SAM Field Trips: Native Art You Need to See Now

During Double Exposure: Edward S. Curtis, Marianne Nicolson, Tracy Rector, Will Wilson, the SAM social team took a few Friday afternoon field trips to visit other museums in Washington that are currently exhibiting work by Native artists. If you missed our Instagram stories, here’s a quick round up of a few exhibitions currently on view around the state that are not to be missed.

Museum of Northwest Art

In Red Ink
Through September 23, 2018

Curated by RYAN! Feddersen and featuring art by Asia Tail and Fox Spears, we just had to stop by for more creative output from these artists who have also been involved with SAM during Double Exposure. The collection of art on view offers a range of styles from contemporary Native artists in a variety of mediums by artists hailing from tribes across the extended Pacific Northwest and beyond. Feddersen is the mastermind behind the Post Human Archive, the social media activity that was installed at SAM.

Asia Tail, also a curator (we can’t wait to see yəhaw̓ at the King Street Station opening in January 2019) is the hand behind the words on the Double Exposure website but we hadn’t seen her art previously! Fox Spears is one of the teaching artists offering free Drop-In Studio workshops at SAM (there’s one more workshop on Sunday led by Sondra Segundo before the exhibition closes) and it was so nice to see this work after learning so much about his process!

Tacoma Art Museum

Native Portraiture: Power and Perception
Through February 10, 2019

 

The lens we look through changes everything. In Native Portraiture, Tacoma Art Museum asks the question: What is communicated when an outsider portrays someone from another culture?

In the galleries you will have the chance to see contemporary Native artists representing Indigenous cultures for themselves. These works are interspersed by a few examples of depictions by non-Native artists that romanticize, stereotype, or appropriate Native people and cultures. We recommend spending at least an hour or two in this gallery to fully absorb the impact of this contrast.

Suquamish Museum

Ancient Shore, Changing Tides
Ongoing

Do yourself a favor and enjoy the ferry and short drive that it takes to get to Suquamish Museum. Well designed and chock-full of information, the permanent installation tells a detailed and important story through movement, textures, the forest environment and the symbolic movement of the tide. The objects on view, many never before exhibited, are a combination of works owned by the Suquamish Museum and on loan from Suquamish families and other museums. The way these objects are arranged creates an environment where you will want to spend some time. The museum describes their goal  as an attempt to “displace the modern way of historical contextual understanding. Culture is more than historical events strung together.  The passing of knowledge and values, generation to generation, is the core of Suquamish culture.” Based on our visit, the Suquamish achieves their goal, and then some!

Where your day trips take you, SAM recommends you make the time to visit the wealth of museums in Washington featuring work by Native artists!

Muse/News: Trickstery art, tree stories, and unfinished histories

Just out in the latest edition of the Stranger: This glowing review of Double Exposure: Edward S. Curtis, Marianne Nicolson, Tracy Rector, Will Wilson by Rebecca Brown.

“But you should see what SAM has done with Double Exposure. The jolts between Curtis’s ‘noble’ (his word) Natives in traditional dress (their own or others’) standing near the lively, light-filled, trickstery art of Wilson, Rector, Nicolson is just exhilarating.”

Prepare to cry: Juan “Neeto” Old Chief Betancourt honored his great-grandmother Antone with an invite to prom, held recently at the Seattle Art Museum. The Seattle Times’ Lauren Frohne and Erika Schultz share the heartwarming story.

Brangien Davis of Crosscut profiles artist RYAN! Feddersen and all her exciting work on view around the region—including her “Post-Human Archive” installation created for the Double Exposure education gallery.

Local News

The Seattle Times’ Brendan Kiley reviews Walla Walla artist Juventino Aranda’s “disarming, arresting” solo exhibition, now on view at the Frye Art Museum.

In their July issue, Seattle Magazine names @seattlewalkreport “the city’s best Instagram account.” The artist’s hand-drawn accounts offer “a charming composite portrait of the city in the midst of a sea change.”

“A cacophony of arboreal anecdotes:” Brangien Davis of Crosscut on artist Katherine Wimble’s crowd-sourced project “Forest for the Trees,” which tells stories through our county’s trees.

“’My hope is that people will read these stories, see trees differently and think about their own connections to trees,’ she says. ‘Their lives are intertwined with ours.’”

Inter/National News

Philanthropist and collector Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Fund announced another round of grants totaling nearly $10 million, going to artists, writers, and policy makers who are working to advance criminal justice reform.

Cultured Magazine names “9 Curators You Need to Know in 2018,” including Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors curator Mika Yoshitake.

Teju Cole for the New York Times Magazine on photography, cultural appropriation, and “getting others right.” The work of Edward S. Curtis is discussed.

“It is not about taking something that belongs to someone else and making it serve you but rather about recognizing that history is brutal and unfinished and finding some way, within that recognition, to serve the dispossessed.”

And Finally

“In a democracy, we do not put children in cages.”

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Manager of Public Relations

Image: Installation view Double Exposure: Edward S. Curtis, Marianne Nicolson, Tracy Rector, Will Wilson, Seattle Art Museum, 2018, photo: Natali Wiseman
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