Muse/News: Arts News from SAM, Seattle, and Beyond
SAM News
The solo exhibition of Molly Vaughan, winner of the 2017 Betty Bowen Award, is now on view. Project 42 raises awareness of a persistent pattern of extreme violence against transgender people by commemorating 42 murdered individuals. The show was recently highlighted by both City Arts and Seattle Weekly.
“When Molly Vaughan accepted the Betty Bowen Award at the Seattle Art Museum, she opted not to speak about her own work, as is custom. Instead, she invited three local artists with Native heritage to memorialize Fred Martinez, Jr., a trans-identified Navajo teen who was murdered in Cortez, Colo., in 2001.”
The Evergrey features artist April Soetarman’s Museum of Almost Realities, about objects “from the life you might have had.” The project popped up at March’s edition of Remix.
Local News
For the Seattle Times (and all the nerds), writer Paul Constant and novelist G. Willow Wilson preview MoPOP’s MARVEL: Universe of Super Heroes, which opened last Saturday.
Crosscut’s Brangien Davis interviews Pacific Northwest Ballet artistic director Peter Boal about a controversial work that premiered in their recent program.
Margo Vansynghel of City Arts reviews the Tacoma Art Museum’s retrospective of Seattle photographer Ella McBride (1862-1965).
“If the flower in the vase of the 1925 black-and-white gelatin silver print ‘A Shirley Poppy’ could speak, it might say, My heart is wide open. I’ve unfurled my petals so you can see it all. Tracing the valleys of light within the crepe-like petals, one imagines photographer Ella McBride responding from behind her single-lens reflex camera, I notice you.”
Inter/National News
Last week, TIME magazine published its list of the year’s 100 most influential people; Kehinde Wiley, Judy Chicago, and JR were three visual artists selected.
Beychella was certainly the event of the last couple of weeks (year? life?), but don’t miss Solange’s video and dance performance that recently took place at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—“the first public museum and memorial to the victims of racial terror in the US”—will open next week in Alabama.
“There is still so much to be done in this country to recover from our history of racial inequality,” says Bryan Stevenson, the founding director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which spearheaded the project. “We can achieve more in America when we commit to truth-telling about our past.”
And Finally
He doesn’t do it for the gram—or the Pulitzer. But this was all of us when rapper and songwriter Kendrick Lamar won the prestigious award this week.
– Rachel Eggers, SAM Manager of Public Relations