Muse/News: Weird and Wild, Fan Service, and Double Takes

SAM News

Lights, camera, action! Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture opened last week at the Seattle Art Museum, and Carrie Dedon, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, appeared on KING5 programs New Day NW and Evening to talk about curating an exhibition of offbeat art from SAM’s collection. 

“Feeling a little rebellious?” asks Alina Hunter-Grah of SEAtoday. If so, she promises you’ll fit right in at the exhibition.

And here’s Destiny Valencia of 425 Magazine on “Visiting the SAM’s Weird, Wild, and Wacky ‘Poke in the Eye’ Exhibit.”

“How one interprets art is, of course, inescapably subjective. Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture at the Seattle Art Museum makes that implicit truth unusually explicit by prompting visitors to ponder what, exactly, they consider to be fine art.”

Local News

Cascade PBS’s Brangien Davis seeks out “the downtown Seattle art collection hiding in plain sight.”

For Seattle Magazine, Rachel Gallaher profiles dancer and performance artist Lavinia Vago

Special to The Seattle Times, T.S. Flock writes “Seattle’s MadArt holds its last show, celebrating its legacy.”

“Someone walking into MadArt for the first time may wonder what ties them all together, even if they delight in the objects. Put simply, the show succeeds as a fan-service anthology, in which audiences can relive experiences they’ve had with MadArt’s projects.”

Inter/National News

Stewed eels, rum punch, and a dessert known as “The Convent Serpent”: Artnet’s Andrew Russeth goes inside Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s recipe collection.

Via ARTnews’ Alex Greenberger: “Carrie Mae Weems Returns to ‘Kitchen Table Series,’ This Time with A$AP Rocky, for Bottega Veneta.”

Rowland Bagnall for The Art Newspaper on Teju Cole’s latest photobook, Pharmakon, which features photographs of “unpeopled scenarios” accompanied by short texts.

“Cole frequently presents a pair of images, the same scene photographed from slightly different angles, moments apart, the gesture (literally) of a double take, illustrating, possibly, the two modes they exist in: peaceful, disturbing. Self-consciously oblique, almost withholding, Cole’s photographs invite us to consider not only what but how we see, through whose lens, when, for what, and why.”

And Finally

“Miss Piggy Has a Mother.”

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Photo: L. Fried.

Renegade Edo and Paris: A Tale of Two Cities

What do late 18th- to 19th-century Edo (present-day Tokyo) and late 19th-century Paris have in common? This was the question Xiaojin Wu, SAM’s former Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, wanted to explore when she began developing Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec, her final show for SAM that can only be seen at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. She found intriguing parallels between Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings and the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901). The result is this vibrant exhibition about a shared renegade spirit that flourished in both cities’ urban and artistic cultures.

Both Edo and Paris were facing a multitude of challenges to the status quo from the rising middle classes. In Edo, townspeople pursued hedonistic lifestyles as a way of defying the state-sanctioned social hierarchy that positioned them at the bottom. That mentality contributed to a booming urban culture, which facilitated the massive production and distribution of ukiyo-e (often translated as “pictures of the floating world”). Many of these pictures arrived in France in the 1860s, a time when the French art world and its society at large were undergoing substantial changes. Fin-de-siècle Paris, like Edo before it, saw the rise of anti-establishment attitudes and a Bohemian subculture. Entertainment venues such as the iconic Moulin Rouge emerged in the Montmartre district. Meanwhile, Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries searched for fresh and more expressive art forms, and they found much needed novelty in Japanese prints. 

Toulouse-Lautrec was indebted to Japanese prints, in particular to those by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806); he was often referred to as “Montmartre’s Utamaro.” While many are familiar with the story of Lautrec and his peers drawing inspiration from Japanese prints, this exhibition uncovers the shared subversive hedonism that underlies both Japanese and French prints. Through around ninety choice works drawn from the Seattle Art Museum’s Japanese prints collection as well as loans of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work, this exhibition offers a critical look at the renegade spirit inhabiting the graphic arts in both Edo and Paris, highlighting the social impulses—pleasure-seeking and a rising celebrity culture—behind a burgeoning art production. It is the first time the Seattle Asian Art Museum offers a double take on Japanese and French art in one exhibition—be ready to take it all in!

This article first appeared in the June through September 2023 edition of SAM Magazine and has been edited for our online readers. Become a SAM member today to receive our quarterly magazine delivered directly to your mailbox and other exclusive member perks!

Photo: Alborz Kamalizad.

Muse/News: Boafo’s Presence, History Digs, and Pastel Bauhaus

SAM News

Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks, the Ghanaian artist’s debut museum solo exhibition, is now on view at the Seattle Art Museum! Evening Magazine interviewed Ramzy Lakos, SAM’s Educator for Digital Learning, about working with the artist to create a Seattle-exclusive smartphone tour for visitors that shares the artist’s perspective

“It’s very personal, I think, to paint someone’s skin using your fingers. And it also leaves a trace of the artist on the painting itself. And I think that’s something he wants you to feel; he wants you to feel like he’s there in the gallery with you.”

And at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, don’t miss historical Japanese prints and Toulouse-Lautrec works in Renegade Edo and Paris. KUOW’s Mike Davis recommends the show in the most recent edition of his “adventures in art.” And in a recent Stranger Suggests, Charles Mudede recommended the “expertly curated” exhibition.

“This was not the stuff of the warrior class. This was the floating world of fleeting and popular pleasures: music, theater, whore houses. Also fleeting was the nightlife of Belle Époque Paris brilliantly and famously captured by the prints of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Local News

“Seattle’s Museum of Museums to shut down after three years”: The Seattle Times’ Margo Vansynghel reports on the sad loss for the city’s museum community. 

In her latest ArtSEA post, Brangien Davis of Crosscut shares details about “the fancy new entrance to the Colman Dock ferry terminal” debuted recently by Waterfront Seattle as part of the massive waterfront renewal project. 

“Unearthing Japanese American history at a dig site in North Seattle”: The Seattle Times’ Tat Bellamy-Walker on the former site of Green Lake Garden Co. and the archaeology project to reveal its story as home to a Japanese American community before WWII-era incarceration.

“‘We’re digging up these histories, but this history is all around us,’ [archaeologist Alicia] Valentino said. “These people didn’t just disappear. They’re in the community today.’”

Inter/National News

In another archaeology story, Hadami Ditmars reports for the Art Newspaper on the discovery of a “1,000-year-old fish trap and the remains of the ancestral village of ȾEL¸IȽĆE (pronounced Tel-eech).”

Melena Ryzik for the New York Times on the new Louis Armstrong Center, which joins the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens for even more ways to celebrate the famed jazz trumpeter, singer, and bandleader.

“It Was Like Pastel Bauhaus”: Artnet speaks with artists Gary Panter and Wayne White about working with the late Pee-wee Herman to bring “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” to life.

“Paul [Reubens], Ric, and Wayne, we’re all painters,’ Panter said. ‘We really brought the sensibility of art and art history to the set. Paul was more of a conceptual artist. He had a lot of input, and we had endless ideas.’”

And Finally

“Meet the diplomat in Seattle who’s become a social media star by folding origami cranes.”

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Photo: L. Fried.

SAM Stories