A lover of art, objects, far-flung lands, beautiful words, and adventure, Katherine C. White amassed one of the world’s premier private collections of African art. Upon her death, the collection of more than 2,000 objects came to the Seattle Art Museum, partially as a gift...
Gold has been a shimmering presence in art across cultures and time. When the first metals were unearthed by humans around 5000 b.c., gold was valued for its rarity and lustrous color. Ancient Egyptians believed that gold was the skin of the gods, and for...
Visual Vertigo Indigenous artists from the center of the Australian continent unleashed a wave of art production in the 1970s. Their contribution has been described as a renaissance of the world’s oldest living cultures. A new installation in the museum’s Australian Aboriginal art gallery brings...
An ingenious interpreter of grand Western portraiture traditions, Kehinde Wiley is one of the leading American artists to emerge in the last decade. This spring, the museum acquired the artist’s most recent work. Since ancient times the portrait has been tied to representations of power....
What, exactly, are the decorative arts? The answer might surprise you… Part of the answer would certainly include metalwork, and objects meant for use. This contemporary tea and coffee service, commissioned for the museum by Julie Emerson, The Ruth J. Nutt Curator of Decorative Arts,...
The multidisciplinary field of art conservation involves the examination, interpretation, analysis and treatment of cultural, historic and artistic objects. Professional conservators rely on their knowledge of both the humanities and the sciences in order to understand the creation and production of material culture in the...
Sometimes, collecting small has a big result. In 1919, following his service in WWI, Richard E. Fuller traveled to “the Orient” with his parents, sister, and brother. Their trip took them from Vancouver, BC, to China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Burma, and India. However, the latter...
Early in the 1940s, artists in New York began to develop an expressive, abstract style of painting that was a stark departure from previous ideas, both artistically and historically. Up until World War II, the center of artistic production in the West had been Paris,...
The naked human body was an acceptable subject for artists illustrating myths or, occasionally, biblical stories. In this painting Venus and her lover Adonis enjoy a brief period of happiness before he is killed. Especially popular in the region of Venice, Veronese’s large, richly colored...
Earth Hour is this Saturday night, March 23 from 8:30–9:30 pm. What is...
Before moving to Seattle to start my fall internship at the Seattle...
Cheryl Colopy discusses her book, Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia’s Water Crisis,...