Lisa Graziose Corrin Archives

Curators Dialogue: City of Tomorrow

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke on Nov 5 2020

Learn more about the new exhibition, City of Tomorrow: Jinny Wright and the Art that Shaped a New Seattle in this talk between SAM curators past and present who worked closely with Jinny Wright over the years in building the museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art.

SAM’s current Curator of Modern of Contemporary Art, Catharina Manchanda, talks with Patterson Sims and Lisa Graziose Corrin. Amidst their ongoing, distinguished careers both Sims and Corrin served as curators of modern of contemporary art at SAM in years past, and offer unique and personal perspectives on Wright’s legacy and the building of support for contemporary art in Seattle. City of Tomorrow features 64 works created between 1943–2003 that define bold and experimental art movements across the United States and Europe. The artworks on view are a fraction of the many works that Jinny and her husband Bagley gifted to SAM over the years, many of which have not previously been displayed at SAM. The exhibition will also include archival photographs, ephemera, and other materials that trace the transformation of SAM, the city, and Washington state. Get timed tickets online to visit this new exhibitions, it closes January 18.

About the Presenters

Lisa Graziose Corrin is the Ellen Philips Katz Director of The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Her previous positions include Director, Williams College Museum of Art, Deputy Director of Art/Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, where she was the artistic lead for its new waterfront Olympic Sculpture Park, Chief Curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London and Assistant Director/Curator of The Contemporary in Baltimore. She has published widely on contemporary art, public art, and critical museology. Her book Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson was given the George Wittenborn Award by the North America Libraries Association in 1994. She has written extensively on Mark Dion’s work including contributing to Phaidon’s monograph on the artist. Most recently she was co-curator of A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s.

Catharina Manchanda is the Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum. Prior to joining SAM, she was the Senior Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. During her career, she has also worked in curatorial positions at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has won a number of prestigious international awards including an Andy Warhol Foundation grant, Getty Library Research Grant, and a German Academic Exchange Scholarship (DAAD), among others.

Patterson Sims serves as President of the Leon Polk Smith Foundation, Managing Director of The Saul Steinberg Foundation, and Secretary of CALL (City as Living Lab), set up by Mary Miss. He is also a member of the boards of the Woodman Family Foundation, the Fanny Sanin Trust, and the Jennifer Wynne Reeves Trust. He previously worked as the Assistant Director of O.K. Harris Works of Art and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Seattle Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Montclair Art Museum. He is co-chair of the board of Independent Curators International and works as freelance art curator, writer, and consultant.

Image: Installation view of City of Tomorrow: Jinny Wrights and the Art That Shaped a New Seattle at Seattle Art Museum, 2020, photo: Natali Wiseman

Object of the Week: Wilkinkarra

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke on Mar 10 2017

The year 2016 wasn’t all bad, and in fact it proved a remarkable year for the growth of SAM’s permanent collection. Just in the area of paintings, the museum acquired Robert Colescott’s colorful Les Demoiselles d’Alabama: Vestidas, on view on the third floor at the top of the elevators; the beautiful Nicolas Colombel Cupid and Psyche now installed in the large European art gallery on the fourth floor; and quite a few other cool things. The largest painting SAM acquired, and among the most visually striking, is Wilkinkarra, a blast of spotted color spread over a 6-by-10-foot canvas, from Australian Aboriginal woman artist Mitjili Napanangka Gibson.

Wilkinkarra came to SAM from the distinguished collection of Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan, out of which a whole survey of Australian Aboriginal art was culled. Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art came to SAM in 2012 and showcased more than 100 artworks that, for many of us, provided an introduction to the history and thriving culture of Australian Aboriginal painting.

When encountering something new, we often try to connect it to something we already know and understand. This is natural because our brains are wired to make sense of new experiences and stimuli by comparing them to ones that already exist in our mental databank. Looking at Wilkinkarra, I was struck by how the aesthetic is distinctively “modern.” Countless bright pops of bold color—pinks, purples, blues, yellows, and oranges—emerge in organic patterns, encircled in heavy black outlines. The dotting approach echoes pointillist painting in the late 20th century, and we could also picture this piece fitting cleanly into newer schools of abstract art.

Only this is not an abstraction, but a representation of a specific landscape, pictured from a bird’s-eye view, and created within a unique culture and school of art-making. While we might see immediate, purely visual connections to the Modern art that we already know, there are still more meaningful connections to be made.

In the exhibition catalogue for Ancestral Modern, Lisa Graziose Corrin finds one of those connections in the idea of journeying. First, note that the features of the land itself, and the idea of moving through the land, have special meaning in Aboriginal culture: “Mitjili Napanangka Gibson’s Wilkinkarra refers to a ritual walkabout in her homeland. For Aboriginal artists, travel through the landscape is spiritual, something performed as well as painted. The ritual walkabout and the represented walkabout are equally significant mappings of sacred cultural experience. Both ensure the continuation of Aboriginal cultural memory that is deeply embedded in the topography of ceremonial places.”¹

Second, consider Corrin’s idea that “At one level or another, contemporary culture is a traveling culture.” The city of Seattle plays host to crowds of neo-nomads. The actions of moving, traveling, journeying, and migrating affect many of us in profound ways, shaping how we understand ourselves and how we relate to the people and places we encounter. Global Modern and contemporary art reflects these ideas. At SAM we see it in works like Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, and in William Kentridge’s Shadow Procession. Lawrence, Kentridge, and now Gibson remind us that sharing about where we go, and what we go through, is a very human thing to do.

–Jeffrey Carlson, SAM Collections Coordinator

¹ Lisa Graziose Corrin, “Staging Australian Aboriginal Art,” Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art, exhibition catalogue, Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, in association with Yale University Press, 2012; 46.

Image: Wilkinkarra, 2007, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson (Australian Aboriginal, Warlpiri people, Western Desert, Northern Territory, born ca. 1940), synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 78 3/4 x 120 1/16 in. Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan, 2016.25.