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...
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 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...
Named for a 17th-century Chinese poem, this painting comes from the “Song of Lake Yuan” series. The poem is a lamentation for the good times the author and his peers experienced before the upheaval of regime change. Echoing 17th-century woodblock illustrations of epic novels, painter...
A member of New York’s avant-garde in the early 1960s, Robert Morris famously experimented with the perceptual and intellectual issues that fueled Minimalism and Conceptual art. He rebelled against the notion of the artwork as a precious, handcrafted original object, arguing that art could also...
The daughter of a prominent Chinese figure painter, Lu Wujiu instead chose to work in the United States, and to focus her practice on abstraction-based visual language. Lu has been praised for her ability, “to see the analogies between traditional Chinese attitudes and the vigour...
Struck by Cupid’s arrow, Venus conceived a defenseless passion for the handsome god Adonis. The lovers’ brief period of happiness will soon end tragically when Adonis is killed by a wild boar while hunting. The myrtle tree refers to eternal love, associated with Venus, and...
Inspired by the artifacts excavated from Junk shipwrecks that brought “china” from Asia to Europe, Koi Junk alludes to the migration of culture through trade, and specifically the culture of tea. It also references the forms, techniques, and ornamentation that dominated the aesthetics in the...
The small-scale totem pole is an indigenous genre that pre-dates contact: Captain James Cook personally collected one at Nootka Sound in 1778. Some model poles are diminutive, specific versions of the forty- to sixty-foot poles erected to honor the lineages of deceased chiefs and nobles....
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,...