robert frank Archives

Muse/News: A SAM award-winner, kinesthetic truth, and art goes lunar

Rachel Eggers on Sep 24 2018

SAM News

This week, the Seattle Times shared SAM’s news that multidisciplinary artist Natalie Ball is the winner of the 2018 Betty Bowen Award. Ball approaches her sculptural work through the lens of auto-ethnography. Look out for the artist’s solo exhibition at SAM in spring 2019.

Our major fall exhibition, Peacock in the Desert: The Royal Arts of Jodhpur, India, is among the highlights in Zoe Sayler’s Seattle Times story on the upcoming visual arts season that promises “something for everyone.”

SAM participated in an important research collaboration between Artnet and In Other Words, exploring in-depth how institutions have—or have not—moved the needle on showing and buying art by Black artists.

RIP to the legendary architect Robert Venturi; he and his wife, Denise Scott Brown, designed the 1991 downtown Seattle Art Museum building.

Local News

Dance critic Sandra Kurtz previews Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Jerome Robbins Festival for Seattle Weekly, noting the iconic choreographer’s “kinesthetic truth.”

Seattle Eater reports: Food science nerd Nathan Myhrvold, creator of the Modernist Cuisine cookbooks, is opening a food photography gallery in SAM’s neighborhood.

Margo Vansynghel of City Arts spoke with artist Lawrence Pitre about community, the Central District, and his new narrative painting series We Are One at 4Culture.

“I knew the Central Area had been going through a lot of urban renewal. I went to see the Migration Series at the Seattle Art Museum and thought, I could do a series capturing urban life, showing the historical legacy of the Central Area.”

(Inter)National News

Just in time for the 10-year anniversary of the 2008 financial meltdown, a 26-foot-tall painted steel rose by German artist Isa Genzken has been installed in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, intending to inspire empathy and equality.

Speaking of the financial breakdown, the New York Times’ Scott Reyburn explores why “the art market remains one of the most glaringly visible symptoms of global income inequality.”

Artsy’s Scott Indrisek on photographer Robert Frank’s game-changing photography book The Americans, and why the monograph—turning 60 years old—matters today.

“’Frank revealed a people who were plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and also rendered increasingly numb by the rising culture of consumerism,’ Greenough noted. ‘But it’s also important to point out that he found new areas of beauty in those simple, overlooked corners of American life—in diners, or on the street.’”

And Finally

“Finally, I can tell you that I choose to go the moon.”

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Manager of Public Relations

Image: Portrait of Natalie Ball by Greg Wahl-Stephens, courtesy of the artist.

Go Tell It: Civil Rights Photography at Seattle Art Museum

Seattle Art Museum on May 10 2016

SAM is highlighting a series of documentary photographs exploring the lived experiences of African American men and women during the Civil Rights era, featuring major works from the collection by artists including Dan Budnik, Danny Lyon, Roy deCarava, Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, Marion Post Wolcott, and others. The exhibition includes a photo series capturing Martin Luther King Jr.’s march to Montgomery, a stark image of man entering the “colored” entrance of a movie theater in Jim Crow Mississippi, a powerful image of a black nanny holding a white baby, and lithographic renderings of mugshots that reclaim these stigmatizing documentary portraits.

As a contemporary counterpart to these historical works, the exhibition also features a work by Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artist, Shikeith, called #Blackmendream. In this documentary video, the artist interviews nine young black men, their bare backs turned to the camera as they answer questions such as: “When did you become a black man? Do you cry? How were you raised to deal with your emotions?”. The resulting film is a poetic take on what it means to occupy a black body today, and an exploration of the emotional lives of black men. The hashtag in the film’s title is an invitation for viewers to respond to the artist’s questions themselves, and to continue discussions about what is happening to people of color in the country today.

Go Tell It: Civil Rights Photography is now on view in the Knight | Lawrence Gallery at the Seattle Art Museum through January 8, 2017.

Images: Joyous Southern Christian Leadership Conference Marchers Outside Jefferson Davis Hotel, Montgomery, Alabama, March 25th, 1965, 1965, Dan Budnick, American, b. 1933, photograph, 11 x 14 in., Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Benham Gallery and Dan Budnik, 2000.42., © Dan Budnik. James Baldwin, 1986, Joseph Norman, 10 x 8 in., lithograph, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph A. Chazan, 2000.26, © Joseph Norman.