“The exhibition…brings together different cultural expressions to demonstrate that water is our shared concern and necessary to our shared survival. In that way, the Indigenous voices are the most resonant in their respectful and deep understanding. But seeing their work and their voices placed among so many other cultures demonstrates the interconnectedness of everyone on the planet.”
“This idea of dynamic identity and reclamation are echoed throughout Embodied Change and are told through the lens of the human body, specifically the female form. One thing that I believe unites these works is the burden of inheritance. There are certain things that we inherit through our heritage without us making the choice to do so. What we do choose, however, is how we carry this inheritance.”
“Only 262 films?” Seattle Times’ Moira Macdonald interviews Seattle International Film Festival director Beth Barrett on what’s different at this year’s festival.
The Stranger’s Jas Keimig on the launch of Seattle Restored, a series of pop-up storefront art installations from the City of Seattle.
“We want to show the more soulful and heartful way of Ukraine. That it’s not destruction, that it’s not a ruin, that it’s actually a very rich and deep history that gets passed on and carried on through generations.”
“Extraordinary Monuments to the Mundane”: The New York Times’ T Magazine profiles sculptor Woody De Othello as he looks forward to his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. As we’ve shared in the past, a sculpture by this rising art world star was recently acquired by SAM for its collection and will go on view later this year.
“As if the result of a solo game of exquisite corpse, these composite creatures are oddly proportioned and at turns alluring and unsettling. Thus, Othello highlights the thrum of spirituality he finds in everyday environments.”
Looking for more ways to learn about our local and global environments following your visit to Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water at SAM? Although Earth Day may only officially be celebrated on Friday, April 22, organizations across the Pacific Northwest are holding events throughout April which honor our planet, give back to our local communities, and inspire movement in the outdoors. From beach cleanups and virtual educational lectures to in-person celebrations and runs of varying distances, read below to find just a few of the many earth-focused events taking place this month.
HERE is an evening of spoken word, song, and tabling from local organizations centered around social and climate justice. Presented by U Productions, Hearth Revial, Abbey Arts, and The Collective, this one-night-only is intended to spark inspiration, connect people to new ways of plugging in, and build community around actively embodying our values. Hosted by singer-songwriter, percussionist, and teaching artist Shireen Amini, this Earth celebration will include stories and poetry from Nikkita Oliver, The People’s Echo, Verbal Oasis, Lennee Reid, Paul Chiyokten Wagner.
Start your morning right by participating in Seattle’s Earth Day Run on Saturday, April 16! Run or walk any of the many race distances while supporting the environment. Each race finisher—no matter the distance—will receive a native sapling tree to take home and will have a tree planted at the park in their honor at the tree hugger station. A Magnuson Park gardener will also be in attendance to answer all questions you may have about native plants and starting your own garden. Plus, organizers will be hosting a shoe drive, so don’t forget to bring your old running shoes to donate to Africa via the More Foundation Group.
Join the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle (ULMS) in celebrating Black Earth Day at YES Farm. Free and open to everyone in Seattle’s Black community, the event will feature gardening activities for all ages, and healthy meals cooked up by local Black vendors. Stop by the event to pick up a green cleaning kit to take home and learn about public health and housing resources offered by ULMS and other community organizations.
Three times per year, Washington Coast Savers teams up with the Washington Clean Coast Alliance to conduct coordinated beach cleanups along the outer coast of Washington and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Dating back to 2007, these annual cleanups have a long and productive history of cleaning the entire Washington State coast. Choose from a number of locations across the state and help keep our beaches clean!
Spring has sprung! Give back to the beautiful Earth we live on by helping restore 935 acres of forested parkland in Snohomish County across the next 20 years. At McCollum Park, volunteers will help clear some of the colonizing weeds like blackberry, holly, and english ivy throughout the 78-acre park of forest and wetland.
Issaquah’s parks are in need of volunteers interested in spending time in nature while helping improve forest health. By 2039, city officials hope to have restored 1,540 acres of forestland, but can’t do it without your help! This Earth Day, sign up to help rid Harvey Manning Park of pesky weed species and plant native species which will thrive for years to come.
Earth Day isn’t limited to just one day per year! King County offers online gardening tips and tricks, interactive quizzes, and a continuously-updated list of outdoor volunteer events and workshops taking place throughout the county that inspire action for environmental conservation, restoration, and stewardship. Not sure where to start in creating your own backyard garden or how to safely dispose of hazardous waste? Check here!
By the time De Wain Valentine moved to Los Angeles in 1965, the artist was already working with plastics. He had been introduced to them by his junior high shop teacher after the then-recent military declassification of the material following World War II and had been working with them on a small-scale ever since. Now in California, Valentine began sharing his experiences while working as a part-time faculty member at UCLA.
Having spent most of his life until that point in Colorado, Valentine has explained how the move influenced his art: “In Colorado, you don’t notice the sky so much because it’s crystal clear: always blue and always so beautiful.” In fact, the Latin name for the Colorado state flower is coerulea, which translates to “sky blue.” But as Valentine continued in a 2011 interview with the Getty Conservation Institute, “you can’t see [the sky in Colorado], so you always forget about it. But the sky in LA is very different: You can really see that—the smog and the fog.”1
For folks from the California coast, the “fog” is really the marine layer, a coastal air mass, usually occurring in the morning, which creates overcast skies that “burn off” around noon. The smog, however, especially in 1960s Los Angeles, was not only something you really could see, but threatened its own weather in the region. A front-page news report in the Los Angeles Times from October 1964 notes that “[s]weltering temperatures helped produce another blanket of smog over the Los Angeles basin Tuesday and touched off lightning storms which started at least three fires in the mountains.” In the next column over, a weather brief states “Light to moderate smog today.”2
Valentine is quoted saying that his extensive series of large-scale polyester resin sculptures are “all about the sea and the sky” and that being in Los Angeles allowed him to see “a new avenue to make sculpture that was completely atmospheric or like a chunk of the ocean cut out.”3 The translucent circles, columns, curved slabs, and sometimes UFO-shaped disks, come in a wide array of colors, from warm rose and orange to more New Age-y lavenders and turquoise, and many are several feet tall or wide. For example, his massive Gray Column (1975–76), made with black pigment that grows transparent and smoky as it tapers at the top, is an impressive 12 feet, like a slab carved from a smog-filled sky.
Circle Blue, with its cerulean gradient, however, is the work that most clearly evokes the ocean and sky, and, with its round shape, the planet. Like the other tall translucent sculptures, Circle Blue is made from a proprietary blend of polyester resin. Working with the manufacturer Hastings Plastics in Santa Monica, California, Valentine produced Valentine MasKast Resin in 1966 that, unlike previous polyester resins, could be used to create large, thick objects cast in a single-pour rather than in thin layers, without cracking or overheating.
After polyester resin’s initial use in the military and aerospace arenas, the cheap, sturdy, and durable material was quickly adopted by the automotive and maritime industries, but also used for small common objects like buttons and bowling ball cores. Polyester resin has a highly complex chemical structure that requires “curing” to transform the liquid resin to a solid. This part of the production process is probably the most toxic, as the most common agent used for curing is styrene, which the National Toxicology Program of the US Department of Health and Human Services has listed as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.”4 Polyester resin is also a plastic, and therefore made from fossil fuels.
Despite the material’s industrial applications, Valentine never really outsourced the production of his sculptures to a fabricator, a common practice for artists using industrial materials, including his peers in the Light and Space movement and in other Minimal Art groups. Pictures of him and his studio assistants clad in PPE (personal protective equipment) show the very hands-on process taken: weeks of sanding and buffing with hand-held machines usually found in an auto-body shop. Citing health concerns, Valentine later turned to using glass for some of his sculptures, but mainly so he could install his works outside: UV light and the potential for surface scratches could destroy the polyester resin sculptures.5 What the material afforded him, however, was a way to examine not just the surface of sculpture, but the (light and) space in between. “[T]he interior of the sculpture is so essential.”6
Reflecting on Circle Blue’s origins in 1960s and 70s Southern California’s smog, sea spray, and glittering oceans against today’s heightened climate crisis, the piece becomes not just an imaginative chunk of the sky, but also a transparent, precious, and conflicting sample of our world. It is both beautiful and a little toxic, strong but also fragile. At almost six feet in diameter, we can see ourselves in its surface, but we also see in and beyond it. Now on view in Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water at SAM, Circle Blue—in addition to many other works on display—prompts questions about our relationship to the planet: How might we preserve a chunk of the sea or sky today? How might we look beyond today and imagine our blue planet in the future?
– Mia C. Ferm, Project Manager, SAM Historic Media Collection
1 Tom Learner, Rachel Rivenc and Emma Richardson, “From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column” (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2011), 7.
2 “Heat, Smog, Lighting and Fires Pile Up Southland Weather Woes,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), Oct 7, 1964.
3 Tom Learner, Rachel Rivenc and Emma Richardson, “From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column” (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2011), 7.
4 National Toxicology Program, “Report on Carcinogens, Fifteenth Edition” (report, Research Triangle Park, NC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, 2021).
5 Dorothy Newmark and Dewain Valentine, “An Interview with Dewain Valentine, Sculptor of Plastic,” Leonardo 4, no. 4 (1971).
6 Tom Learner, Rachel Rivenc and Emma Richardson, “From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column” (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2011), 12.
Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Waterdocuments the stories and histories of water in our world. Pulling exclusively from local loans and works in SAM’s permanent collection, the expansive exhibition features paintings, sculptures, textiles, and multimedia works by over 70 artists from around the world. Over the next 10 weeks, we’ll be talking with some of the contemporary artists involved with the exhibition about their artwork and the importance of water in their lives.
Born in 1963, Claude Zervas is best known for his light and video installations focusing on the topography and topology of the Pacific Northwest. In the 1980s, Claude attended Western Washington University to pursue a degree in geology and moved to Paris, France following his graduation. Although he spent many years working as a software engineer, Claude eventually decided to return to Washington and fully commit to his art practice and art production. Discover the story behind Claude’s 2005 sculpture, Nooksack, now on view in Our Blue Planet at SAM below.
1. What is your name and where are you currently based?
My name is Claude Zervas and I am based just outside of Bellingham, Washington.
2. What is the title of your artwork and how does it fit in with the themes explored in Our Blue Planet?
The title of my work is Nooksack. It’s a part of SAM’s permanent collection and has previously been on view in a couple of exhibitions at the museum. When piecing Our Blue Planet together, I think the curators thought to include my work because of its connection to one of our local waters. After deciding to include my work, I worked a bit with SAM’s conservation team to give the sculpture new life. We had to replace all of the lamps which proved difficult because the tiny little fluorescent bulbs I used are now, more or less, obsolete technology. Back in the day, they were used in scanners and back light for video displays but they’re not used so much anymore and are getting harder to find. But, I really like the delicate and thin light that they put out—nothing else really puts out that kind of light.
3. What thoughts, ideas, and/or perspectives do you want visitors to take away from your artwork in Our Blue Planet?
Nooksack stems from this really personal relationship to the Nooksack River that I had as a kid growing up near the water. And for some reason, as an adult, I still feel a kinship to it. I’m not totally sure why, but it’s a beautiful river. And this piece is an ode to the river based on my memory of it and acts as a sort of ‘thank you’ to it. In seeing my work, I want visitors to consider the bodies of water which exist around us and thank them for all that they do for us.
4. What other artworks in the exhibition stood out to you?
All of the works in this exhibition are incredible, but what really stood out to me was a quote I saw on the floor of the exhibition by Abby Yates. I don’t know why her words so deeply affected me, but they did. Just to see a voice representing the Nooksack people and the river I care about so much was a beautiful experience.
5. How do art and activism intersect? Why do you think it’s important for museums like SAM to curate exhibitions around environmental and societal issues such as water?
I’m not much of an activist but I think we can all agree on the importance of water on Earth. It’s hard to overstate considering we’re 90% water and without it we’d all be dead. It’s essential for us to continuously investigate and discuss the role it plays in our lives. Overall, I’m just pleased SAM thought it important to publicly acknowledge and highlight the various ways water impacts all of our lives—and I’m honored they decided to include my work in the exhibition.
Via Eater Seattle: Shubert Ho’s restaurants—including MARKET Seattle at SAM—are donating 10% of sales on select days to World Central Kitchen, an organization “that’s helping provide hot meals to Ukrainians suffering from the Russian invasion of their country.”
And here’s Artnet’s Eileen Kinsella on the many complexities of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms; Catharina Manchanda, SAM’s Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, was among the art world voices sharing their experiences showing these works–including before the blockbuster editions.
“Like some great works of art, the Infinity Rooms were not immediately and universally appreciated. Manchanda recalled visiting one at the Whitney Museum (which also owns one) as part of a biennial more than two decades ago, while she was a student in New York. ‘The biennials were always crowded, but I was the only person in line wanting to see it. There was no interest whatsoever.’”
“Ever seen Cheetos made of glass?” The Seattle Times’ Jerald Pierce asking the tough questions–this one about Tacoma Art Museum’s show of glass art by the youth of Hilltop Artists.
“Those who have been through the Hilltop program have seen its ability to teach students invaluable teamwork and leadership skills, with one person taking the lead as a gaffer (who will lift the molten glass) and one or two assistants helping to shape that glass into whatever the gaffer is working on. Keith equated it to a sort of dance, where everyone needs to learn their part and anticipate the moves and needs of others.”
“But it’s only when you stand in front of them, or in some way stand with them (from the side or directly behind can be just as effective) and focus in on them that they give up their devastating secret (which is also your secret and mine): that we’re alone, that no one else knows what’s in our heads and that we will cease to exist.”
At first glance, this might look like a typical trophy head found in a mountain lodge, but Sherry Markovitz has turned the conventional idea of a hunting trophy on its head in the creation of Sea Bear.
“I am after beauty, with an edge of uncertainty, vulnerability, and power,” she says of her artistic process. “I use animal metaphors to explore issues of intimacy, closeness, and separation.”1Sea Bear’s tranquil and inquisitive stare is a powerful celebration of peace and gentleness, highlighting a species historically honored as a dynamic part of a balanced ecosystem.
As the subject matter of countless forms of creative expression, polar bears may have appeared in art as early as 17,000 years ago in the Paleolithic cave of Ekain in the Basque Country of Northern Spain. Below, two outlines resembling an adult and juvenile can be seen on the ceiling. Their elongated bodies look remarkably like polar bears. Perhaps they drifted south with pack ice off the coast of England during the icier years rounding out the Pleistocene.2 What we can be sure of is that they’ve been depicted in art and lore ever since.
Among the shared spiritual beliefs of the Inuit, polar bears are a living representation of resilience and determination, imbued with souls and regarded as brothers in a time when we did not take pre-eminence over other animals. Nanook, an almost man-like master of bears decided if hunters deserved success in their endeavors or punishment for violating taboos.3
This bear, crafted of wood, beads, shells, fabric, paint, and papier-mâché, is the culmination of intertwined memories and experiences the artist had with nature and her loved ones.
“Emotionally, Sea Bear is circular, all the stuff on it is traceable to significant walks. Walks with my mother in Florida, walks in Port Townsend with Peter (during which time her son Jake was conceived), walks alone to find the ‘root’ pieces at Discovery Park. Walking on the beach is such a drifting and wonderful activity.”4
From a distance, Sea Bear offers up the impression of a familiar creature. Its intricate and subtle beadwork appears at first to be deceptively monochromatic. A step closer, however, reveals an otherworldly figure clad in the ocean’s bounty emerges. The beads are revealed to be six or seven shades of color, like gentle eddies of ermine pebbles undulating over sand. The eye is drawn towards the shadows cast by exhibition lighting on the bear’s outstretched neck and jaw, flowing into the sinuous curves of its pelagic collar.
“I see the ‘collar’ as directional—the wood shape and the bear shape working in tandem was the key (formally) on this one. I think the large pearls pulled the shape back to the bear. It’s funny, as I get further away from a piece, it is, in fact, the abstract concerns that remain the most visible to me.”5
Seattle is treasured for the water which surrounds it. From Lake Washington, fed by so many vital creeks and rivers, to the misty solitude of salt-scoured beaches along the Olympic Peninsula. Water inexorably affects our physical and cultural landscapes, it sustains and determines our way of life, and shapes our histories slowly over time like glaciers carving mountains. Sea Bear is an opportunity to reconnect to this life-giving force, to step outside of our immediate reality and transport us to the shores of our minds choosing where we can know the peace of our own walk along the water’s edge.
– Danelle Jay, SAM Curatorial Division Coordinator
1 Sherry Markovitz, quoted in 50 Northwest Artists: A critical Selection of Painters and Sculptors Working in the Pacific Northwest, ed. Bruce Geunther, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1983, pages 80–81.
2 Digitized interior of Ekain, courtesy of the Society of Sciences Aranzadi.
3 C.R. Harrington, The Evolution of Arctic Marine Mammals, ed. A. Berta, Ecological Applications, Volume 18, Issue sp2, 2008, pages S23–S40.
Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water documents the stories and histories of water in our world. Pulling exclusively from local loans and works in SAM’s permanent collection, the expansive exhibition features paintings, sculptures, textiles, and multimedia works by over 70 artists from around the world. Over the next 10 weeks, we’ll be talking with some of the contemporary artists involved with the exhibition about their artwork and the importance of water in their lives.
Born and raised in Seattle, Ken Workman is a member of the Duwamish Tribe, the first people of Seattle, and the fifth generation great-grandson of Chief Seattle. A former Systems and Data Analyst at Boeing, Ken previously served as a Duwamish Tribal Council member and Duwamish Tribal Services President. He also currently sits on the board of two non-profit organizations, the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition and the Southwest Seattle Historical Society. Read below to learn about Ken’s involvement in Our Blue Planet.
1. What is your name and where are you currently based?
My name is Ken Workman and I live in West Seattle.
2. What is the title of your artwork and how does it fit in with the themes explored in Our Blue Planet?
I serve as the introductory speaker for Our Blue Planet. The curators of this exhibition reached out and asked if I would say a few words in my native language, Lushootseed, and welcome people onto this land. In the video, I welcome everyone to the area, to the museum, and into the galleries in my native language—and I was honored to be asked to do it.
3. What thoughts, ideas, and/or perspectives do you want visitors to take away from your artwork in Our Blue Planet?
For so long, the Duwamish people weren’t allowed to speak our language on our land. Being a part of this exhibition, and being given the opportunity to speak Lushootseed publicly, is very special to me. I consider it an honor any time I am able to share our ancestral sounds with the public. What I think is most important in watching this introductory video is hearing my voice and my language. Water is such a broad topic which affects every community and person in the world, so I want visitors to learn about and understand the Duwamish people’s relationship to water while I speak in my community’s native language.
4. What other artworks in the exhibition stood out to you?
The one that really caught my eye was Tracy Rector’s Clearwater: People of the Salish Sea. She uses a combination of audio recordings and visual media to tell the story of the annual Canoe Journey, an inter-tribal event from Alaska to Oregon that celebrates the return of traditional canoe culture and water protection. In watching the video, what I realized was that I was actually a part of it! In addition to the drumming and native songs playing in the background, I suddenly heard my own voice and remembered that Tracy had asked record me speaking in Lushootseed many years ago. When I first watched the film, I was a bit surprised to hear my voice as I didn’t know I was a part of it but it was wonderful to discover that Tracy had included me in her work.
5. How do art and activism intersect? Why do you think it’s important for museums like SAM to curate exhibitions around environmental and societal issues such as water?
It’s important for us to recognize the importance of our natural resources. Around the world, potable water is in short supply. Our glaciers—in the Alps and here in America—are melting and our access to drinking water is shrinking. Bringing attention to these issues, like Our Blue Planet does so well, is more important than ever. Through experiences like these, I hope people will wake up and think more about using and conserving limited resources like these.
“I think the hotel [as a museum] has the opportunity to somehow unveil or interpret the former Japantown area and the vibrancy that it used to have, leading all the way up to 1942,” [Karen] Yoshitomi said. “It provides the stage for all these other stories to be told.”
“To look at American art — and thus America — they sensed there was value in stepping just outside. The generative alchemy of a border town might offer clues for fresh thinking about other divisions: between racial or gender categories, the material and the spiritual worlds, the living and the dead.”
In celebration of the opening of Embodied Change: South Asian Art Across Time at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, SAM’s Assistant Curator of South Asian Art, Natalia Di Pietrantonio, sat down with contemporary artists Mithu Sen and Bani Abidi to discuss their artistic processes and involvement in the exhibition. Both Sen and Abidi explore themes of gender stereotypes, structures of power, and self-representation while reflecting on their South Asian heritage.
With their artworks in Embodied Change, each of these international artists seek to capture ephemeral gestures of the body. This virtual panel begins with an overview and introduction by Di Pietrantonio followed by a presentation from each of the artists on their artistic practices. The video concludes with a Q & A moderated by Di Pietrantonio.
Visit the Asian Art Museum between 10 am and 5 pm on Friday, March 25 for a day of free art activities and artist interactions including an artist talk with Humaira Abid, a Bharatnatyam and Kathak dance performance by South Asian art collective Pratidhwani, and a take-away Madhubani painting activity designed by artist Deepti Agrawal.
The Stranger’s Jas Keimig has an exit interview with Emily Zimmerman, as the director of the University of Washington’s Jacob Lawrence Gallery heads to the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Ross Gallery.
A long read from Noema Magazine: “Over a hundred miles southeast of Los Angeles, alongside the Salton Sea, Bombay Beach is a stretch of mud and sand wracked by hazardous dust storms, trash-filled lots and the smell of fetid algae. Its shores are also home to a burgeoning, surrealist art hub.”
“Working in the decades between Hiroshima and the American buildup in the Vietnam War, Giacometti portrayed an emaciated, uprooted, and pock-marked humanity living in a world on the brink — a precarious state of existence at least partially reprised by the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler.”
We love art, and we love love: Thrillist rounded up their picks for “where to go on a date this spring in Seattle,” including “spend a rainy afternoon at Seattle Art Museum” and “go on a self-guided tour of Olympic Sculpture Park.”
“I find the body an interesting repository for different changes,” Di Pietrantonio said. “Many artists are really thinking about … [the] emotion of the body and expanding the body as part of the landscape or rethinking the parameters of the body. I felt that the body and thinking about emotions was very important to connect to activism.”
“To me, this opportunity comes in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of API (Asian Pacific Islander) hate, you have January 6,” he says. “It is about ‘what are you going to do in this moment?’ The cultural capital, the social capital (of the Wing Luke) is the Batmobile. What is going to happen in the next year? It is going to take strong institutions like Wing to get through this.”
“The new initiative Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) has been working around the clock to back-up and preserve data and technology, all of which are threatened by the war.”
“It focuses particularly on modern contemporary artists that are activist artists that are emboldened and trying to change norms within society,” Di Pietrantonio explained. “I decided upon the theme based on current events, and what I thought Seattle audiences would be drawn to during this particular time.”
And save the dates: Curiocity shares that SAM has announced its lineup of 2022 exhibition openings, including an exhibition on sculptor Alberto Giacometti this summer and a dual exhibition on Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems this fall.
Grace Gorenflo of the Seattle Times on 10 years of “creative aging” programs at the Frye Art Museum “that allow individuals living with dementia to foster friendships and community through art.”
“Randy Rowland participated in multiple Creative Aging classes with his wife, Kay Grant Powers, before her death in 2019…‘My wife declined for a long time, and I hadn’t seen her operate at that level for a while. And then all of a sudden, there she was, kind of waxing poetic and talking about the painting that we’re looking at,’ he said.”
Inter/National News
Artnet has been sharing news out of Ukraine and impacts of the war on its cultural people and places, including an opinion piece from Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, the director general of Kyiv’s Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex, who wrote about what’s going on there and how others can help.
Frieze has a video exploring the work of Woody De Othello, in which he explores “the emotion of everyday objects.” A sculpture by this rising art world star was recently acquired by SAM for its collection.
“Chief Curator Asma Naeem, one of the people who came up with the idea of security/curators, says they pick up lots of insights, and pass them along to visitors. Naeem remembers her early days of museum-going. ‘For me, walking into a museum for the first time was something very intimidating.’ Guards helped. ‘I felt like I could go up to one of the guards and hear their observations and comments, and just ease into being a visitor.’”
No matter where I encounter them, Naiza Khan’s artworks always transport me back to a classroom on the campus of SOAS, University of London. It was in one such space where I had the privilege of hearing the artist speak about her series Henna Hands and The Skin She Wears—both deeply connected to Cage-Corset (2007) and New Clothes for the Emperor (2009), currently on view at the Seattle Asian Art Museum as part of the exhibition Embodied Change: South Asian Art Across Time.
Embodied Change at Seattle Asian Art Museum
These works and series illustrate Khan’s preoccupations with the female body. In thinking through the function of attire as a construct, Cage-Corset and New Clothes for the Emperor present clothing as a strategy to discuss gender. This is all the more relevant placed within the context of the back-and-forth between feminist activism and Islamicization in Pakistan that began in the 1960s and 70s, and gained much greater traction in the 1980s. As scholar Iftikhar Dadi has noted, in Khan’s works “the female body finally becomes visible in modern South Asian “Islamic” art as a subject itself, rather than simply remaining a decorative motif.”[1]
Part of her Heavenly Ornaments series, in which Khan turned to metal to fabricate armor, corsets, chastity belts and lingerie, Cage-Corset and New Clothes for the Emperor highlight the artist’s engagement with the Bihishti Zewar, an Urdu text written by the Islamic scholar and Sufi Ashraf Ali Thanawi. Written in the beginning of the twentieth century, the text prescribes morals and behaviors pertinent to young Muslim women and girls. Noteworthy, the Bihishti Zewar was written with state and social reform in mind. It posited that Muslim women were capable of becoming educated and moral actors just as equally as men. Thus, the Bihishti Zewar paradoxically asked, why should women conform to the authority of men or the state?
Through her artworks, Khan also references the presence/absence of women within the public sphere, particularly in the context of the roll-back of numerous rights for Pakistani women under the Zia regime of the late 1970s and 80s. Despite these retrogressions, huge numbers of women entered both the formal and informal labor sectors, and the applications of female students to higher educational institutes significantly increased. While the Zia regime attempted to control the presence of women in the public sphere, it inadvertently brought attention to the emergence of the publicly visible female body as an issue that could not simply be “rolled back.” In other works, Khan, unlike women artists before her, made use of the calligraphic form that was purported by the state as within the line of its official policy. Thus, Khan’s artworks demonstrate that simply opposing any state sanctioned idioms and logics are not enough to ensure the freedom of women.
Khan’s Cage-Corset and New Clothes for the Emperor demonstrate the entanglement of social, political, religious, and spatial relations that inform questions of subjectivity, freedom, and control imposed upon females. Then, as a starry-eyed master’s student, as now, the quiet subtlety of Khan’s artworks ring true. The artist does not simply claim her works as agents of freedom for those living under repressive regimes, but rather, brings attention to the ways in which such systems and its mechanisms, just like her corsets, are constructed, negotiated and navigated.
– Ananya Sikand, PhD Candidate, University of Washington
[1] Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2010, 198.
Images: Cage-corset, 2007, Naiza Khan, Metal and fabric, 11 13/16 x 11 13/16 x 11 13/16 in., Purchased with funds from Dipti and Rakesh Mathur, 2022.1.1, Ⓒ Artist or Artist’s Estate. Installation view of Embodied Change: South Asian Art Across Time at Seattle Asian Art Museum, 2021, photo: Natali Wiseman. New Clothes for the Emperor (II), 2009, Naiza Khan, Black & white digital photograph on archival Canson Infinity paper, 33 x 22 1/2 in., Purchased with funds from Dipti and Rakesh Mathur, 2022.1.2, Ⓒ Artist or Artist’s Estate.
Temporary Gallery Closures The Seattle Art Museum offers visitors a dynamic and ever-changing roster of exhibitions and installations throughout the year. To do this, the museum occasionally needs to close some galleries for reinstallation which will be happening in the coming months. Closing galleries isn’t something we like to do but we hope you’ll bear with us because the result will be new visual art experiences for you to enjoy.
COVID-19 Update Masks are no longer required to enter the museum, but visitors are encouraged to wear them for their personal safety and comfort. Additionally, the vaccine verification requirement to enter the museum is no longer in effect per the latest guidance from Public Health—Seattle & King County.
Masks Encouraged Visitors are encouraged to wear them for their personal safety and comfort
Physical Distancing Reminder Keep at least six feet between your group and other visitors and staff
Prefer to wear a mask? SAM is offering a mask-required hour in the galleries for visitors that prefer to wear masks and be around others wearing masks. This will occur on the third Saturday of the month through October 15 from 9–10 am at Seattle Art Museum and Seattle Asian Art Museum. We will determine whether to extend the mask required hour beyond these initial dates based on the trajectory of COVID-19 and if there is demand for this additional hour. Online advance purchase is recommended.
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Seattle Art Museum Wednesday–Sunday, 10 am–5 pm The first Thursday of the month is free.
Seattle Asian Art Museum Thursday–Sunday, 10 am–5 pm The last Friday of the month is free.
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When You Arrive
Seattle Art Museum: Enter at First and Union. The south entrance (the Hammering Man entrance) and the South Hall will be closed.
Seattle Asian Art Museum: Follow marked entrance and exit signs at front doors to maintain one-way visitor traffic and physical distancing.
Check the entry time on your ticket Please have your ticket ready to be scanned at the entrance to the galleries. Tickets to Alberto Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure are timed. If you are more than 15 minutes late to the exhibition, we may not be able to accommodate entry.
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Expect some areas to be closed Seattle Art Museum: The Ann P. Wyckoff Education Resource Center, Bullitt Library, and children play areas will also be closed. Seattle Asian Art Museum: The Education Studio, Community Gallery, Chen Community Meeting Room, and Library will be closed.
Wash your hands and use hand sanitizers We have instituted rigorous cleaning procedures using EPA registered disinfectants throughout the museum, with a special focus on high-touch and high-traffic areas and restrooms. We ask that you do your part by washing your hands frequently and using hand sanitizers located throughout the museum.
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We are working hard to make visitors and staff comfortable during their visit and hope to see you soon!
In celebration of Black History Month this February, we gave our Instagram followers an up-close look at artworks in Lauren Halsey, on view at our downtown location through July 17. Check back next month, as we choose a new SAM gallery to walk through as part of our live #SAMSnippets series and appreciate art from any location!
Highly attuned to growing gentrification in her neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles, 2021 Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Award winner Lauren Halsey, who studied architecture and art, celebrates Black culture by making space for representations of the people and places around her as a method of creative resistance. In her installation at SAM, the artist shows works in which proud declarations of Black-owned businesses intermingle with images of Egyptian pyramids, the Sphinx, pharaohs, and queens, all drawn from a personal archive Halsey has developed through research and community interactions.
Photo: Natali Wiseman.
The tour begins with a look at four carved gypsum relief panels which line the perimeter of the gallery. These four works—all untitled and created between 2019 and 2022—are reminiscent of temple walls. Each of these panels features fictional advertisements for local Black-owned businesses in South Central Los Angeles.
The final work shown in the video acts as the centerpiece to the gallery. This large-scale sculpture of colorful boxes stacked atop one another represent the metaphorical building blocks for future architecture while resonating with imagery from the past.
Photo: Natali Wiseman.
Through her archive and daily life, Halsey strives to record the unique expressions of her neighborhood before the forces of capital erase them. Placing these hyperlocal portraits, signs, and imagery in the context of real and imagined histories, the artist remixes ancient and contemporary cultures into a unifying vision.
One of the most influential Black American artists of the 20th century, Jacob Lawrence spent the latter years of his life living and working in Seattle, serving as a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Art. In 1977, seven years after his move, Lawrence painted The Studio, depicting himself in the attic of his Seattle studio. The Studio narrates Lawrence’s artistic journey of growing up in Harlem, moving westward, and his subsequent artistic development. Outside the window, Harlem tenement buildings scatter the view, connecting his relationships between Seattle and New York. In a 2000 interview, Jacob Lawrence spoke about this painting:
Yes, that’s my studio here, in Seattle. Not in this apartment, but it’s Seattle. And this is what my studio looked like going up the steps. And my neighbor, our neighbor is an architect. And these buildings back here bring somewhat of the tenements of New York. In reality, this is an empty wall. So I decided to put that back, to use that as a sort of symbol of my thinking of the big city, of New York.1
Lawrence grew up in Harlem after his mother relocated the family there in 1930 when he was thirteen years old. Wanting to encourage her son’s creative expression, his mother enrolled him in an after-school arts program shortly after their arrival in New York. Due to financial hardships, Lawrence was unable to finish his high school education. Yet, he continued to take classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, where he was mentored by the painter Charles Alston.
Lawrence’s upbringing in Harlem was one of the most formative periods of his life, and he frequently referred to those memories and experiences in his work, regardless of his geographical location. He specialized in scenes from Black American life and culture, taking inspiration from the stories of elders within his communities and transferring them into his paintings.
While best known for his paintings of workers from various professions, The Studio offers a glimpse into his work as an artist and teacher as he welcomes the viewer into his own studio. Lawrence referred to his style of painting as “dynamic cubism,” inspired by the colors and shapes of Harlem. The Studio showcases his use of vivid colors, bold linear movements, and mastery of geometric form.
– Kari Karsten, SAM Emerging Museum Professional Curatorial Intern
“On a recent Sunday afternoon, three art critics sniffed, prowled, jumped and climbed their way through a new exhibit. Khione gravitated to a colorful installation featuring cloth orbs and plastic linked chains. Oliver climbed on top of an austere, spiraling sculpture made out of 4x4s, plywood, masonite and carpet. And Luna sat in a small separate room, processing her impressions.”
Inter/National News
Via Artnet: Another Super Bowl “friendly wager” of art sees a Robert Henri painting from the Cincinnati Art Museum heading to LA’s Huntington Library. SAM’s adventures in Super Bowl-ing in 2014 and 2015 are mentioned.
Tatler names “4 Power Couples of Design” from history, including the architects of the 1991 Seattle Art Museum building, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi.
“Halsey said it was one of her dreams in life to design a stage for Clinton to perform on that would match the scale of the maximalist P-Funk concerts of the 1970s. And why not? If nothing else, Clinton’s career has been an ongoing argument that anything is possible. He has a handful of live performances on the horizon, and when asked if he was planning to ever go back on tour, Clinton responded, ‘Oh, hell, yeah.’”
An artist whose work defies easy definition, Aaron Fowler’s “memoiristic, maximalist bricolage” sculptures are comprised of carefully sourced found materials and second-hand objects that have the “feel of human in them.”1 Taking compositional cues from American history painting, religious iconography, and family lore, Fowler’s work includes both imagined narratives and real stories from his own experiences as well as those of his friends and family.
Me and Pops—included in the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition at SAM, titled Aaron Fowler: Into Existence—depicts the artist in the foreground, ironing used clothing that will later be incorporated into a sculpture. He works alongside his father, a relationship that he hoped to continue building. The background includes references to other works (then in-progress) that were also included in his SAM exhibition—a nod to moments in the past as well as hopes for the future—while the canopy structure overhead refers to a shared dream with his father to build a home on their own land. Fowler describes his mirrored self-portrait as a means by which others can see themselves within the personal dreams he is relaying, lending them a more universal message: “I’m having these experiences to share with others…So whether it’s good, bad or ugly—I feel these experiences I’m having are not just for myself.”
A sense of optimism, ambition, and aspiration underscore Fowler’s practice. Me and Pops, like so many of his works, depicts a poignant subject and action that the artist wished to manifest, borrowing from the words of encouragement spoken by his grandmother: “you need to speak it into existence.”
– Elisabeth Smith, SAM Collections and Provenance Associate
The SAM Research Libraries strive to develop digital collections that represent our unique holdings. Here, volunteer Kirsten Painter, discusses her efforts to digitize a unique set of slides that represents the 18th century French porcelain collection of two local collectors, Dr. Ulrich and Stella Fritzsche, and features objects now on view in SAM’s Porcelain Room. Digitization is a key method of preservation for unstable photographic media, and, in this case, preservation was especially necessary as this slide collection is the only visual evidence we have of the collection prior to it being dispersed to museums throughout the world.
A new digital exhibit from the Seattle Art Museum Research Libraries offers an illustrated introduction to the world of eighteenth-century porcelain. The exhibit showcases the Dr. Ulrich and Stella Fritzsche Collection of eighteenth-century works from the Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain Manufactories, including several objects now in the Seattle Art Museum.
Snake-Handled Bowl, ca. 1750, Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, gift of Ulrich and Stella Fritzsche, photo by Ted D’Arms, SAM Online Object Collection no. 95.53.
The exhibit offers a fresh view of collecting itself, including Dr. Fritzsche’s philosophy of art collecting and illustrated anecdotes about several of the pieces in his collection. In Dr. Fritzsche’s view, the collector is merely a “temporary guardian” of the art: “You live with the artwork for a while, you preserve it, then you pass it on. It doesn’t belong to you forever.”1
With high-resolution images of several dozen exquisite porcelain pieces, accompanied by explanations of décor, style, color, marks, and historical context, the Fritzsche Porcelain Exhibit also serves as a useful digital guide to anyone wishing to learn more about porcelain history or terminology.
Two Bouillard Cups (gobelets Bouillard), 1753, Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, painted by André-Vincent Vielliard aîné (active 1752–90), photo by Ted D’Arms.
With high-resolution images of several dozen exquisite porcelain pieces, accompanied by explanations of décor, style, color, marks, and historical context, the Fritzsche Porcelain Exhibit also serves as a useful digital guide to anyone wishing to learn more about porcelain history or terminology.
Diamond-Shaped Breakfast Service (déjeuner losange), 1763, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, painted by Charles Louis Méreaud (active 1756–80), photo by Ted D’Arms.
Dr. Fritzsche’s journey as a collector began by chance in 1974, when he happened upon a small tea set in a Seattle antique store run by the artist Jay Steensma; Dr. Fritzsche credits Steensma for inspiring him to become a collector.2
Square Openwork Tea Service (déjeuner carré à jour), 1761, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, painted by Louis-Jean Thévenet père (active c. 1741–77), photo by Ted D’Arms.
From then on, Dr. Fritzsche aimed not just to assemble a significant collection of porcelain, but also to conduct extensive research about each piece: his philosophy of collecting involved “chasing a piece down and finding out everything about it that I could.”3
Tea Canister (boîte à thé), n.d., Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, photo by Ted D’Arms.
It was on Dr. Fritzsche’s initiative that the French Porcelain Society was founded by Kate Foster (Lady Davson) in 1984.4 Read more about Dr. Fritzsche’s experience as a collector here.
Pomade Pot with Ornaments (pot à pommade à ornements), 1766, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, painted by Étienne Evans (active 1752–1806), photo by Ted D’Arms.
Among the items highlighted in the Fritzsche Porcelain Exhibit are seven objects in SAM’s collection, on display in the Porcelain Room, such as the magnificent blue Flower Vase (cuvette à fleurs Courteille), which originally belonged to Madame de Pompadour, and is notable for its painting of the maritime Battle of Solebay. Julie Emerson credits Dr. Fritzsche himself for unearthing this object’s relation to Madame de Pompadour’s inventory, while the vase was part of his collection.5
Flower Vase (cuvette à fleurs Courteille), 1755–56, Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, painted by Louis-Denis Armand aîné (active 1745–88), photo by Ted D’Arms, SAM Online Object Collection no. 99.8.
More easily overlooked, but exquisite in its minuteness, is the Three-Legged Teapot(théière à trois pieds), located in the “Early Porcelain” case on the left (northern) wall of the Porcelain Room.6 Its white body, gilded with a fanciful bird design, stands on paw-like feet with gilded toes. Its surprisingly tiny size could be due to the eighteenth-century custom of brewing a small, concentrated amount of tea, to be later diluted with hot water,7 a custom still prevalent in Russia, among other places. Dr. Fritzsche tells the colorful story of how he acquired this rare teapot in Paris here.
Three-Legged Teapot (théière à trois pieds), ca. 1750–51 (body); 1753–60 (lid), Vincennes & Sèvres Porcelain Manufactories, gift of Ulrich and Stella Fritzsche, photo by Ted D’Arms, SAM Online Object Collection no. 99.71.
Just to the right of the little Teapot in the “Early Porcelain” case is the elegant Sugar Spoon(cuillière à sucre), whose dual gilded handles are intertwined like sinuous vines. Such spoons, designed most likely by Jean-Claude Duplessis, the artistic director at Sèvres, were exceedingly rare due to the fragility of the handle.8 Stella Fritzsche notes that this spoon was one of her favorite pieces in their entire collection. Read more about Stella Fritzsche’s memories of their collecting years here.
Sugar Spoon (cuillière à sucre), 1752–54, Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, gift of Ulrich and Stella Fritzsche, photo by Ted D’Arms, SAM Online Object Collection, no. 2005.177.
Another inherently fragile structure is the footed eggcup on a narrow stem; like the spoon, it is rare because easily breakable, so this style was later replaced with a more durable footless eggcup model.9 Two such footed Eggcups (coquetiers à pied), on slender stems, each adorned with colorful painted flowers, are in the “Botanicals” display case, on the right (southern) wall of the Porcelain Room.
Two Eggcups (coquetiers à pied), ca. 1755, Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, gift of Ulrich and Stella Fritzsche, photo by Ted D’Arms, SAM Online Object Collection nos. 95.54.1, 95.54.2.
The Litron Cup (gobelet litron), delicately painted with Chinoiserie décor, is an eye-catching embodiment of the eighteenth-century fad for the Chinese style. It stands prominently at the center of the “West Meets East” display case in the Porcelain Room (left/northern wall). This teacup shape, the Litron Cup(gobelet litron), was the most frequently produced at the Sèvres factory; its straight-sided, cylindrical form was modeled after a traditional wooden measuring cup for salt and grains.10
Litron Cup (Litron Cup; gobelet litron), 1778, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, gift of Ulrich and Stella Fritzsche, photo by Ted D’Arms, SAM Online Object Collection no. 2005.179.
The Fritzsche Collection contains several examples of the litron teacup style. Read more in the exhibit about other shapes of teapots and teacups (Calabre Teapot, Bouillard Cup), and eighteenth-century tea-drinking habits.
Litron Cup and Saucer (gobelet litron et soucoupe), ca. 1764, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, painted by Fallot (active 1764–90), photo by Ted D’Arms.
Aside from the objects from the Fritzsche Collection now in SAM’s Porcelain Room (read the complete list here), the Fritzsche Collection contains almost 100 images of porcelain now residing in museums and collections worldwide.
The rich histories of selected distinctive pieces, such as the Catherine the Great Service, are highlighted in the exhibit. Some objects have unexpected backstories. The hunting scene on the pink Wine Bottle Cooler was likely inspired by Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s tapestries, and may represent King Louis XV on a stag hunt.11 Read more in the exhibit regarding the way scenes of hunting parks underscored Louis XV’s domestic agenda and persona as the “hunter-king.”12
Wine Bottle Cooler (seau à bouteille), 1758, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, photo by Ted D’Arms.
The Fritzsche Collection contains a rich variety of bird imagery, from the scientifically inspired Buffon birds on Dodin’s Partridge-Eye Plate(assiette, œil de perdrix) to the fantastical, extravagantly plumed birds on pieces by Thévenet and Chappuis.
Delving back into the forgotten lives of the porcelain painters and gilders who decorated these objects, the exhibit also attends to life within the factory community itself. Some of the artists arrived at Vincennes or Sèvres as apprentices, as young as age nine, and stayed there for their entire lives; their wives and children often worked at the factory as well.13 The exhibit includes biographies of these little-known figures and an illustrated sampling of the evocative, mysterious painters’ marks that have fascinated porcelain scholars for generations.
Marks for Plate from the Catherine the Great Service, 1782, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, painter Jean-Baptiste Tandart aîné (active ca. 1754–1803), gilder Michel-Barnabé Chauvaux aîné (active ca. 1753–88), photo by Ted D’Arms.
Focusing also on technique, the exhibit discusses methods for firing and glazing, the usage of different shades of blue, and a variety of decorative methods, such as œil de perdrix, rose marbré, vermiculé, and caillouté.
Duplessis Tray (plateau Duplessis), ca. 1765, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, photo by Ted D’Arms.
The Fritzsches documented their collection with an array of slides, taken by the photographer Ted D’Arms, which they have donated to SAM’s Dorothy Stimson Bullitt Library, along with Dr. Fritzsche’s extensive Collector’s Notes, and the Fritzsche Library on Decorative Arts, comprising his entire collection of scholarly reference works on porcelain.
Litron Cup with Dolphin Handles (gobelet litron), Detail, n.d., Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, photo by Ted D’Arms.
The Fritzsche Porcelain Digital Collection was created between 2017 and 2020. The project included digitization of Dr. Fritzsche’s slides, interviews of the Fritzsches from 2018–19 about their lives as collectors, research into the historical context and style of pieces in the collection, and creation of an exhibition website meant to provide broader context to this magnificent collection, both within the eighteenth century when these objects were made, and within the twentieth century when they were most recently collected.
Half Wine Bottle Cooler (seau à demi-bouteille), n.d., Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, photo by Ted D’Arms.
– Kirsten Painter, SAM Volunteer, Dorothy Stimson Bullitt Library
1 Ulrich Fritzsche, interview conducted and transcribed by Kirsten Painter, Seattle Art Museum Bullitt Library, November 12, 2019.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 “Inspired by the collector Ulrich Fritzche of Seattle, who organized a first informal dinner, our founder’s goal was to bring together collectors, museum curators, dealers, auction specialists and enthusiasts so they could enjoy each other’s company, share their passion for French porcelain, and promote its study” (“Our History,” The French Porcelain Society, 2021, https://www.thefrenchporcelainsociety.com/about-us/our-history/).
5 Julie Emerson, “Victory at Sea: A Vincennes Cuvette Painted with a Battle-Scene,” French Porcelain Society Journal 3 (2007): 66n19; Ulrich Fritzsche, “Ulrich and Stella Fritzsche Collection of Vincennes–Sèvres Porcelain,” unpublished manuscript, Seattle Art Museum Library Archives/Special Collections (Seattle, 2018), 7, https://samlibraries.omeka.net/items/show/2991.
7 Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie (1757–80), cited in Rosalind Savill, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain (London: Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 1988), 2:490.
8 Svend Eriksen, Davids Samling: Fransk porcelæn/The David Collection: French Porcelain (Copenhagen: Davids Samling, 1980), 66; Svend Eriksen and Geoffrey de Bellaigue, Sèvres Porcelain: Vincennes and Sèvres 1740-1800, trans. R. J. Charleston (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 275.
9 Eriksen and De Bellaigue, Sèvres Porcelain, 305.
10 Rosalind Savill, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain (London: Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 1988), 2:501.
11 Ulrich Fritzsche, “Ulrich and Stella Fritzsche Collection of Vincennes–Sèvres Porcelain,” unpublished manuscript, Seattle Art Museum Library Archives/Special Collections (Seattle, 2018), 14, https://samlibraries.omeka.net/items/show/2991; The Huntington Art Museum Catalog Online, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens (San Marino, CA), no. 27.52, accessed August 2021, http://emuseum.huntington.org/collections.
12 Julie Anne Plax, “J.-B. Oudry’s Royal Hunts and Louis XV’s Hunting Park at Compiègne: Landscapes of Power, Prosperity and Peace,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 37, no. 2 (2017): 102–19, doi: 10.1080/14601176.2016.1169709; Colin Bailey, “A Long Working Life, Considerable Research and Much Thought: An Introduction to the Art and Career of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755),” in Oudry’s Painted Menagerie: Portraits of Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Mary G. Morton (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), 10.
We wrapped up SAM Photo Club for Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective with a whopping 1,517 posts contributed by photographers from all over the world. To take part, all you had to do was tag your photo with #SAMPhotoClub on Instagram in one of the defining categories of Cunningam’s long and illustrious career: Portraits, botanicals, street, and dance photography. Then we invited members of the Cunningham advisory board to select their favorites to be featured here! We also worked with photographer Ashley Armitage to spread the word about SAM Photo Club and she shared some of her own images from each category that we’ve gathered selections of in a slideshow below. Ashley catapulted herself into photography and directing at 15 years old after observing the lack of diversity and representation in the media. Her work dismantles beauty standards and pushes outdated societal boundaries. Stay tuned for the next round of SAM Photo club, coming soon!
For me, the photographer took this character study to a different level with the inclusion of the Marilyn Monroe graphic on the women’s garment. The juxtaposition between the “real” of the subject and the “artificial” of Marilyn’s pose is striking
This photograph rings the bell for authenticity. It puts me in the setting, providing insight into the subjects work place and work day.
The framing, the pose, the camera angle and the contrast all speak to me. To my eye, this photo carries some of the spirit of Cunningham’s work.
The lighting. The lighting. And the lighting. I love the lighting on this photo.
Robert Wade is a photo-based artist and event/performance photographer. He has a graduate degree from Stanford University in Communications and, in previous lives, was an information systems project manager, community college psychology instructor, management consultant, web site developer, restaurateur, and DJ. A long-time trustee of the Henry Art Gallery, Robert served as president of the Seattle Art Museum’s Contemporary Art Council for six years and is a former board member of the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra and the Center on Contemporary Art. Among Robert’s clients are the Seattle Symphony, the Seattle Opera, the Seattle Art Museum, the Northwest African American Museum, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the City of Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, and the Seattle Public Library.
The clever use of focus and subject placement gives this composition a story with the “lead” mushroom in sharp focus leading the others through a field. The soft sepia tone and dark edges gives the plot mystery as if they are travelling surreptitiously in perilous circumstances.
There is something entirely comic about this image of a desperate leaf clinging with arms stretched out for dear life. The rainy window pattern provides a nice contrast to the vividly colored leaf, and the dark blurry lines from the tree outside add extra energy and movement to the composition.
Simple but powerful, negative space is used nicely to put the spotlight on the alium bud getting ready to break open. The blurry white “echo” behind the bud hints at even more anticipation of what could come, and adds visual interest to a composition that would be almost too simple without it.
SuJ’n Chon is a photographer, writer, multidisciplinary artist, and co-founder of IDEA Odyssey, a visual arts collective for emerging artists whose works focus on diversity, culture, and identity. She is a community advisory committee member of SAM’s Imogen Cunningham exhibit. In her professional life, SuJ’n has served in administration roles for nonprofit and government agencies since 1991 and is currently the principal of Novum Lux, which primarily supports those doing work at the intersection of arts, education, and social justice.
This could have doubled in our Dance Photography competition, but if Cunningham could blur boundaries, so can I! This image has such a spirit of whimsy and humor that is present in a lot of Cunningham’s street photography.
A true “stolen picture,” as Cunningham would say—a very clever composition, caught in a perfectly candid moment. I also love the use of reflection in the shop window, a device Cunningham used often in her street photography as well.
The f/64 artists would love the sharpness of this image! I like how the figure, the puddles on the street, and the lines of the graffiti are all so graphically delineated, almost like a drawing.
Where street photography meets portraiture. This image strikes me as in spirit with Cunningham’s ideas of capturing the “inner biography” of her subject, made all the more poignant as a chance encounter.
Movement, chance, and a little bit of humor—this speaks to so many of Cunningham’s’ street images!
Carrie Dedon is Assistant Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at Seattle Art Museum and curated SAM’s exhibition of Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective.
Dance photography selected by Catherine Nueva España
Though dance is often social or performed in groups, some of my strongest dance memories involve being alone, working through a difficult bit of choreography. It feels that to me that this dancer is asking us for some space and quiet time so they can focus.
Many of Imogen Cunningham’s artist portraits convey both the essence of the person and their artistry. This photograph struck me as both portrait-like and a demonstration of the dancer’s artistry.
It has become a cliché to say, but I do think it is important to dance like no-one is watching! This photograph describes the joy of dance: being out in public, dancing in the middle of the street, masked, with lots of people around you, spontaneous, sweaty…you can almost hear the music.
If Imogen Cunningham took ballet as a child, I imagine that this would be her self-portrait: a sense of purpose, beauty, and subtle use of shadow and light.
As an audience member, I love seeing performers moving close together like this – each dancer senses their own individuality and is aware of the charged space between them and others. This could easily be a city street scene as well.
Catherine Nueva España is the Interim Executive Director at On The Boards and was the former Executive Director at Velocity Dance Center. She started dancing at age 6, trained in Manila, New York, and London, and considers herself a lifelong dance student. She supports artists and arts organizations through her service as a WA State Arts Commissioner, grants panelist, and consultant. She enjoyed her time as a community advisor for SAM’s Imogen Cunningham exhibition, when her love of dance, photography, and community collaboration came together.
– Chelsea Werner-Jatzke, SAM Digital Marketing Manager
Image: Installation view of Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective at Seattle Art Museum, 2021, photo: Natali Wiseman
“Support arts in long road to recovery.” That’s the message from the Seattle Times editorial board, reviewing the data from the recent COVID Cultural Impact Study conducted by ArtsFund. SAM participated in the study, and director and CEO Amada Cruz was interviewed about SAM’s recovery process so far.
“While there is reason to hope the worse days of the pandemic may soon be behind us, the arts community faces years of uncertainty…How quickly creative organizations recover has a big impact on the region’s quality of life. A vibrant arts scene is good for the economy, good for the community, and good for the soul.”
“The museum’s 2017 Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, a trailblazer in the now wildly popular genre of immersive art installations, exemplifies its ambitious global reach, while its 2021–22 retrospective on the work of photographer Imogen Cunningham speaks to its enduring local commitments.”
Dusty Somers for the Seattle Times on the forthcoming shows by Seattle Shakespeare Company: Hamlet and As You Like It, both performed entirely by actors of color and using the Depression-era Works Progress Administration’s support for theater as a framing device.
“We could have just done it set here in present day, but we were like, ‘There’s an opportunity to tell a greater story here,’ ” [diversity programming coordinator Lamar ] Legend said. “There are just too many parallels with that period of history and the one we’re currently in.”
“The exhibition is rooted in posthuman thought,” Alemani said. “Many contemporary artists are imagining a posthuman condition challenging the presumed Western condition using the white man as a measure of all things. They propose difference alliances, fantastic bodies. This is why the exhibition includes a large amount of female and gender nonconforming artists.”
What if you turned on the faucet in your bathroom or kitchen and no water flowed out? How far would you have to go to obtain enough water for your family’s needs for one day? How much do we take our immediate access to clean water for granted?
Aida Muluneh was hired by an international organization, WaterAid, to help shed light on the extreme inequities in access to clean water. WaterAid has the statistics to make their case—working in 34 countries for the poorest and most marginalized people—who they have served since 1981.1 One water historian contends that, “the struggle to command increasingly scarce, usable water resources is set to shape the destinies of societies and the world order of the 21st century.”2
Called upon to be a truth teller, Muluneh created a series of twelve striking photographs that focus on the burden women bear in finding and carrying water. She set the stage for most of the photographs in an Ethiopian region called the Danakil Depression, one of the hottest and driest places on Earth. Its salt lakes and the air and gas from hot sulfur springs and boiling lava lakes accentuate the sense of being on another planet. In Distant Echoes of Dreams, women move across this primordial geography carrying water in clay pots tied to their backs.
Star Shine, Moon Glow, 2018, Aida Muluneh, Archival digital photograph, 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.
I first saw Muluneh’s series in London and heard the artist speak about it, as you can too in this short segment. This photograph was just recently acquired into SAM’s collection and will be on view in Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water, opening March 18. The small image on your screen does not reveal the details, texture, and visceral impact of the Muluneh’s original work. Accompanying this image in SAM’s galleries will be a video that takes you to Ethiopia with the artist as she creates this indelible series.
– Pam McClusky, SAM Oliver E. and Pamela F. Cobb Curator of African and Oceanic Art
Imogen Cunningham often took photographs of unsuspecting strangers on the street. Uncomfortable with confrontation, she found beauty in capturing daily public life without interference. At times, she used windows, spun around, or bent over and pretended to be searching for something in her purse to distract from the sound of her camera’s click. She called these surreptitious photographs “stolen pictures.”
Double Image, Sutter St. and Fillmore marks a stark contrast from Cunningham’s typical street photographs. In this image, her subject—a Black woman dressed in a long coat, stockings, and heels—has spotted Cunningham. Waiting for the bus, her right eyebrow is raised as she looks directly into the camera.
The woman’s stare is intensified as the image is cleverly reflected off of a storefront window, dividing the composition down the center, and creating a “doubled” illusion. Cunningham was fascinated with this effect and often used mirrors or glass to create this perspective.
In this audio recording produced by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Chris Johnson, chair of the photography department at the California College of the Arts, discusses Cunningham’s “stolen pictures” and the changing dynamic shared between Cunningham and her subject after being spotted. Tune in to all 13 recordings as part of the free smartphone tour of Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective when you visit the exhibition at our downtown location through February 6.
Double Image, Sutter St. and Fillmore, ca. 1940
Narrator: Taken in Cunningham’s San Francisco neighborhood, this photograph captures two figures waiting for a bus. On the right, a man wearing a hat holds a paper bag. In the center, a woman stands dressed in a winter coat with her purse at her feet.
Chris Johnson: She’s giving Imogen a very strong direct gaze and there’s nothing reticent about that gaze and I think Imogen liked that because she was a strong outspoken woman herself.
Narrator: The image is doubled in the reflection of the storefront window on the left. Cunningham was fascinated with this effect, something she first encountered in the compositions of eighteenth-century Japanese prints. She often used mirrors or glass to create this perspective. The doubling effect places the woman in the center of the image and creates a dynamic between individuals, including the photographer.
Chris Johnson: The implied relationship between the photographer and the woman who’s giving her that gaze… between the black woman and the white man who is presumably ignoring both of them,Imogen and this black woman are in their own world. The white man is in his other world. He has his back turned to us. So Imogen is affirming her allegiance to this black [woman] and I really think the meaning of the image resides there.
Narrator: These “stolen pictures”, as Cunningham called her street scenes, were sometimes taken without the subject’s knowledge and represented a stylistic departure for her. But in this case, the central figure directly confronts Cunningham, and us.
Chris Johnson: Isn’t this a clear example of photographic seeing, you know, the way that the camera sees differently than the way eyeballs see?
Welcome back to #SAMSnippets! In this live series on our Instagram you get an up-close look at works in SAM’s permanent and semi-permanent installations. Each month, we choose a new gallery to walk through, offering you art appreciation wherever you may be!
In January, we featured a diverse collection of artworks from Embodied Change: South Asian Art Across Time. The first special exhibition to open in the remodeled and renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum, the featured works explore social, political, and religious perceptions of humanity and the human body through the lens of past and contemporary South Asian artists. Many of them utilize female and feminized forms in a myriad of ways, including as a devotional object, as a mode of self-representation, and to question the safety of public spaces. Watch the video now to get a peek at what’s on view at the Asian Art Museum now and learn more about the works shown below. Get your tickets now to see the entire exhibition before it closes on July 10!
Photo: Natali Wiseman
The tour begins with a look at Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s Kali (I’m a Mess). For more than 30 years, Burman has used a variety of mixed media to advocate for female empowerment, racial equity, and her Punjabi heritage. Kali (I’m a Mess) was a part of Burman’s recent installation titled Remembering A Brave New World, superimposed over the Tate Britain’s entrance. Perched atop the building’s pediment, the Hindu goddess of destruction and protection obfuscated the statue of Britannia. The text above Kali reads, “I’m a Mess,” a message usually not associated with Kali. Burman takes Kali seriously as a potent symbol of liberation and rebellion and uses this text to speak to political and social concerns that occurred in 2020. Kali (I’m a Mess) is one of a few works in Embodied Change which was acquired into SAM’s permanent collection as a result of being included in this exhibition.
As we enter the exhibition, the camera pans across five earthenware and clay terracotta figures. Originating from the Indus Valley civilization in modern day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, these works date back to 2600–1900 BCE. Archaeological digs in the area have revealed numerous small, female figures, usually sculpted with wide hips, small breasts, stocky appendages, and abundant jewelry. Early scholars deified these figures as “mother goddesses” (a manifestation of Devi), creating a tie between past religious beliefs and present-day Hindu practitioners. This interpretation has been reevaluated, questioning whether these items were truly representative of religiosity. Their meaning remains a mystery but the near absence of male figures suggest the body held significant importance.
Next, we see two photographs by Brendan Fernandes: As One III and As One IX. Fernandes is Canadian of Kenyan and Goan (South Asian) descent, and his last name evokes the complex circuits of exchanges between the Portuguese colonial apparatus and western India. In his work, Fernandes is invested in bodies that move, showing that the human body has a range of permutations, meanings, and identities. The artist and his practices does not hold a fixed identity or a singular idea of Europe, Africa, or India. Overall, he envisions “a different process of communication,” one that is body-driven.
These two photographs were created locally. Fernandes used dancers from the Pacific Northwest Ballet in the auditorium of the Seattle Art Museum alongside African masks from SAM’s permanent collection. Using gestures derived from classical French ballet, the two dancers address the African masks with formality and etiquette. Compositionally, the dancers’ heads are hidden, which allows for the masks to stand in for the dancers’ missing faces. Through such juxtapositions, Fernandes forges a bridge between the inanimate and the animate.
Adeela Suleman’s Helmet is part of a series repurposing kitchen objects. Made from utensils including a colander and tiffin (lunch box), the form is gendered as it uses objects typically located in the interior space of the kitchen, often associated with female domesticity. In performance photographs, Suleman dons these helmets, suggesting that women need special armor in their day-to-day movement in the public arena. The rigid and hard helmets provide little real protection. One wonders how much protection Suleman wants her pieces to afford; she seems to gesture to the futility of such an attempt.
Photo: Natali Wiseman
In a glass pedestal adjacent to Suleman’s Helmet, we see Humaira Abid’s Sacred Games-I. Made entirely out of wood, the open suitcase contains clothes, a holy book, a cap, and prayer beads, all the possessions of a religious practitioner who is undertaking a spiritual journey. The gun that is placed alongside the belongings symbolizes both religious extremism and violence toward religion, including attacks on mosques, churches, and other religious buildings. In the artists’s own words, “all societies have extremists who twist religion as well as other social institutions and use it to their own benefit, to oppress women and vulnerable and defenseless people.”
The final section of the video is focused on portraits. Here, the featured artists use the theme of portraiture to challenge bodily ideals and the role of the female body in the arts.
The first portrait we see is B. Prabha’s Untitled. Active in the 1960s when there were few professional female artists, her trademark was elongated figures of rural women with a subdued color palette. Hailing from the small Indian village of Bela, near Nagpur, India, Prabha gravitated to rural village scenes. She painted lower caste women at work and at leisure. In this portrait, the unknown woman rests her back against a tree as she enjoys the company of a bird. Although Prabha typically depicted the silent labor of rural women to show their plight and suffering, she also endeavored to give them grace and personhood by depicting them enjoying moments of rest.
The camera next pans two works by Chila Kumari Singh Burman: Auto-Portrait, from Fly Girl series and Punjabi Rockers. In this first large collage work, Burman distorts her portrait through a range of different guises and manipulations. Her face is stretched, magnified, compressed, and painted with bright colors. Through the act of repetition and the reproduction of the print form, Burman crafts new personas, enacting fantasies of the self as the goddess Kali and as pop icons. As Burman explains, “These self portraits position the construction of racial and sexual identity as a process that is crafted and fluid within the process of representation. My manipulation of the photographic image questions the idea of the photograph as a document of the empirical reality to reveal ‘an image of myself.'” In other words, Burman resists a singular identity. Through the act of printmaking, she can reconstruct multivalent identities for herself.
Photo: Natali Wiseman
In Punjabi Rockers, Burman, a member of the British Black Arts Movement, mines both South Asian histories and pop culture to overwhelm and challenge Euro-American perceptions of South Asian women. She has declared, “My work is about reclaiming the image of Asian women, moving away from the object of the defining gaze, toward a position where I, [an] Asian woman, become the subject of display. My self-portraits construct a femininity that resists the racist stereotype of the passive, exotic Asian woman, imprisoned by male patriarchal culture.” Together, these two prints burst forth with levity and joy to convey Burman’s political message of empowerment.
We then see Rekha Rodwittiya’s Untitled. Consistently, Rodwittiya paints female figures with vibrant, bold colors. The scale of her portraits tends to be quite monumental to celebrate the female form. Even in such large compositions, a sense of intimacy is present. In this canvas, a local schoolgirl shows off her spinning top. With her content smile, she is both anonymous and knowable. Regarding her practice, Rodwittiya states, “I live and breathe as a feminist so therefore that is the prism through which I perceive everything around me, and so therefore it would patina my art as well.”
The final work in the video is Mithu Sen’s Miss Macho (Self Portrait), from the False Friends series. Sen paints a mustache on her self-portrait along with overgrown floral vines in her hair and a phallic building on the bridge of her nose. Consistently throughout her practice, Sen applies a confrontational approach to topics related to the body, including sex. This work is part of the series called False Friends, in which Sen asked strangers to take photographs of her. According to Sen, during her childhood, she was considered the “literal black sheep” of her family since she was visibly darker-skinned than her light-skinned female family members. Here, Sen’s face occupies the entire canvas, making space for herself in her social and professional world. Her gaze is both otherworldly and visceral.
– Lily Hansen, SAM Marketing Content Creator
Video Artworks: Kali (I’m a Mess), Chila Kumari Singh Burman, 2020, 6mm 12v silicone LED neon, galvanized weld mesh, 12v switch mode transformers, IP67 plastic box, 137 13/16 x 70 7/8 × 1 3/16 in. (180 × 35 × 3 cm), Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis Acquisition Fund for Global and Contemporary Art, 2021.25. Goddess Figurine, India, Earthenware, 2300–1750 BCE, Earthenware, 4 3/8 x 1 3/4 x 11/16 in. (11.11 x 4.45 x 1.75 cm), Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 41.23. Half Figure of a Goddess, India, Earthenware, 2300–1750 BCE, Earthenware, 2 3/4 x 3 x 1 in. (6.99 x 7.62 x 2.54 cm), Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 41.24. Fragmentary Figure, India, Terracotta, ca. 3rd millennium BCE–2nd century CE, Terracotta, 7 1/2 x 2 5/8 x 2 in. (19.05 x 6.67 x 5.08 cm), Gift in honor of Millard B. Rogers, 93.31. Fragmentary Figure, India, Terracotta, ca. 2nd–1st century BCE, Terracotta, 3 7/8 x 2 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. (9.84 x 6.35 x 3.81 cm) Overall h.: 4 3/4 in. Overall w.: 2 3/4 in., Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 39.36. Fragmentary Figure, India, Terracotta, ca. 3rd millennium BCE–2nd century CE, Terracotta, 4 1/8 x 1 3/4 x 3/4 in. (10.48 x 4.45 x 1.91 cm), Gift in honor of Millard B. Rogers, 93.32. As One III, Brendan Fernandes, 2017, Digital print, 34 x 48 in., Gift of Christopher and Alida Latham, 2019.27.1. As One IX, Brendan Fernandes, 2017, Digital print, 34 x 48 in., Gift of Christopher and Alida Latham, 2019.27.2. Helmet, Adeela Suleman, 2008, Metal with foam and cloth, Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. Sacred Games-1, Humaira Abid, 2020, Carved pine and wenge woods, Collection of Christopher and Alida Lantham. Untitled, B. Prabha, ca. 1960s, Oil on canvas, Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. Auto-Portrait, from Fly Girl series, Chila Kumari Singh Burman, 1993, Mixed media and laser printer, Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. Punjabi Rockers, Chila Kumari Singh Burman, 1993, Mixed media and laser printer, Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. Untitled, Rekha Rodwittiya, ca. 1990s, Acrylic and oil on canvas, Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. Miss Macho (Self Portrait), from the False Friends series, Mithu Sen, 2007, Mixed media photocollage on archival paper, Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan.
“…this Market sits inside Seattle Art Museum, where you can now tear into a fried soft-shell crab in a bag amid ample lights and white-backdrop gallery vibes.”
The Stranger’s Chase Burns catches up on Sundance flicks; Matt McCormick’s short 2002 film the subconscious art of graffiti removal, narrated by Miranda July, is the one that sticks with him.
“The relationship between tagger and remover is an ongoing one. Often, a remover will cover an original tag, only for the tagger to return and tag on top of the remover’s masking. This back-and-forth can continue for years, with the remover coming back and using different shades of paint, creating a layered, more colorful image. This can be accidentally beautiful.”
Artnet reports: Art Spiegelman has spoken out about the banning of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus by a Tennessee school board.
“The district’s decision to censor the book, because it said the material was inappropriate for students, ‘has the breathe of autocracy and fascism about it,’ Spiegelman told CNN.”
Since 2005, Fred Tomaselli has developed a body of work in which he uses the front page of The New York Times as the starting point for fantastic and at times surreal or psychedelic collages. Transforming newsprint into complex abstractions, the artist simultaneously responds to and divorces his imagery from current events, addressing the absurdity of our ever-spiraling news cycles.
Monday, March 16, 2020 is an exemplar piece in this regard. Made in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tomaselli looked to the front page of the March 16 edition of TheNew York Times, turning a still-haunting headline and image into an altered and abstracted space. “FED CUTS RATES TO NEAR ZERO; VIRUS TOLL SOARS” hovers above a lone traveler in an eerily empty Grand Central Station, the void through which they pass transformed with a multi-colored rainbow arch. In describing the ambiguous tone of the image, the artist has said, “This woman is walking into the unknown. I wanted to make her really stark and make her really isolated, but I also wanted to talk about hope.”1
This print, made almost two years ago now, is a harrowing reminder of all that we have endured in the days and months since March 16, 2020. Still mired in a pandemic with COVID-19 rates soaring, it can be challenging to imagine a future beyond this. And yet, perhaps as Tomaselli suggests, this print—like all great art—can inspire and offer some hope that we will soon be on the other side.
– Elisabeth Smith, SAM Collections and Provenance Associate
Hands play a prominent role in the work of Imogen Cunningham. Many of her most recognizable photographs focus on the movement of hands and their connection to the body. In Hand Weaving with Hand, the shadow of a hand with spread fingers protrudes from the lower left side of the image. Although the majority of the photograph is composed of a thin, rumpled fabric with vertical stripes, it is the ambiguity of this shadowed hand which captures the viewer’s attention.
Tune in to this audio recording to hear nonbinary Black transfem choreographer and dancer Randy Ford explore Cunningham’s use of hands throughout her work and relate it to her own dance production, Queen Street. Hear this and other audio recordings as part of the free smartphone tour of Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospectivewhen you visit the Seattle Art Museum.
Hand Weaving with Hand, 1945
Narrator: While the right side of this photograph is dark, filled with billowing folds of a draped cloth, the left portion is backlit, and the fabric hangs flat. Behind the weaving, a light silhouettes a hand with fingers splayed. This hand is what first caught the eye of Seattle native Randy Ford, a dancer and choreographer.
Randy Ford: So I just think the hands are very interesting. You know, we create a lot of things with our hands. You know, we draw. We open doors. We close doors. We celebrate with our hands. They just play a really huge part in our lives and choreograph what we do every day. I don’t think of dance as just something that you do with your legs and your body and your torso. You know you can do a lot of expressing with just your hands, which is probably just why I again gravitated toward this shadow of a hand on this masterpiece of a sheet. The hands really kind of direct us a lot of places.
Narrator: In her portraits, Cunningham often zeroed in on hands—tickling the keys of a piano, delicately playing a violin, or shaping the rim of a clay pot. This singular, open palm appears to almost clap the suspended weaving. Is this the hand that made it? Is it presenting the cloth proudly… lovingly? As with so many of Cunningham’s photographs, the layering—in this case of fabric, lighting, and shadow—and ambiguity allow for multiple interpretations. Randy Ford, who recently told her own complex transition story in her dance production, Queen Street, can relate.
Randy Ford: I love making work that, is definitely visually appealing, but I also want people to realize what they’re looking at or maybe where their feelings are coming from. There’s definitely just a lot of depth within this simple-looking image and that’s why I chose it. It was very simple but still complex. It had like a little bit of a story. It invoked something about creation for me as a choreographer and director and an artist myself. I always kind of just wonder what are the beginnings of things? You know, things aren’t just the way they are just because they appear to us.
– Lily Hansen, SAM Marketing Content Creator
Photo: Hand Weaving with Hand, Imogen Cunningham, 1945. Gelatin silver print, Image: 13 1/4 x 9 1/2 in. Collection of The Imogen Cunningham Trust.
“Imogen was always after capturing a moment in time. It wasn’t a perfect moment—it was just a moment that spoke to her.”
– Meg Partridge
Hear Meg Partridge, Imogen Cunningham’s granddaughter and Director of the Imogen Cunningham Trust, discuss one of her favorite Cunningham photographs, Ruth Asawa Family and Sculpture. Capturing Asawa at work in her studio with her young children beside her, the photograph, explains Partridge, illustrates the close relationship Cunningham shared with the Asawa family and marks a contrast from many of the major themes Cunningham explored throughout her career.
Accompanying this image in the exhibition are seven sculptures created by Ruth Asawa herself. On view for the first time in Seattle and exclusive to this venue, the works demonstrate the inextricable link between these two artists as Cunningham’s photos of Asawa’s sculptures gained widespread attention for the artistic pursuits of both women.
“‘The thing that’s interesting is because this uncertainty is still in place, we still don’t know what those changes are going to be,’ Cruz said. ‘We have learned that we have to be nimble, and we’re learning to be nimble.’”
French fashion designer Thierry Mugler died at the age of 73. His sci-fi couture is currently on view at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris; see images from the show at Artnet.
“It’s exceedingly common for artists’ output in popular, ephemeral contexts—cartooning, illustrating, advertising, and the like—to be taken less seriously than their endeavors in more traditional artistic media. In this case, that needs to change, and Bearden’s images should be kept in mind as the conversation about Guston continues to play out.”
With photography becoming a more common medium than ever before, what can we learn from 20th century photographers like Imogen Cunningham’s whose careers were built on the use of film cameras? In partnership with South End Stories and Mr Santos Creations, this video follows three students from Baile Dior Studios—Yizjuani Watson, Andre Yancey, and Neveah Thompson—as they explore SAM’s ongoing special exhibition, Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective, draw personal connections, and respond through dance. See Cunningham’s works on view at our downtown location through February 6, 2022!
Director
Terrence Jeffrey Santos Regional Emmy Awardee for Cinematography (2016), The Otherside Documentary Design Director of Video Production, UW Athletics Marketing Department (2010-2015) @filipinxfoodseattle @musangtinos @anaktoykompany @loveandpicnics
Producers
Donte Felder is the founder and Executive Director at South End Stories where they focus on Trauma-Informed Arts Practice: Healing Through History and Creativity. Donte is a former SPS educator and has been the recipient of WEA’s Humanitarian Award as well as Washington’s Golden Apple Award. Donte comes from a family of seasoned educators and community leaders focused on pursuing social justice by developing anti-racist and anti-oppression practices in schools and communities. More information about Donte and South End Stories can be found at: https://www.southendstories-artsed.com/.
TiQuida “TQ” Spellman has been involved in dance and performing arts for over 20 years. The founder of Baile Dior Studios (Dance Golden Studios), the Pacific Northwest’s first dance studio to specialize in J-sette Majorette dance and focused on connecting youth to the benefits of attending historically Black colleges and universities. A love of performing arts, dance, and a degree in Educational Studies guides TiQuida’s mission to provide youth with self-esteem and courage to showcase their talents, creativity, and imagination. TiQuida works as an Arts Education Consultant and teaches a host of dance classes for youth and adults.
Speakers
What’s poppin’ y’all, the name is Andre, but I prefer to go by Drizzy Dre. I’m 21 years old, born and raised in Kent, WA. You’ll either catch me laughing, or attempting to make someone else do so. I love to dance and teach, but my passion is for Majorette.
Hi my name is Yizjuani Watson and I am 14 years old. I attend Renton High School. My favorite color is purple. I enjoy art because it gives you another vision of life. The main part of art I enjoy is physical art because it helps you physically express yourself. The type of physical art I do is dance. Dance is my passion, I have danced for 7 years. The reason I dance is because it is a physical art that lets me know that being unique and out of the ordinary is okay.
Hey y’all! I’m 19 yrs old and I was born and raised in Seattle, WA. My name is Neveah, but everybody calls me Veah. My favorite thing to do is to create choreography in the studio with my peers.
