring over 40 works from the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims. One focal point of the exhibition is the brilliant artist Camille Corot, who exemplified the transition from idealized academic studies to paintings directly inspired by the French countryside. (Through Sun Aug 5)
Henry Art Gallery
2018 University of Washington MFA + MDes Thesis Exhibition Every year, the UW's MFA program deposits a cohort of emerging artists into the local scene. This year's crop includes Nate Clark, who uses woven materials as a stand-in for networks and structures, and Caitlin Wilson, whose large-scale paintings are evocative of Cy Twombly, Mark Tobey, and Emily Gherard. Alex Kang uses technology to explore the heartbreak of losing information in translation, while Katie Schroeder uses it to focus on identity, belonging, and the curation of our surroundings. Other artists include Lacy Bockhoff, David Burr, Ian Cooper, Daniel Hewat, Erin Meyer, and Christian Alborz Oldham. Catch their work before they finish school and can no longer afford to live here. (Through Sun June 24) EP
Martha Friedman: Castoffs Martha Friedman is a master of uneasy forms, using tubing and cement to evoke a distorted, blobby version of the male body. In contrast, little glass-blown fingers reference both erotic acts and "Egyptian two-finger amulets that were placed at the site of incision after embalming to protect the integrity of the body in the afterlife." You may feel both fascination and an icky, quasi-sexual discomfort at the sight of these strange forms. (June 15—Feb 10)
MUSE: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête Earlier this year, Mickalene Thomas's bright, brilliant portraits of black women in dazzling interior spaces graced the walls of Seattle Art Museum as part of Figuring History, a multi-generation group show that placed her in a lineage of monumental painters that also includes Robert Colescott and Kerry James Marshall. While most of Thomas's works begin with photographic sources, MUSE is the first-ever exhibition devoted to considering her photographs as finished works in themselves. As the title suggests, this show revolves around the inspiring women who comprise Thomas's community. Curated by Thomas, tête-à-tête is an accompanying exhibition of photographs by artists who further inspire her. (July 14—Sept 30) EP
The Brink: Demian DinéYazhi´ Established in 2009, the Brink is a biennial award that honors a Northwest artist under the age of 35 with a cash prize and an exhibition at the Henry. The fifth and final Brink recipient is Demian DinéYazhi´, an indigenous Diné (Navajo) transdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Portland. DinéYazhi´'s work in text and image traces the entangled relationships between the land, Native cultures, and colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal economic, political, and social systems, imagining a future where these structures have lost their power. (Through Sun Sept 9) EP
Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI)
Seattle on the Spot: The Photographs of Al Smith According to Al Smith's 2008 obituary in the Seattle Times, Smith never considered himself a professional photographer. But his photographs of the Central District, jazz clubs, and African American community in Seattle number in the tens of thousands, and their quality, depth, and breadth are unparalleled. In particular, his documentation of the Jackson Street jazz scene has helped preserve memories of a relatively fleeting but culturally formative time in our city's history. (Through Sun June 17)
Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP)
Pearl Jam: Home and Away The museum pushes on with its mission to recreate the Seattle grunge scene, through photos, memorabilia, stage props, instruments, art, and more from Pearl Jam's local warehouse. (Opens Aug 11)
Nordic Museum
Northern Exposure: Contemporary Nordic Arts Revealed This exhibition brings together contemporary Scandinavian artists Olafur Eliasson, Jesper Just, Bjarne Melgaard, Kim Simonsson, Tori Wrånes, and others. Kim Simonsson's nuclear green sculptures of dystopian woodland children, Cajsa Von Ziepel's BDSM-ish, sexually explicit sculptures and Jesper Just's mildly porno films usher in a new era for the newly opened Nordic Museum. (Through Sun Sept 16) KK
Northwest African American Museum
Jessica Rycheal and Zorn B. Taylor: Everyday Black Jessica Rycheal is a portrait photographer whose work documents subjects drawn from Seattle's multigenerational activist community with a sensuous, effervescent joie de vivre. Also a portrait photographer, Zorn B.Taylor often spotlights the idea of intentionally chosen family, capturing his subjects with simultaneous attention toward the monumental and the quotidian. In this two-person exhibition, curated by C. Davida Ingram and Leilani Lewis, Rycheal and Taylor present a series of intimate, honest, and lovingly created photographs celebrating many prominent members of Seattle's black creative community. (Through Sun Sept 30) EP
Seattle Art Museum
Double Exposure: Edward S. Curtis, Marianne Nicolson, Tracy Rector, Will Wilson This exhibition will showcase more than 180 Native American portraits by the ethnologist Edward R. Curtis, who devoted much of his career to recording American indigenous peoples' songs, language, and, of course, images of dress and faces. His total body of work relating to Native Americans included 40,000 photographs. This art show will combine his documentation with original work by Native artists Marianne Nicolson, Tracy Rector, and Will Wilson. (June 14—Sept 9)
Everyday Poetics These works by Central and South American artists are constructed from humble materials—from dust cloths to soda cans to lottery tickets—to make sculptural poetry shaped by social, resistance-related, and religious themes. The artists include Cildo Meireles and Sonia Gomes, who began their careers under Brazilian dictatorship in the 1960s; Fritzia Irízar of Mexico, a conceptual artist; and many others. (Through Sun June 17)
Sondra Perry: Eclogue for [In]habitability The focal point of new-media artist Sondra Perry's current exhibition at Seattle Art Museum is an "interstellar backhoe" outfitted with three LCD monitors and multiple pairs of headphones and surrounded by surreal videos of real and digitally generated drone footage. Through the headphones, viewers learn the story of Seneca Village, a Manhattan neighborhood filled with black homeowners who were forced out in 1857 to make way for Central Park. Perry's multifaceted work deals with mechanized systems of displacement, extraction, appropriation, and alienation, using images of landscapes and the machines themselves as stand-ins for racialized bodies and the ways in which they are exploited for profit. The processes her work addresses are both historical and ongoing, timely and timeless. (Through Sun July 8) EP
Jono Vaughan: Project 42 The winner of the 2017 Betty Bowen award is Jono Vaughan, an artist who works in printmaking, textiles, painting, drawing, and performance. Vaughan's Project 42 raises awareness about the extreme violence that transgender people face in the United States. Each work in the series begins with an image of a murder location, translated into a textile print which is used to create a garment. The garment is then worn by a collaborator in a performance, as a way to forge memories, create connections, and transmute violence into conversation and healing. (Through Sun Aug 5) EP
Basquiat: Untitled This energetic, gestural painting of a screaming skull by 21-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat is on view on the West Coast for the very first time. You have just a few months to see the tragically short-lived Brooklyn artist's work without leaving Seattle. (Through Mon Aug 13)
Tacoma Art Museum
Captive Light: The Life and Photography of Ella E. McBride Ella McBride, who was born in 1862 and died in 1965 at 102, was one of the most accomplished and widely exhibited Pictorialist photographers during the early 1900s. Pictorialism introduced a more painterly rather than documentary approach to photography by combining artistic composition with experimentation during the development process. In McBride's "Shirley Poppy," a single bloomed poppy with two budded stems stand tall in an overlarge Chinese vase while cherry blossoms cast shadows on the wall behind. Not sepia-toned nor black and white, the warm tan hues lend a soft elegance to the piece. When not producing her own work, McBride ran famed photographer Edward Curtis's studio and was an accomplished mountaineer. (Through Sun July 8) KK
To Sing of Beauty Paul Stephen Benjamin and C. Davida Ingram's collaboration considers blackness and musical expression through video installations. Ingram's The Deeps: Go Away from My Window incorporates music and performance by Hannah Benn and Rachael Ferguson, while her other video, Procession, "conjures a sense of the African American Northern Migration via railway" through the metaphor of changing Seattle. The Atlanta-based Benjamin reworks Nina Simone's performance of "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" in New York City, 1959. Don't miss this duo—Ingram has been producing fascinating art in the city for the past few years, and Benjamin was awarded the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia Working Artist Project not so long ago. (July 21—Sept 30)
Native Portraiture: Power and Perception This exhibit invites you to contemplate structural oppression and appropriation of Native subjects in portraits by non-Native people, as well as Native artists' reflections and reworking of this stereotypical iconography. (Through Sun Feb 10)
Places to Call Home: Western Settlements See representations of Western cities throughout their history and development, including beautiful works by immigrant or immigrant-descended artists like Kenjiro Nomura and Mian Situ. (Through Sun Feb 10)
Immigrant Artists and the American West Past Event Like List This exhibition helps rediscover stories and experiences of immigrant artists in Western expansion with works by people from Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Russia, and Sweden. (Through Sun June 14)
White River Valley Museum
Suffer for Beauty: Women's History Revealed Through Undergarments Women have struggled in and out of figure-shaping undergarments since ancient times. Suffer for Beauty covers 90 years of undergarments and includes everything from wire bustles to restrictive bodices, pregnancy corsets to pointed bras. (Through Sun June 17) KK
Wing Luke Museum
Lore Re-Imagined: Shadows of Our Ancestors Past Event Like List Curator Chieko Phillips has brought together three artists who make work that engages the cultural traditions of previous generations. Satpreet Kahlon uses embroidery and textile techniques passed down by her mother and grandmother to create soft works with strong critical subtexts. Seattle-born artist Alex Anderson studied ceramics in Jingdezhen and Hangzhou, China, and currently lives and works in LA, making work that probes the moral and physical decay lurking behind seemingly flawless facades. Also known as a photographer, Megumi Shauna Arai's Unnamed Lake uses the Japanese hand-stitched embroidery technique of sashiko to reflect on the physical, mental, and emotional implications of the act of mending. (June 15—April 14) EP
Wham! Bam! Pow!: Cartoons, Turbans, and Confronting Hate Vishavjit Singh responds to xenophobia—which he experienced plenty of after September 11, 2001, as a Sikh American lumped in with other South Asians and Middle Easterners—with a superhero series about a Sikh anti-bigot. (Through Sun Feb 24)
GALLERIES
A Gallery
Karey Kessler: A Portable Homeland Karey Kessler creates colorful, conceptual maps of areas like "Almost Majestic" and "Infinite Light." Her exhibition means to tease out an internal landscape that reflects on the immigrant experience as well as individual spirituality. (Through Fri June 29)
Abmeyer + Wood
Cristina Córdova A sculptor of realistic human forms with surrealistic accoutrements as well as an accomplished painter, Córdova folds the history of European and sometimes even ancient Egyptian statuary with contemporary sensibilities. (Sept 6—29)
The Alice
AFTER LIFE (what remains) A group of indigenous and Asian American artists will express in art and performance how humanity can recover from "environmental catastrophe and military intervention," particularly those "facing displacement and dispossession." Curator Thea Quiray Tagle and artists Alejandro Acierto, Michael Arcega, Leeroy New / Aliens of Manila, Super Futures Haunt Qollective, and Rea Tajiri elaborate on the role of art in changing society. (June 16—July 21)
A/NT Gallery
Artvocacy: Refugee Art Exhibit Founded in 1988 in a decommissioned Trailways bus terminal in Westlake, Art/Not Terminal spent 25 years in a space owned by Capitol Hill Housing before establishing its current home at Seattle Center in July 2016. Completely volunteer-staffed and sustained, the gallery's mission is to facilitate accessibility for both artists and patrons through non-juried exhibitions in which anyone—regardless of artistic training or sales history—is invited to hang artwork in a professional context. Each month, A/NT partners with a different nonprofit organization to create a context aimed at the cultivation of physical, mental, and emotional well-being through self-expression. In June, the gallery will be devoted to art that reflects the refugee experience. (June 2—30) EP
Bridge Productions
Mike Wagner: From Fool to World Bridge Productions has a history of experimenting with new ways to create outreach and dialogue around art. Their latest venture is a curatorial residency featuring Negarra A. Kudumu, a critical scholar with a sharp eye and international outlook whose recent projects include coauthoring a book about the visual legacy of the Black Panther Party. For this residency, Kudumu will curate an exhibition of works by prolific multimedia artist Mike Wagner, whose work explores the forgotten, disfigured, beautiful, and unobtainable. Throughout the residency, essays by the effervescently brilliant Kudumu—whom Charles Mudede once called "a marvelous cloud of thinking and practices"—will appear on Bridge Productions' website. (Through Sat June 30) EP
Columbia City Gallery
Locally Sourced This exhibition plans to poke fun at the hippie-ish NW obsession with local sourcing, "whether in reference to fresh produce, or to where people were born and raised." Lisa Myers Bulmash, Carletta Carrington Wilson, Susan Ringstad Emery, and Bernadette Merikle—four women artists of color—will use this as a jumping-off point for understanding attitudes toward who "belongs" here. (Through Sun June 24)
Davidson Galleries
Joan Miró: Etchings & Lithographs The Catalan painter and sculptor Joan Miró, like Salvador Dalí and others in the surrealist movement, was galvanized by the theories of André Breton. Intrigued by the idea of plunging into the unconscious, he ditched his early investigations of realism, cubism, and Naïve art to play with geometric, organic, vividly colored forms in striking compositions. Miró hasn't had the same pop-culture impact as Dalí, but his body of work is less encumbered by his contemporary's dogmatism and attention-hogging. (June 7—30)
Ryohei Tanaka: Etchings This Japanese artist makes magnificently detailed etchings of trees, rural houses, and other rustic subjects, often in black and white or sepia. His "Persimmon" series combines these palettes with vivid spots of color representing fruits that add the tiniest hint of irreality. His prints breathe peace, mystery, and lush life. (Aug 2—Sept 1)
Corita Kent Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Sister Mary Corita Kent entered a convent at age 18. In 1947, during graduate school at the University of Southern California, she fell in love with screenprinting. Influenced by Andy Warhol, the slogans of the Civil Rights era, and her own commitment to consider poverty, racism, and injustice from a spiritual perspective, Corita Kent created one of the boldest, most distinctive bodies of 20th century poster art. After heading up the art department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles for a number of years (where she could often be seen screenprinting in a full nun's habit) she left the order and moved to Boston, where her work took on a more introspective style. (Sept 6—29) EP
Eunice Kim This Seattle printmaker developed allergies to the chemicals generally used in the practice and so developed a more environmentally friendly and healthy process, which produces variation in prints. She creates images formed by spots in simple formations, perhaps reminding you of magnified microbes or of a more subdued Yayoi Kusama. (Sept 6—29)
Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery
Jini Dellaccio Starting as a self-taught fashion photographer in California, Jini Dellaccio (1917-2014) was one of those right-place, right time photographers. A teaching job brought her to the Northwest in the '60s, where she was asked to capture the essence and energy of proto-grunge bands like the Sonics and the Wailers, as well as the wide-eyed winsomeness of Seattle native Merrilee Rush ("Angel of the Morning"). The first female rock and roll photographer, Dellaccio (who, in an interview, said she didn't know she was the first) also shot Neil Young, Mick Jagger, and the Who. (June 9—July 11) KK
Foster/White Gallery
Janna Watson Watson's mixed-media canvases combine vivid washes with blossoms of wavy brushstrokes that function like Rorschach tests to the viewer: They depict nothing definite, but evoke familiar shapes. They're bold and kinetic, yet give the impression of delicacy. (Sept 6—22)
G. Gibson Gallery
Michael Kenna: Abruzzo and Other New Work Michael Kenna of England shows new photographs. His work often makes use of long exposures to tease out unusual facets of natural and manmade landscapes all around the world. (June 8—July 14)
Gallery 4Culture
Coley Mixan: F.I.B.E.R. Earth-Bound Training Center Coley Mixan is a writer, musician, and visual artist whose psychedelic, saturated Vimeo channel is described as "attempting to impose a credible order upon ordinary reality." This exhibition serves as both an indoctrination site and training program for something Mixan calls F.I.B.E.R. (Feminists Improving Boundless, Eternal, Rock n' Roll). F.I.B.E.R. aims to fight patriarchal conspiracies and constipation in the form of "toroidal pastries" (donuts?) traveling through the G.U.T. (Grand Unified Theory of space-time). The strategy of trying to dislodge the patriarchy with F.I.B.E.R. so that it can be shit out is so fanciful it just might work. (June 7—28) EP
Lawrence Pitre: We Are One Eschewing traditional perspective or shading in favor of a surreal impression of depth, and opting for a folk-art aesthetic, Lawrence Pitre depicts the Central District's history of European, Chinese, Jewish, African American, and Filipino communities, as well as its changing demographics today. (Sept 6—27)
Greg Kucera Gallery
Joseph Goldberg: The Earth is a Lamp: Memorial Survey Commemorate the Seattle artist, long represented by this gallery, at a posthumous exhibition following his tragic death in an automobile accident last year. It's an occasion to celebrate the mourned painter's creativity: He fused sculpture and painting in unusual ways, like working with encaustic on unusual linen shapes or stringing a nexus of coke cinders within a square frame. With these gentle subversions, he invites you to examine your own expectations of symmetry and form. (Aug 1—Sept 6)
Hedreen Gallery
in a split second (it happened.) There is a stretch of beach in Key West, Florida, that contains an African cemetery with roots in the transatlantic slave trade, an AIDS Memorial, and a sculptural lectern dedicated to a local philanthropist. In Monument a Surface, Seattle University's first High Resolution Media Artist-in-Residence, Dan Paz, uses photography, sculpture, video, and print to analyze the stories told by these landmarks. Like Paz, artists Danny Jauregui and Elise Rasmussen use multiple mediums to produce and present original research. Jauregui focuses on the erasure of queer bathhouse culture in Los Angeles, while Elise Rasmussen visits two sites related to the life and untimely death of artist Ana Mendieta. (Through Sun Aug 12) EP
Interstitial
Tabita Rezaire: Deep Down Tidal This video installation by a French artist of Guyanese Danish heritage—now based in Johannesburg—draws parallels between undersea optic cables and the routes of international slavery and colonialism. It's an investigation of how contemporary technology perpetuates age-old hegemonies. (Through Sat June 30)
James Harris Gallery
Viola Frey: The Future of Yesterday This solo exhibition brings together six drawings and three sculptures by the late artist Viola Frey, who worked largely in ceramics. The retrospective spans from 1975 to 1997, representing the changing themes and styles in the artist's work. In some of her most striking images, her figures resemble battered pantomime puppets in the throes of existential angst and recall a less benign Marc Chagall. (Through Sat June 23)
Kirkland Arts Center
Troy Gua: Immaculate Disasters In 2011, Stranger critic Jen Graves wrote an article on Troy Gua that the artist then incorporated into a pee-themed installation called Pissing Contest. Gua usually plays with slick pop-culture surfaces and symbols as well as found materials, with an eye (and possibly a middle finger) to art history and criticism. For this show, he has drawn on something more peaceful: the vistas of the Northwest filtered through the sensibilities of ukiyo-e, the predominant form of Japanese figurative art from the 17th to 19th centuries. Gua borrows the aesthetic of balanced, simplified landscapes and adds his own glowering colors. By his own account, his aim to depict utopias "took an apocalyptic bend" over the course of the project—he now seems less preoccupied with pop than with the frightening beauty of potential planetary doom. (June 1—Aug 3)
Linda Hodges Gallery
Zac Culler, Lisa Golightly Zac Culler is one-third of the mischievous, Stranger Genius Award-winning artistic trio SuttonBeresCuller, known for their prankish stunts and installations. Among his other visual art, Culler makes mandalas out of motifs like hummingbirds, insects, and figures from Tarantino movies. Lisa Golightly, who paints figurative and abstract works, makes excellent use of dapples of light. (June 7—30)
Timea Tihanyi, Peter Gross, Claire Sun The brilliant ceramicist Timea Tihanyi—former Stranger critic Jen Graves called her "a structural engineer who puts her forms in the service of history"—will be joined by painter Peter Gross, whose thickly layered abstract paintings also evoke architectural shapes. Third on the roster is Claire Sun, a fellow Seattleite. (Aug 2—Sept 1)
METHOD
Alexander Keyes: the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity Plunge into the sea as metaphor for the unknown in Alexander Keyes's exhibition, which uses accumulated found objects and doodles as metaphorical allusions. (June 8—July 28)
Natalie Ball: grab a plate The objects of Natalie Ball are enigmatic, potent, and visually stunning. Erratic patches of fabric stretch and drape across rough-hewn armatures. Knobby, anthropomorphic sticks are outfitted with shoes, wrapped with tule ropes, and adorned with deer fur. Born and raised in Portland, Ball studied Maori art in New Zealand and is currently earning an MFA in painting from Yale. "I work to move 'Indian' outside of governing discourses to complicate an easily affirmed and consumed narrative and identity without absolutes," she says of her work. grab a plate will lend new texts to this ongoing discourse through figurative sculpture, assemblage, and sound. (Aug 2—Sept 8) EP
Mount Analogue
Anastacia-Reneé Seattle's Civic Poet seemingly has boundless reserves of energy: After publishing three books in one year, she's been performing at readings almost constantly. Now, she'll mark the end of her tenure with an installation, with special events throughout the month. (June 7—28)
Chapel This exhibition unites two great minds of Seattle's DIY arts scenes: Mount Analogue's Colleen Louise Barry and Party Hat's Mary Anne Carter. Their wedding chapel is not an artsy imitation—it's the real thing, with "an ordained wedding officiant on the premises during open hours." Even better: Mary Anne Carter and the poet/essayist Sarah Galvin will get married in the gallery. You're invited to their rehearsal dinner performance on June 3 during First Thursday. (Aug 2—30)
Aidan Fitzgerald If you avidly followed the Perry Bible Fellowship strip when it updated regularly, chances are you'll be intrigued by Aidan Fitzgerald's disturbing existential comics, featuring empty shells of human figures falling into cosmic traps. (Sept 6—29)
Re:definition
Re:Definition 2018: Celebrating 90 Years of Community, Culture and Space For the Paramount's 90th birthday, respected curators Juan Alonso-Rodríguez, Tracy Rector, and Tariqa Waters preside over an exhibition of their own and other locals' works, including "large-scale panels, ceiling installations, video projection, and a rotating salon wall of artwork created by youth from various non-profit organizations." Alonso-Rodríguez's painting and activism won him a Conducive Garboil Grant in 2017, Rector's a Stranger Genius Award winner, and Waters is a longtime Stranger favorite for her roguish and iconoclastic sensibility. They've chosen Christopher Paul Jordan, Junko Yamamoto, Rhea Vega, Kenji Hamai Stoll, Joe (wahalatsu?) Seymour, Jr., and Gabriel Marquez to display work with them in the gallery. (Through Sun Dec 30)
Saint Mark's Cathedral
Josh Faught: Sanctuary Bay Area artist Josh Faught—winner of the 2009 Betty Bowen Award—uses textiles and collage to negotiate the shared histories of people and places. Sanctuary, a 45-foot textile installed on a pillar in Saint Mark's Cathedral, weaves memorabilia from Seattle's underground gay history together with lyrics from Belinda Carlisle's Heaven on Earth. The result is a contemplative work that queers the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual, the carnal and the ecstatic, the adherent and the outsider (Faught himself is Jewish). Add it to Saint Mark's Compline Choir every Sunday night as another reason for art lovers to investigate this Capitol Hill house of worship. (Through Tues July 31) EP
SAM Gallery
Splitting Image Marita Dingus, Troy Gua, Tariqa Waters, and Jennifer Zwick—diverse and well-established artists and sculptors around Seattle—show unconventional takes on the portrait. (June 13—July 9)
Shift
Craig van den Bosch: Transmissions Van den Bosch continues his fascination with technology and futurism with this series on "transmissions unearthed from a distant civilization on another planet." If it's anything like his previous work, it'll be a series of fascinating sci-fi collages mixing color and vintage black-and-white. (July 6—28)
SOIL
Nadia Gohar: Foundation Deposits In ancient Egypt, temples and tombs were often built on top of foundation deposits: ritual objects buried at specific points in the architecture. When these buildings are excavated, the foundation deposits are revealed like clues to an unattainable past. Nadia Gohar grew up in Cairo, but her family relocated to Toronto after the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. In Gohar's first solo exhibition—curated by local luminary Minh Nguyen—foundation deposits serve as a proxy for the place that is left behind in a migration, as well as the intangible aspects of culture and memory waiting to be unearthed. (June 7—30) EP
Markel Uriu This artist, who often uses botanical themes to explore "inner worlds, feminine labor, impermanence, and the unseen," will hang work in the back gallery. (July 5—28)
Colleen RJC Bratton: Good Mourning Bratton, a member of the gallery and curator of last year's Tech Support, muses on an unformalized grief over a lost love. (Aug 2—Sept 1)
Stonington Gallery
Masters of Disguise IV: Group Mask Exhibition This iteration of Masters of Disguise will once again examine masks and their specific cultural, social, and economic place in Pacific Northwest and Alaska, featuring modern and traditional works by a variety of artists in media including glass, wood, stone, hide, fiber, metal, and ceramics. (June 7—30)
Dan Friday Lummi glass blower Friday crafts exquisite sculptures based on Native practices like, in this case, cedar bark weaving—an art he encountered growing up with his relative, the Lummi weaver Fran James. The objects are exquisite, paying homage to the intricacy of the traditional craft and adding his own asymmetries and vividly contrasting colors. (Sept 6—30)
Strobel & Sands (Emerson Garage)
Dawn Cerny: Now That We Found Love What Are We Gonna Do With It? Dawn Cerny's watercolors and sculptures grapple with humans' relationships with one another and with objects. (Through Sun June 24)
Traver Gallery
Jun Kaneko: Visual Language A veteran of the Contemporary Ceramics movement, Omaha-based Jun Kaneko has pieces in museums all over the world, including the Smithsonian, and his enormous outdoor sculptures of ceramic heads in Omaha are considered a groundbreaking use of the medium. His style ranges from figurative to geometric to decorative. (June 7—30)
Various locations
Becoming American The more than 20 artists of Becoming American are inspired by the American Camp at San Juan Island National Historical Park, the site of the "last territorial dispute between the United States and Great Britain" in 1859. Cefalonia, a non-profit arts association, will bring the exhibition to Seattle galleries: Specialist, studio e, and SOIL. Some very interesting artists are contributing, uncovering themes of race and gender: Stranger Genius Award winner Barbara Earl Thomas, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Jasper Johns, and many others. (Aug 4—Sept 30)
Virago Gallery
Heather Marie Scholl: Reflections Troubled by the role of women in white supremacy? So is Heather Marie Scholl, whose Whitework is a body of embroidery and text that interrogates white womanhood. The other part of this exhibition, The Self Portraits, features framed, embroidered pictures that evoke women's trauma and the experiences of femininity. In conjunction with the art show, there will be a "Confront White Womanhood" performance at Theatre Puget Sound on July 21. (July 4—Aug 4)
Winston Wächter Fine Art
Summer Dreams: Works by Electric Coffin, Peter Gronquist, Neon Saltwater, and Jennifer Zwick According to Amber Cortes, Electric Coffin is "known for their almost painfully über-hip and high-concept interior-design work that elevates hand-drawn, street-art-inspired murals and Pacific Northwest kitsch to a new level in office spaces and restaurants around the city." They are leaguing their talents with those of Portland sculptor/painter/taxidermist Peter Gronquist, dreamy unrealists Neon Saltwater, and photographer and installation artist Jennifer Zwick—each of the four artists/groups take a corner of the gallery to create a wildly colorful, glowy indoor landscape. (June 26—Aug 22)
ART EVENTS
Bar Ciudad
Lusio Lights Georgetown Dance to DJs' cuts in the midst of projection mapping and other light art installations. (Sat June 16)
CenturyLink Field Event Center
Seattle Art Fair About the 2017 Seattle Art Fair, Emily Pothast wrote, "The first Seattle Art Fair was aspirational, with the lofty goal of establishing Seattle as an art destination. The second tested its staying power: Would the dealers find reasons to keep returning after the novelty had worn off? Fortunately, the answer appears to be yes." This year's fair will "explore identity, modes of play, and technology." Galleries from Korea, Canada, Japan, the UK, China, Singapore, and France will display pieces, with New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco also well represented. And, of course, some of Seattle's most essential galleries will attend in force: Davidson, Greg Kucera, Foster/White, Linda Hodges, and more. (Aug 2—5)
Olympic Sculpture Park
Summer at SAM These Thursday and Saturday events offer a range of family-friendly arts programming throughout the park, including yoga, Zumba, tours, shows, workshops, food, and more. (July 12—Aug 30)
Volunteer Park
Lusio. A Night to Awaken This is a free, family-friendly, inviting evening of light, art, and sound, featuring more than 30 light installations throughout the park. (Fri Aug 10)
ZINE RELEASES
Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery
Hot Off the Press Book Fair Browse works by Paper Press Punch, Czap Books, Short Run Micropress, and others, while wandering through an installation by Vashon Island comics titan Jim Woodring and Berlin’s Lilli Loge. (July 14–Aug 31)
Mount Analogue
Julia Kernerman: PP 911 Cold Cube Press will launch Julia Kernerman's new zine about "the Red Bull drinking, beanie wearing, indie music listening cool-kid white boys, forever scrolling through tindr [sic] and forever in need of therapy." Buy copies and stickers. (Tues July 31)
Nii Modo
Infamous Kitsap Ferry Riot Party Chris Looney's zine and animated film memorialize the clashes between punk youth and the SPD in the wake of the Seattle City Council's banning of underage concerts and gatherings in 1985. One such riot broke out on the Kitsap Ferry when several young people were arrested and locked in the purser's office. In the spirit of rebellious youth, this launch party will offer music for all ages as well as refreshments. (Sun July 8)
ART WALKS
Second Fridays
Second Saturdays
Third Thursdays
Second Fridays
Second Thursdays
First Fridays
Second Saturdays
First Thursdays
Third Fridays
Second Thursdays
