SAM Soundtracks Archives

All the Ways to Experience Calder at SAM

Seattle Art Museum on Jul 22 2024

Calder: In Motion, The Shirley Family Collection debuted last fall, but we’re still spinning with excitement about this transformative gift of art by Alexander Calder to the collection. This inaugural exhibition is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see all 45 seminal works gifted to SAM on view together. Now, there’s even more reason to check out Calder: In Motion for the first, second, or tenth time following our recent announcement of the exhibition’s extension through Sunday, October 20. Here, we remind you of all the ways you can experience this exhibition and deepen your appreciation of this collection and the stories it tells.

Website
The exhibition microsite is the online home for all things Calder at SAM and offers a robust portal for exploration. The site details the story of the collection’s formation, includes information on each collection object, features a “surprise me” button that randomly selects an object to explore, and highlights the life and career of the artist. Check it out at visitsam.org/calder!

Smartphone Tour
The exhibition audio guide, produced by SAM and available via smartphone, features collector Jon Shirley’s reflections on his 35-year journey of collecting Calder’s works, and object spotlights by Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder’s grandson and the President of the Calder Foundation; Kennedy Yanko, a painter-sculptor based in Bushwick, Brooklyn, who works in acrylic paint skin and metal to explore the limits of material gesture; and José Carlos Diaz, exhibition curator and SAM Susan Brotman Deputy Director for Art.

Catalogue
The clothbound hardcover catalogue is a stunning keepsake that introduces you to the Shirley Family Collection. Fully illustrated with 102 dazzling images, it features contributions from Jon Shirley, Alexander S. C. Rower, José Carlos Diaz, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner, a Calder scholar and University Professor in the Department of Art, University of Virginia. It’s available in person or online at SAM Shop.

SAM Soundtracks
SAM created a playlist, available via three music platforms, that features tracks from Calder’s own collection of jazz, world, and avant-garde music. Wander the Calder galleries while you listen, or put it on anytime to engage with Calder’s creative mind. Find the link via QR code in the galleries or on SAM’s Calder microsite.

Exciting Events & Tours
Since the exhibition’s opening, SAM has hosted various events—including Balancing Act: A Calder Family Festival, SAM Open House, and the Calder Symposium—which offer new and thoughtful ways to engage with Calder’s art. Keep an eye out for additional upcoming Calder-related events on our website. Plus, SAM docents offer guided tours of Calder: In Motion every Saturday and Sunday at the Seattle Art Museum. They’re free with museum admission!

This article first appeared in the February through May 2024 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!

Image: Installation views of Calder: In Motion, The Shirley Family Collection, Seattle Art Museum, 2023, © 2024 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photos: Chloe Collyer.

SAM Celebrates Pride: Watch These Queer Films Recommended by SAM Staff

Lily Hansen on Jun 28 2024

In honor of Pride Month, SAM Blog features reflections by SAM voices on LGBTQIA+ art and artists. Queer lives matter every day of the year, but this month is a particular opportunity to celebrate histories of joy, advocacy, and resistance. Check out more Pride-related content on SAM Blog, including two object spotlights and this list of queer film recommendations curated by SAM’s LGBTQIA+ affinity group.

Each of the films listed below resonated with a SAM staff member for its depiction and representation of queer life. This collection showcases a wide range of cinema with the intention of representing the diverse spectrum of queer experience. From campy 90’s comedies such as But I’m a Cheerleader to heart felt explorations of identity like Moonlight, the euphoria, rage, tragedy, and joy of queerness are all celebrated here. While each movie is distinct in tone and genre, they are connected by themes of acceptance, belonging, and autonomy.

Be sure to also check out Free to Be, SAM’s Pride Spotify playlist curated entirely by staff!

But I’m A Cheerleader (1999)
Directed by Jamie Babbit

But I’m a Cheerleader is a hilariously quirky coming-of-age story that prescribes comedy and camp as antidotes for gender norms and homophobia. When quintessential high schooler Megan (a young Natasha Lyonne!) is sent away to conversion therapy by her parents, she resists being labeled as a lesbian– she’s a cheerleader dating a football player! But as she and her friends undergo “treatment” (in the form of simulating heteronormative domesticity in 1950s dresses), she falls in love with cool girl Graham and embraces her queerness and the expansive complexity of real identities. Highlights include: RuPaul, the most saturated pink and blue tones you’ve ever seen, jorts.

– Savannah Di Giovanni, SAM Board Relations Associate

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Directed by Céline Sciamma

This is a quiet, intimate look at the love between two women who are forced to adhere to societal norms in the 18th century. Privately, however, they are able to explore their love for one another while creating art. I love this movie because it highlights queerness in an era we often overlook in the community as well as inserts queerness into the period drama genre and its tropes we have come to know from its heteronormative counterparts.

– Emily Roberts, SAM Visitor Experience Lead

Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror (2022)
Directed by Bryan Fuller, Tom Maroney, and Sam Wineman

This is one of my favorite documentaries, and connects to me personally as someone who’s loved horror all my life. The representations of otherness explored in the genre have always resonated with me, before I had the words to identify my own difference. Queer people are not a monolith, and I enjoy media that engages with all our experiences, as well as the resonance horror aesthetics can have for people who have been marginalized.

– Jonathan Davidson, SAM Customer Service Center Representative

Bound (1996)
Directed by Lana and Lily Wachowski

I got to see a theatrical screening of this movie at SIFF recently, and it was great to see audiences still laughing and gasping along nearly 30 years later. A crackling debut, and a strong argument for handing a few million dollars to as many first-time Trans filmmakers as possible.

– Lane Belton, SAM Donor Services Representative

Am I OK? (2022)
Directed by Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne

I really enjoyed this movie because it is not just a typical “coming of age” story, but it portrays a woman in her 30s struggling to come to terms with her sexuality in a very real way. Not only is Lucy feeling like she’s realizing her sexuality “too late” and just generally lost as to what she wants to next in life a very relatable and not often portrayed narrative, this movie does a great job of showing the awkwardness, the unsureness, and the fumbling that comes with real life.

– Leah Kogan, SAM Membership Communications Associate

My Beautiful Laundrette (1986)
Directed by Stephen Frears

This is one of my go to comfort movies. It explores the intersection of queerness, class, race, and cultural identity with such tenderness all while being set in a run-down laundromat. An important reminder that we are nothing without our community.

– Petra Jouflas, SAM Development and Finance Coordinator

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun

This movie is absolutely beautiful visually and so deeply unsettling emotionally that you are sucked into the horror without any jump scares. Its message about not connecting to your body/life and that there has to be some kind of escape into a reality that will bring you more joy sits with you long after the credits. If you’ve ever experienced any amount of gender dysphoria or derealization you will find this movie both haunting and also strangely comforting.

– Jasmine, SAM Customer Service Center Representative

Consider supporting our Community Pass Program partners who serve queer communities:

Celebrate Pride Month in Seattle with these suggested events:

Sat Jun 22
Youth Pride Disco
Break out your disco wear for this LGBTQIA+ Pride party, planned for and organized by LGBTQ+ youth between the ages of 13 and 22! Join us for drag performances, great music, friend-making activities, food and soft drinks, a quiet room, and more.

Through Sun Jun 23
Jinkx Monsoon and Major Scales: Together Again, Again!
Experience the comedy, music, and saucy stylings of two of the Pacific Northwest’s standout drag entertainers, in this wildly hilarious extravaganza set in an apocalyptic future. Check the event calendar for information about performances for teens, ASL interpretation, captions, and masking.

Fri Jun 28
Trans Pride Seattle 2024
Started in 2013, Trans Pride Seattle is an annual event organized by Gender Justice League. Visit the Volunteer Park Amphitheater from 5 to 10 pm for live music, community speakers, performances, and a resource fair all dedicated to increased visibility, connection, and love of the Seattle-area TwoSpirit, Trans, and Gender Diverse (2STGD) community.

Sat Jun 29
PrideFest Capitol Hill
Spanning six blocks of Broadway and Cal Anderson Park, this all-day market features queer local businesses, beer gardens, family and youth programming, and three stages with an unforgettable lineup of live performances.

Sun Jun 30
Seattle Pride Parade
Spend the final day of June by taking part in the 50th annual Pride Parade led by grand marshals Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe. Then, head over to Seattle Center for the can’t-miss performances, hundreds of acts, beer gardens, food vendors, a new family area—and dancing in the iconic International Fountain.

Visit the official Seattle Pride website for even more suggested events.

Photo: Chloe Collyer.

Muse/News: Interesting Pictures, Ritual Objects, and Girls in Windows

Rachel Eggers on Nov 27 2023

SAM News

Here’s Margo Vansynghel of the Seattle Times with arts recommendations for December, including Elizabeth Malaska: All Be Your Mirror. The solo show features tour-de-force paintings by the 2022 winner of SAM’s annual prize for Northwest artists, the Betty Bowen Award.

“Malaska’s brushwork is at once vigorous, detailed and patterned, then loose and almost abstract or even droopy and distorted. The result is beautiful, unsettling and varied — and paints a much more interesting picture.”

“A theatrical new Calder exhibition staged in Seattle”: Don’t miss Elena Goukassian’s take for The Art Newspaper on Calder: In Motion, The Shirley Family Collection. She highlights the thoughtful curatorial choice to “frame his works as a delightfully subtle kind of performance.” ) She also mentions the playlist drawn from Calder’s own record collection.)

“These are all displayed in a newly configured gallery that features individual “stages” for the larger works, vitrines for the smaller ones and “overlook” balcony views—all with an eye towards spotlighting their theatrical nature.”

For the subscriber-only Airmail, Osman Can Yerebakan interviews the Shirleys and relays the story of the first time they heard Dispersed Objects with Brass Gong make a sound. (Are you patient enough to wait to hear it in the galleries?)

ICYMI! “Legendary Children Brought the House Down”: Jas Keimig and Susan Fried capture the magic for South Seattle Emerald.

Local News

It’s dark. Seattle Met helps with “Where to See Holiday Lights in Seattle.”

For her weekly ArtSEA post, Crosscut Brangien Davis features “art, film, and food to honor Native American Heritage Month.”

“Chehalis artist explores cultural appropriation of Native regalia”: Gayle Clemans for The Seattle Times on Selena Kearney: object/ritual, now on view at Solas Gallery.

“After shifting to a more conceptual art practice, Kearney has thought carefully about how much information to reveal in an image and how much to conceal. In this series, all of the photographs are taken in crisp detail with vivid color, as if they are beautiful documents of cheap, often offensive cultural relics.”

Inter/National News

Via Artnet: “5 Massive Pop Culture Moments From 2023 That Remind Us of Renaissance Paintings.”

Via Artdaily: The first New York solo exhibition for Natalie Ball—featuring never-before-seen works—just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ball was the winner of SAM’s 2018 Betty Bowen Award and her work is now on view at SAM.

David Segal for The New York Times on Girls in the Windows (1960) by Ormond Gigli, a photograph that people keep buying and buying.

“He’s working without an assignment because he wants to memorialize those buildings, which stand directly across the street from his home studio. What he doesn’t know is that the image will become one of the most collected photographs in the history of the medium.”

And Finally

Another video from the Calder Foundation archives: The first performance of Work in Progress at Teatro dell’Opera, 1967–68.

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Photo: Alborz Kamalizad.