As part of our ten-year anniversary celebrations, we’re considering the best of a decade of arts writing. Today’s selection comes from editor-in-chief Bean Gilsdorf, who notes, “I love looking back through the DS archives to find that the artists, curators, and institutions mentioned a decade ago are alive and kicking. For example, Carrie E. A. Scott is curating and writing in London now, James Harris is[…..]
Currently on view at Frye Art Museum, Young Blood is a large-scale exhibition of two prominent contemporary artists and brothers, painter Noah Davis and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph. The most elaborate display of their individual works to date, Young Blood includes painting, film, sculpture, and installation, weaving varied mediums together with precision and fluidity. Through the tone and cadence of their depicted world—one of beauty, mystery,[…..]
Salt and water: an amalgamation of fundamental, life-sustaining compounds that evokes the sea, sweaty human excretions, and the makings of primordial soup. Independently innocuous, it is the combination of salt and water that produces something transformative—a substance potentially electric and corrosive. It is the coming together of salt and water that sparked the concept for Salt/Water, an exhibition of contemporary photography on view at the[…..]
The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle opens two exhibitions, Franz Erhard Walther: The Body Draws and Pae White: Command-Shift-4. The featured artists—albeit separated by 24 years and 5,600 miles—create a compelling juxtaposition, revealing shared interests in graphic art, architecture, and fiber as mediums that shift between sculpture and performance. Both artists produce works that are liminal and in flux—forever making and remaking themselves through direct interaction.[…..]
For the last thirteen years, Seattle has cheekily retorted the MacArthur Foundation’s annual announcement of “Genius Grant” winners by presenting a roster of its own local “geniuses” through the Stranger Genius Award. The Stranger, which is the city’s weekly alternative news and entertainment paper, selects and awards five individuals each year, from the fields of art, performance, literature, film, and music, with $5,000 of unrestricted[…..]
Let’s just state the obvious: Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: Half the Air in a Given Space, on view at Henry Art Gallery, is insanely fun to experience. Pushing your way through a space filled (true to the installation’s title, only halfway) with over 37,000 pearly gray balloons is like being in a mosh pit, surrounded by marshmallows. It’s a ridiculous image, to be sure,[…..]
Museums are constantly devising new platforms to present their permanent collections. Interventions and mining-the-museum have become commonplace curatorial strategies, and institutions frequently turn to contemporary artists to animate, recontextualize, and bring visibility to canonized cultural objects. Disguise: Masks and Global African Art is Seattle Art Museum’s latest attempt to draw connections across temporal, geographic, and cultural lines. Leveraging the museum’s collection of African masks, the[…..]
