Openings & Events
Event Yadda. Details
Event Yadda. Details
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Event Yadda. Details
Event Yadda. Details
Event Yadda. Details
Event Yadda. Details
Event Yadda. Details
Ongoing
The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts From the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942–1946. Over 120 objects are on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items—like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps—come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., 425-519-0770, bellevuearts.org, $8-$10, Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Through Oct. 12.
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Bellevue Arts Museum. Through Sept. 21.
Romson Regarde Bustillo In his show Dugay na, the Filipino artist creates brightly colored works on paper, intricately cut and designed with patterns, some of them narrative. The title of the show translates as “no longer new” or “a long time now.” Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, 550 Winslow Way E., 842.4451, biartmuseum.org. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Daily through Sept. 24.
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Chen Shaoxiong The contemporary Chinese artist shows new video works and their source drawings in the exhibit Ink. History. Media, which is inspired by historical photos of major events from 1909-2009. Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), 654-3100, seattleartmuseum.org. $5-$7. Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Through Oct. 19.
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920–1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view—prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.—we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ’20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ’30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar—even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, ends Oct. 19.
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami An exhibit that examines the evolution of origami as an art form around the globe from its origins all the way up to today. Bellevue Arts Museum, through Sept. 21.
Healthcare: On the Edge of Change That’s the name of this small exhibit by painter Nancy Rothwell, who addresses the aging of baby boomers in her art. University Unitarian Church: 6556 35th Ave. N.E., 525-8400. Ends Sept. 5.
Femke Hiemstra & Casey Weldon Hiemstra paints on found objects in Warten am Waldrand. Weldon tweaks nature scenes with bright, artificial colors in Novel Relic. Roq La Rue Gallery, 532 First Ave. S., 374-8977, roqlarue.com. Ends Sept. 27.
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Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions—From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show’s opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake (6 p.m. Weds, on the northwest side of the lake) to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave. S., columbiacitygallery.com, 760-9843. Ends Sept. 21.
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, for one thing, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party—derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific—including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all new Seattle residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $12–$19. Weds.-Sun. Ends. Sept. 7.
Mughal Painting: Power and Piety Some 300 years of Indian art, from the 16th century to English colonial rule of the subcontinent, goes on display. Seattle Asian Art Museum, opens Sat., July 19. Ends Oct. 19.
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Ken Price The recently deceased L.A. artist created colorful cityscapes of his home town, often to accompany the poetry collections of his pal Charles Bukowski. The show is called Inside/Outside. Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., 543-2280, henryart.org. $6-$10. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs. & Fri. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wed., Sat. & Sun.
Through Sept 7.
William Robinson The local artist shows large organically-inspired sculptures rendered in stone. Foster/White Gallery, 220 Third Ave. S., 622-2833, fosterwhite.com. Ends Sept. 3.
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Skyspace James Turrell’ Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery
Under Pressure Traveling up from Portland and the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and family, this big survey of postwar prints includes work by Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and Warhol. Bellevue Arts Museum, through Sept. 12.
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ’50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ’60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ’70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society—made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ’80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters—only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., 622-9250, fryemuseum.org. Free. 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m–7 p.m. Thurs. Ends Sept. 21.
