The Best Art Shows in Seattle: Winter 2017/2018

Find a complete list of art shows in Seattle this winter 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

Walter McConnell: Itinerant Edens (Through Feb 11): Artist and ceramic art professor Walter McConnell is known for doing something unusual with his clay pieces: not firing them. His wet ceramic pieces are often intricate, complicated, and enormous, and anyone looking at them would never question how “finished” they are. His latest exhibit, Itinerant Edens: A Measure of Disorder, looks terrifying. McConnell took full-body scans of live models, made 3D plaster molds based on their bodies, and cast terracotta clay models from the molds. He then created nature-inspired pedestals, put the human figures on top, and sealed the scenes in tall, thin terrariums. The end result looks like a dystopian version of the Natural History Museum. To maximize uneasiness, visit at the end of the show’s run—because the pieces are unfired, they will change and morph over the course of the exhibit.

Humaira Abid: Searching for Home (Through March 25): Born in Pakistan and based in Seattle, Humaira Abid works in wood carving and miniature painting—two very different mediums, related by their capacity to hold rich, meticulous detail. Her previous bodies of work have tackled sociocultural norms, gender roles, and relationships, often expressing very intimate and personal narratives. Abid’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Searching for Home, is a site-specific installation revolving around the stories of immigrants and refugees in the Pacific Northwest. Political yet poignant, this work renders the humanity of families affected by far-reaching forces into magnificent, stunning forms. EP

Making our Mark: Art by Pratt Teaching Artists (Through April 8): The Pratt Fine Arts Center is a true resource for the community. It’s the most grassroots, accessible place to make art of all kinds, from starting out in prints or clay or metal sculptures, to using large-scale or arcane equipment to realize a grand project that will be exhibited at a museum. And over the years they’ve had an incredible roster of teaching artists, including Buster Simpson, Marita Dingus, Mary Anne Carter, Preston Singletary, and Cappy Thompson. Making our Mark will showcase pieces by more than 250 past and present Pratt teaching artists, including those listed above, reminding local arts lovers exactly how much they owe to Pratt.


Frye Art Museum

Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Mexico’s Poet of Light (Through Dec 31): See 23 photographs by renowned Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who is known for his seven-decade career capturing—among many other themes—urban life, the nude form, folk art, and the work of muralists including Diego Rivera. Many of Bravo’s images come across as anthropological photojournalism, and others focus closely on texture and shadows, zooming in to create abstract, sometimes surreal mini-scenes removed from culture and politics. This exhibit will feature images that “show the artist’s ability to synthesize motifs of Mexican religious and indigenous works and plant forms (such as agave leaves) with a Modernist approach to image making.”

Mike Kelley: Day Is Done (Through Dec 31): Mike Kelley was a highly regarded artist known for using video, performance, drawing, found objects, textiles, sound, and site-specific installation to investigate the relationship between popular culture and the American subconscious before his untimely death in 2012. Created in 2005, Day Is Done is an ambitious, overwhelming musical-film installation in 32 chapters that uses “extracurricular activities” culled from hundreds of high-school yearbooks as a point of departure to illuminate the dark contours of adolescence, concealed trauma, and memory through evidence of personal and institutional ritual. EP

Tavares Strachan: Always, Sometimes, Never (Jan 27-April 15): Born and raised in the Bahamas and currently based in New York, Tavares Strachan is a conceptual artist whose work in a diverse range of media investigates the overlapping domains of science, technology, and history—in particular the hidden stories and agendas behind common cultural narratives. His signature media include neon sculpture and projected lights, often presented alongside reflecting pools that suggest the distortion of perception and reveal invisible implications. Strachan has exhibited widely, including at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Always, Sometimes, Never is the first presentation of his work in Seattle. EP

Alison Marks: One Gray Hair (Through Feb 4): The Frye continues its outstanding track record of programming multimedia investigations of identity, tradition, and history with Alison Marks’s first solo museum exhibition. Rejecting the notion that Native art must function spiritually to be considered legitimate, Marks uses unexpected materials and imagery drawn from contemporary internet culture to reimagine customary Tlingit forms as something fluid, playful, and made with whatever materials are available. Through her work, Marks constantly asserts that “culture is not stagnant”—new mediums create an ongoing context for new forms. EP


Henry Art Gallery

The Time. The Place. Contemporary Art from the Collection (Through April 22): To celebrate its 90th anniversary, the Henry will display a diverse spread of more than 50 works from their contemporary collection. The theme is essentially “time and place”—broad enough to justify pulling out all their most interesting and beloved pieces, regardless of subject matter.


Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI)

Seattle on the Spot: The Photographs of Al Smith (Ongoing): 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.


Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP)

Scared to Death (Ongoing): Scared to Death showcases more than 50 key objects from famous horror movies, including Freddy Krueger’s sweater, Pamela Voorhees’ severed head, the camcorder from The Blair Witch Project, Buffy’s “Mr. Pointy” stake, and the axe Jack Torrance/Jack Nicholson uses to bust down the bathroom door in The Shining. In addition to the props, they’ll also have films, oral history interviews, and interactive photo ops.


Seattle Art Museum

Sondra Perry: Eclogue for [In]habilitability (Dec 8-July 1): New media artist Sondra Perry, winner of the 2017 Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize for early-career black artists, will return to Seattle with an immersive video and sculpture show that questions representation, oppression, and black identity.

Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect (Through Jan 15): Born in Pennsylvania 100 years ago, Andrew Wyeth is an American realist painter associated with regionalism. His paintings and drawings generally include figures—sometimes in a landscape, sometimes in contemplatively lit interiors—that simultaneously present drama and stillness. In the 1970s and ’80s, he painted more than 247 studies of a German-born woman named Helga Testorf, resulting in some of the most intimate and compelling examples of 20th-century portraiture. Organized in partnership with the Brandywine River Museum, Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect presents more than 100 works by this quintessential American artist. EP

Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas (Feb 15-May 13): Figuring History displays large-scale history paintings by African American artists Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Kerry James Marshall (born 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (born 1971), each of whom offers alternatives to—and even undermines—traditional European American depictions of pivotal moments in our country’s story. From Robert Colescott’s cartoon-like image of a black Washington crossing the Delaware to Mickalene Thomas’s feminist nudes, these artists question the chokehold of white culture on the imagination of the past.

African Renaissances (Through March 4): This exhibit highlights the power of the African continent by imagining a futuristic renaissance, featuring regalia and furnishings that were originally seen in the courts of the Benin, Asante, Kom, and Kuba kingdoms, alongside art created by Maasai, Fulani, and Ndebele women, as well as contributions—including a music video—from Baba Tendai, a contemporary musical leader living in Seattle.

Everyday Poetics (Through June 17): 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.


Tacoma Art Museum

Selections from the Anne Gould Hauberg Collection (Through Dec 31): In 2016, Jen Graves wrote, “Anne Gould Hauberg, the arts patron who knew how to crack a joke and command a room, and who also had one of those exquisite Matisse drawings facing her when she sat on her couch at home, died Monday at age 98. I liked her very much. She was no stuffy snob. She was a whip. She is already very missed.” Hauberg co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School and was known for her incredible art collection—at this exhibit, see a selection of the works she amassed.

Two Centuries of American Still-Life Painting: The Frank and Michelle Hevrdejs Collection (Through Jan 7): At this exhibit, see influential still-life paintings from the past 200 years created by artists including James Peale, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth, and Wayne Thiebaud.

Zhi Lin: In Search of the Lost History of Chinese Migrants and the Transcontinental Railroads (Through Feb 18): Seattle artist and UW professor Zhi Lin’s work has drawn on Chinese-American history to explore uncomfortable truths as well as quotidian realities. Christopher Knight at The Los Angeles Times described some of his work in 2009: “At Koplin Del Rio, most of Lin’s landscape drawings are made on sketch-pad-size paper using pencil and thinned Chinese ink. Their modest scale and simple materials yield a sense of the artist sketching on-site, as if taking pictorial rather than written notes of what he sees — a method employed by countless 19th century artists from the American East traveling through the Western frontier. Lin could have used a camera (period photographs of the Chinese laborers at work are not scarce), but drawings connect eye to mind to hand in a powerful and thoughtful way.”

Familiar Faces & New Voices: Surveying Northwest Art (Through June 1): This exhibit promises a survey of Northwest art that will highlight work by both big names and less recognizable figures, and will offer a chronological take on visual expression in the region. See art by a wealth of significant regional painters and sculptors like Dale Chihuly, Roger Shimomura, Patti Warashina, Barbara Earl Thomas, Jacob Lawrence, Nancy Mee, and many others you may not have heard of.


Wing Luke Museum

Year of Remembrance: Glimpses of a Forever Foreigner (Through Feb 11): Former Stranger visual art critic Jen Graves wrote that Roger Shimomura’s 2009 exhibition Yellow Terror contained “art that he hopes will lose its power.” Unfortunately, his work (paintings crowded with snarling Japanese stereotypes, prints about American concentration camps, and collections of racist objects) has become intensely relevant. Shimomura’s pop-art social critiques are highlighted alongside Lawrence Matsuda’s poetry in Year of Remembrance, a show that features history, writing, video, and visual art centered on Shimomura’s and Matsuda’s own experiences of internment. JULIA RABAN

Teardrops That Wound: The Absurdity of War (Through May 20): Portland artist Yukiyo Kawano is a third generation hibaku-sha—a survivor of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her life-size replica of ‘Little Boy’ (the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima) is crafted from kimono silk and strands of her own hair—containing DNA bearing witness to this history. In Teardrops that Wound, curated by SuJ’n Chon, Kawano’s work stands in dialogue with the work of other Asian Pacific American artists who use transformative strategies to deconstruct the horror associated with the imagery of war. EP


Galleries



4Culture Gallery

Satpreet Kahlon: Production Valued (Through Dec 7): Satpreet Kahlon creates beautiful installations in striking, sumptuous materials that call into question the unseen boundaries and tacit assumptions that permeate art-world dynamics, often incorporating a critique of how the exhibition venues that show her work are complicit in these systems. For the group show BorderLands, her installation contained a tongue-in-cheek takedown of the premise of running an exhibition about national borders in tandem with a commercial art fair. Her 4Culture show features, among many other things, two similarly shot videos of the artist and her mother mopping their kitchen floors. That one is considered “art” while the other is typically regarded as a mere gesture of domestic labor speaks volumes about the kind of production we value, and as a result, the individuals we tend to ascribe cultural value to. EP

Gazelle Samizay: My shadow is a word writing itself across time (Through Dec 31): This exhibition by Gazelle Samizay embodies the fear of oppression that still haunts ethnic minorities in the United States. The Kabul-born artist journeyed to Manzanar, California, the site of the biggest Japanese internet camp, and her photo exhibit explores the space, its history of exploitation and cruelty, and its natural geography, which to Samizay is reminiscent of that of her native Afghanistan.

Francisco Guerrero: Loaves and Fishes (Jan 4-25): There is a growing movement of conservative Christians who are withdrawing from society to live off the grid, preparing for the impending environmental and social catastrophes that they know are coming, since their own political beliefs and lifestyles have helped bring them about. Seattle University professor Francisco Guerrero examines these “prepper” systems through drawing and sculpture, connecting contemporary evangelical aspirations with the ancient growing and gathering techniques of pre-Columbian Mexico. This exhibition features functional animal traps, among other things. Come hungry? EP


The Alice

Everyone’s $50 (Through Dec 30): This exemplarily democratic exhibition has gathered works by anyone who wished to participate in a “wunderkammer-style” art show where everything costs $50. Each contributed a single piece and will receive half of the proceeds, so your purchase of homegrown amateur and professional art will benefit both the gallery and a local creator.


ArtXchange

Humaira Abid: My Shame (Feb 1-March 31): Humaira Abid’s emotionally affecting, highly detailed sculpture, often carved in wood, evokes difficult, tragic, and uncomfortable themes. For her new show, Abid dramatizes feminine shame, in hopes that bringing natural and social issues to light will help to break down taboos.


Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA)

Cathy McClure: Dispossessed (Through Jan 13): Betty Bowen Award-winning Cathy McClure has created cute/disturbing deconstructed toys to interrogate our visions of the future, our current reality, mass production, and inequality.


CORE

Black Imagination: The States of Matter (Jan 4-27): For the month of January, Core Gallery will be transformed by a black-womxn-led cadre of writers, multimedia artists, activists, and community builders into an immersive, publicly accessible dialogue on wellness and creativity using technology and storytelling. “Reparations” website founder Natasha Marin delves into what it means to create a space beyond the white gaze, while poet Imani Sims examines the shadow of blackness. Writer and educator Amber Flame gathers origin stories from children and incarcerated people, while LA-based performance artist Rachael Ferguson harnesses the alchemy of bottling “Black Joy.” Don’t miss the performances during the First Thursday opening on January 4. EP


Davidson Galleries

International Wood Engraving Invitational (Dec 7-30): See wood engraving from around the world by, among others, contemporary Japanese artist Atsushi Matsuoka, 20th-century German American artist Fritz Eichenberg, and English American modern artist Clare Leighton.

Sister Corita Kent (Feb 2-24): 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. EP

Keisuke Yamamoto (March 2-31): Keisuke Yamamoto works in paint, pencil, and especially wooden sculpture, creating mystical objects that resemble something between religious icons and organisms. Since major earthquakes and the economic recession in Japan, Yamamato has returned to a simpler style, abandoning his penchant for colossal pieces.


Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery

Jaime Hernandez and Charles Burns (Dec 9-Jan 10): If you have the slightest interest in the art of graphic novels, this is a big deal. Charles Burns, author of the haunting body horror stories Black Hole and Last Look, is famed for his stark chiaroscuro style. Jaime Hernandez is the co-creator of Love and Rockets, which he wrote and illustrated with his brothers Gilbert and Mario. Hernandez’s stories focused on the dramas playing out among a group of chicano punk friends in Los Angeles. This exhibition will show original prints by the two artists.


Frederick Holmes and Company

Walter Quirt: A Science of Life (Through Dec 31): You can find the works of this American modernist in the Whitney, the MoMA, the deYoung Museum, and many other prestigious institutions—but many of the particular drawings and paintings now at Frederick Holmes haven’t been seen in half a century.


G. Gibson Gallery

Gala Bent

Gala Bent and Justin Gibbens (Dec 8-Jan 20): Gala Bent is known for her intricate sketches intertwined with geometric abstractions. Justin Gibbens, a founding member of the lamented former art gallery PUNCH, favors animal and paleontological subjects.


Ghost Gallery

Holiday Mini Art Exhibit (Through Jan 7): Sadly, the Ghost Gallery is losing its lease—although we hope to see it pop up elsewhere. Pay them a visit and buy some mini-art (“in the 10″x10″x10″ range”) for $300 or less.


Glassbox Gallery

Tannaz Farsi: Field not Frame (Through Dec 9): Farsi’s solo show features seven sculptures. The first two works you encounter are of a personal-to-the-artist nature. One is a memory box of sorts, featuring the artist’s mother’s hand-knit sweater and a digital print of a parrot. In the same room is a stack of greeting cards indiscriminately floating on the wall. There are no explanations or didactics near the artworks. In the other room is one of Farsi’s most recurring pieces–Untitled [Without Control]. It is a large round silver medallion, standing alone in the middle of the room, with “YOUAREINVISIBLE” carved through it. It said to me: “No one actually sees you. I am sorry to inform you.” Upstairs there are two works. The first is composed of three individually titled sculptures which form one installation. 10 security lights blare directly at two steel plates carved with words addressing social and digital boundaries (colonist, pilgrim, defector, to name a few). Around the corner is the last piece, “Script.” Do not miss it. Leah st. lawrence


Greg Kucera Gallery

David Byrd and Michael Dailey (Through Dec 23): This exhibit offers beautiful works by two very different artists: Michael Dailey’s glowing abstractions, which play with figure/ground perception using washes of color, and David Byrd’s painstakingly created portraits and surrealist interiors and scenes, inspired by his 25 years working in a VA hospital.

Gregory Blackstock (Feb 22-March 31): See encyclopedically drawn renderings of sets of objects by Blackstock, a non-neurotypical artist and obsessive list-maker and cataloguer of the everyday, from thesaurus pages to squash species or Montana architecture.

Joey Veltkamp: Recent Work (Feb 22-March 31): After 20 years in Seattle, beloved Northwest artist Joey Veltkamp has recently relocated to the city of Bremerton on the Kitsap Peninsula, an hour west by ferry. For his first solo show at Greg Kucera, Veltkamp uses quilting techniques to stitch together the disparate aspirations, economic conditions, and histories of these neighboring cities. The centerpiece is an enormous quilt made of denim from Bremerton thrift stores that says “BLUE SKIES FOREVER.” The title is a Lana Del Rey lyric that alludes to buoyant optimism in the face of adversity, but it could also reference his view of the region from the Salish Sea, where Veltkamp has already spotted seals and orcas along his commute. EP


Hoedemeker Pfeiffer Gallery

Kat Larson (Through Dec 31): In Kat Larson’s latest photo/video series, she continues the story of an alien from another planet who crash lands on Earth. As the visitor explores the planet, they find their strength weakened by a lack of love and compassion, and begin to slowly fade away.


INCA

Hypomnemata (Through Dec 9): Have you ever thought about how weird things will be for the aliens or future civilizations tasked with unearthing artifacts from the early 21st century? When the internet is long gone, what will the material hints at its former ubiquity even look like? Hypomnemata is a group show that examines this question by means of various modes of inquiry. Featured artists Rindon Johnson, Ed Steck, Robert Joseph Sandler, Holly Melgard, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Somnath Bhatt, and Maya Martinez are poets, designers, dancers, and visual artists working at the intersection of digital culture and embodied experience. The results are, in the words of curator Barrett White, “remnants of a speculative archaeology, a future ruin.” EP


Interstitial

Wong Ping: Who’s the Daddy (Through Dec 23): Hong Kong-based artist Wong Ping is known for his cutesy, creepy, trippy animations (Jen Graves especially liked “the story of the impotent man who waits in the bedroom closet while his wife does sex work”). Don’t miss his brightly-colored and metaphor-driven stories.

Brandon Aleson, Reilly Donovan, Benjamin Van Citters (Jan 6-Feb 24): Interact with Aleson, Donovan, and Van Citters’s installations exploring the body and “digitally mediated space.”


Jacob Lawrence Gallery

Material Performance: Part II (Through Dec 9): Can painting and sculpture be considered time-based art? Material Performance is a two-part exhibition that answers this question in the form of objects that change throughout the run of the show. The first part showcased the work of current UW MFA students; the second installment features a stellar roster of artists including Francesca Lohmann, whose 80 pound blocks of lemon taffy gradually flatten out under their own weight, and Nola Avienne, whose magnetic sculptures continually reshape themselves. Other artists in this show about matter and the forces that shape it include Leon Finley, Jason Hirata, and Jono Vaughan. EP


James Harris Gallery

Brad Winchester

Claire Cowie and Brad Winchester (Jan 4-Feb 10): Claire Cowie works in watercolor, collage, and sculpture to produce imaginary worlds that resonate with the emotional and perceptual experience of intimacy, imagination, and physical space. Sometimes these spaces are densely populated with animals, figures, and architectural elements; other times they are haunted by an absence so profound that you can’t quite put your finger on what’s missing. Brad Winchester is a painter whose recent work has bypassed painting altogether to deconstruct the physicality of the canvas, using unwoven linen to create sculptural objects with or without stretcher bars. This is his first exhibition at James Harris. EP


M. Rosetta Hunter Art Gallery

Youth in Focus (Through Dec 14): For the past 24 years, low-income city youth have expressed themselves and captured glimpses of their daily lives thanks to Youth In Focus’s arts program, which pairs the young photographers with adult mentors.

Carina del Rosario: Passports Series (Jan 2-Feb 1): See Carina del Rosario’s collaborative “passports,” for which she asked participants to create identity papers by “using their own words to describe the most important parts of themselves.” In this commentary on self-determination, individuals escape rote categorization.


METHOD

Julia Freeman: The Will to Synchronize (Through Jan 6): Once again, Julia Freeman interrogates systemic influences over everyday interactions. The Will to Synchronize unfolds in three acts in an exploration of online relationships and the forces controlling them, expressed in “3D printed objects of vocal recordings, choreographed performance, and installation.”


Oxbow

Barbara Robertson: Architectonic (Through Jan 6): Seattle-based artist Barbara Robertson’s site-specific installation is composed of three projected animations that use the gallery space as a central part of its image. The artist will continue to add new elements to the installation until it closes.


Nii Modo

Hobby Rockers (Robin Edwards & Bree McKenna) (Dec 15-Jan 13): Local musicians Robin Edwards and Bree McKenna of Lisa Prank, Tacocat, Childbirth, and Who Is She? fame are teaming up again but this time for an art show, with years of their paintings and drawings displayed in new community art space Nii Modo.


Photographic Center Northwest

Jun Ahn: On the Verge (Jan 8–March 24): See South Korean photographer Jun Ahn’s hair-raising self-portraits atop high buildings.


Prographica / KDR

Fred Birchman and Kathy Gore Fuss (Through Dec 22): See iconographic, architectural drawings by Seattle mixed media artist Fred Birchman and forest-dedicated paintings by Olympia’s Kathy Gore Fuss, which express her relationship with natural areas that she visits throughout the year.

Zhi Lin (Jan 4-27): Zhi Lin continues to explore the same themes of Chinese immigration as in In Search of the Lost History of Chinese Migrants and the Transcontinental Railroads at the Tacoma Art Museum.


Push/Pull

Fruiting Bodies (Through Dec 19): Explore “the mysteries and secrets of the fungal world” at this group show featuring artist Lara Kaminoff.


Re:definition

Joe (wahalatsu?) Seymour Jr. (Through Feb): Joseph (wahalatsu?) Seymour Jr. (Squaxin Island/Pueblo of Acoma) is a visual artist who works in glass, photography, Salish wool weaving, printmaking, wood, and rawhide drums. His work in various mediums will be on view through February at the final exhibition curated by 2016 Genius Award winner Tracy Rector at Re:definition, a Native-centered art gallery located in the lobby of the Paramount Theatre. “The pervasive colonizer mentality of writing and rewriting history, to serve the needs of those in power, is a symptom of ‘dis-ease’ that impacts our global body,” writes Rector in her curator statement. “As an act of healing, now is the time to decolonize false narratives, spaces, and our minds.” EP


SAM Gallery

Harold Hollingsworth at TASTE (Through Feb 4): Hollingsworth’s work is reminiscent of the Seattle painter Ken Kelly, but the former’s idiosyncratic vocabulary of images plays on the canvas in a simpler, more random way.


Schack Art Center

Looking Back: Honoring 25 Years of Artist of the Year (Jan 11-Feb 24): The Schack Art Center has honored an “Artist of the Year” for the past two and a half decades. This retrospective will feature such laureates as glass artist Robert Mitchell, painter Chuck Close, and basket-maker Dona Anderson.


School of Art, University of Washington

Telling Our Stories: Art and Homelessness (Through Dec 15): Don’t miss this exhibit that highlights the perspectives of resident artists living at the Downtown Emergency Service Center building. The pieces—created by a group of the center’s residents called the LEAP Artist Collective—speak to themes of “hope, healing, reconnection, and finding home.”


SOIL

Tech Support (Dec 7-30): As the tech industry alters Seattle’s landscape in ways large and small, SOIL responds with an installation of art objects based on technology, formatted like a store. In addition to delving into the art market and whether it should appeal to rich newcomers, the exhibit—showing works by Ellen Jing Xu, Francisco Guerrero, and many others—will try to bridge the gap between the art and tech communities.

In the Shadow of Olympus (March 1-31): The continent-spanning Japanese collective Art Beasties, which collaborates over Skype, has brought together work addressing the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. Some of the participating artists include locals Junko Yamamoto and Paul Komada.


Spaceworks Gallery

Malayka and Tom Gormally: Present / Tense (Through Dec 21): Born in the Bay Area to immigrant and Jewish parents and raised during the Civil Rights era, Malayka Gormally makes colorful, figurative oil paintings that capture the strangely human side of tense confrontations between activists and members of hate groups. During the Vietnam war, her husband Tom was a Navy mechanic who protested the war he had to serve in. Now he works with wood, found objects, and LED lighting to create objects that are at once aspirational and precarious; uncertain yet surprisingly resilient. Their two-person show is an examination of our current cultural moment by two artists who have already been through an era of intense political upheaval and lived to tell about it. EP


studio e

Neddy Artist Awards Exhibition (Jan 27-Feb 24): The Neddy Awards, given by Cornish College, recompense artists living in the Puget Sound area. This year, Tacoman Christopher Paul Jordan an Korean/Indigenous artist Che Sehyun took top prizes, while Barbara Sternberger, Gillian Theobald, Tuan Nguyen, Gretchen Bennett, Marita Dingus, and Dakota Gearhart were runners-up. See the works of these distinguished locals.


Veronica

Matt Browning (Jan 6-Feb 24): Canadian artist and UW graduate Matt Browning has exhibited at the Whitney Biennial exhibition. He explores “time, latency, and the selective and hierarchical valuations of human activity.” Specifically, his past exhibitions have dealt with masculinity, sports, and folk art.


Winston Wachter Fine Art

Amanda Manitach: Dirty (Through Jan 10): From afar, Stranger Genius Award nominee Amanda Manitach’s block prints look like inner thoughts (or perturbing greeting cards) punched into colorful stains. Get closer, and you’ll realize that these stains are elaborate patterns that may evoke Victorian wallpaper. Manitach’s artistic process is demonstratively physical: She rubs patterns into splashes of color, getting herself “dirty” in the process. She says: “I see my work as a task of both consciously and subliminally sorting out the experience of a female trying to make expressive marks—a task that has found uncanny resonance for me with the history of female hysteria.”

Dirk Staschke: Perfection of Happenstance (Through Jan 10): Dirk Staschke’s take on the Dutch “Vanitas” paintings, reminders of death painted by 16th- and 17th-century artists, uses ceramic and wood sculpture to explore images of decay.


Art Events



Colman Automotive Building

Arcade 35.3 Issue Launch Party (Dec 14): Welcome the newest issue of the luscious and colorful ARCADE magazine, devoted to architecture, urban planning, and design, with an artsy party. Volume 35.3 is entitled Rethinking Efficiency and edited by Sawhorse Revolution. Pay $20 and enjoy appetizers, drinks, music, and a holiday auction.


Daybreak Star Center

Native Art Mart (Dec 9 & 17): Buy authentic Native gifts—clothing, drums, art prints, and more—from a group of diverse local artists in beautiful Discovery Park.


Duwamish Longhouse

Duwamish Arts & Crafts Market (Dec 15-17): Pick up some holiday gifts from the Duwamish Arts & Crafts Market to find creations from local Native American artists representing a broad range of tribal traditions.


Equinox Studios

Very Open House (Dec 9): See the work of more than 125 artists and artisans in four buildings as mammoth Georgetown arts collective Equinox celebrates its 11th birthday. The studios also promise “guest artists, music, poetry, dance, demos, food trucks, and a whole lot more!” Stay after 10 p.m. for a night of revelry and fire.


Imperial Lanes Building

Punk Rock Flea Market (Dec 16-17): If shopping at the mall gives you hives, but you still need to buy something for someone, why not buy a locally procured good while drinking whiskey and listening to locally selected music? Since 2006, the biannual Punk Rock Flea Market has provided an opportunity to do just that, and today’s iteration promises to be bigger and better than ever.


Magnuson Park Hangar 30

Renegade Craft Fair (Dec 16-17): Renegade Craft Fair (“the largest independent craft fair in the world”) will return to Magnuson Park, bringing along more than 200 makers selling their wares, DIY workshops, food and drinks, and other special events.


Olympic Sculpture Park

SAM Lights (Dec 14): Fight darkness and gloom in SAM’s garden of luminarias and other installations while you make your own art, drink something hot, and listen to live performances.


Party Hat

GIFT HOLE (Dec 7 & 21): Want to do your Black Friday or December shopping for “artist made shit that doesn’t immediately trigger existential dread or perpetuate the systematic malaise of big box stores and late stage capitalism”? Party Hat has you covered.


Ren Fitness

HUG: A henry solo show and book release party (Dec 9): You know him as Henry, and he’s the muralist who has covered the walls of your city in goofy walruses and ostriches and fish and wizards. He’s putting on a solo show and launching his new book, Mystic Hug Thug.


Seattle Design Center

Art Under $100 (Dec 16): Find affordable gifts from over 100 “crackerjack artists” offering paintings, glass, fabric art, ceramics, jewelry, and more priced under one Benjamin.


Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts

TK Lofts 13th Annual Open House (Dec 7): If Santa and sleigh bells are too ho-hum for your winter celebrations, try this art party with butoh dance by members of DAIPAN, Suzanne Morlock’s sculpture exhibition, Rosemary Dai Ross’s holiday art, Lynn Schirmer’s “Secret Language” installation, DeGennaro/Riutta family works, and open studios, plus a masquerade where you can make your own mask and a potluck for all.


Tractor Tavern

Tractor Tavern’s Handmade Arcade (Dec 10 & 17): Enjoy live music and drinks while you shop for holiday gifts to bestow upon yourself and all your special friends.


Art Walks



Art Up PhinneyWood

Second Fridays

Ballard Night Out

Third Thursdays

Belltown Art Walk

Second Fridays

Capitol Hill Art Walk

Second Thursdays

Fremont First Fridays

First Fridays

Georgetown Art Attack

Second Saturdays

Pioneer Square Art Walk

First Thursdays

Queen Anne Art Walk

Third Thursdays

U-District Art Walk

Third Fridays

West Seattle Art Walk

Second Thursdays

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

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