EXHIBITION
CALENDAR
2017–18
Rachel Eggers
Manager of Public Relations
[email protected]
206.654.3151
The following information is subject to change. Prior to publication, please confirm
dates, titles, and other information with the Seattle Art Museum public relations office.
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SEATTLE ART MUSEUM – NOW ON VIEW
Seeing Nature
Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection
Seattle Art Museum
February 16–May 23, 2017
Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection
illustrates the evolution of European and American landscape painting across
five centuries by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt,
Georgia O’Keeffe, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha. Drawn from Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen’s private collection, one of the most
significant in the United States, the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to
see the natural world through the eyes of great artists.
In Seeing Nature, 39 paintings organized in rough chronological order
showcase key moments in the development of the landscape genre—from
intimate views of the world to an artist’s personal reflections on nature. Many
of the works on view have never been publicly exhibited prior to this
exhibition.
As a starting point for considering European landscape painting and its
relationship to sensory experience, the exhibition begins with Jan Brueghel the
Younger’s allegorical series The Five Senses (ca. 1625). Evocative works
interpreting Venice, Italy, are also featured, including paintings by Canaletto,
Édouard Manet, and J.M.W. Turner.
At the heart of the exhibition are significant examples of French Impressionism:
five paintings by Claude Monet, including The Water-Lily Pond (1919), as well as
Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1888-90). A rare landscape by Austrian
artist Gustav Klimt—Birch Forest (1903)—immerses the viewer in a forest scene;
surrealist works by Max Ernst and René Magritte introduce inventive
approaches to the genre.
The final galleries present 20th-century American landscape paintings,
including epic, wide-ranging works depicting the Grand Canyon by Thomas
Moran, Arthur Wesley Dow, and David Hockney, as well as more atmospheric,
contemporary works by Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, and April Gornik.
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Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series
Seattle Art Museum
January 21–April 23, 2017
In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of artist Jacob Lawrence’s birth,
the Seattle Art Museum presents Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series. Thanks
to a major loan from The Museum of Modern of Art in New York (MoMA) and
The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, all 60 panels from his masterwork
The Migration Series—depicting the exodus of African Americans from the rural
south between World War I and World War II—will be shown together for the
first time in more than two decades on the West Coast.
The Phillips Collection exhibited the complete series October 8, 2016–January
8, 2017, and MoMA did so April 3–September 7, 2015, bringing new attention to
this important work more than 75 years since its creation. The two museums
agreed to lend the combined series to the Seattle Art Museum so that it could
be seen in Lawrence’s other home city. Jacob Lawrence and his wife, artist
Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, moved to Seattle in 1971 when Jacob accepted a
position at the University of Washington, where he taught until he retired in
1986.
Lawrence conceived of The Migration Series as a single work of art, painting on
all 60 panels at the same time to achieve unity of form and color. The complete
work appears rather like a large mural painting, an art form that Lawrence
admired and that gained new attention in the late 1930s and 1940s, thanks to
government sponsorship and the role that public art was given in bringing the
US out of the Great Depression.
Fittingly, SAM will install the series like a mural in its Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob
Lawrence Gallery, which was created to honor their enduring gifts to the city.
Both Lawrences were generous supporters of the museum and of the arts
throughout this region—an immense legacy that continues to this day.
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John Grade: Middle Fork
Seattle Art Museum
February 10, 2017–ongoing
Middle Fork, a large-scale sculpture by Seattle-based artist John Grade, is
presented in its largest iteration yet. More than doubling from its previous
length of 50 feet to 105 feet, the tree sculpture dynamically spans the entire
length of the Brotman Forum, the main entrance lobby that welcomes guests
to the museum.
The highly detailed sculpture was created by Grade, his team, and a cadre of
volunteers using a full plaster cast of a living old-growth western hemlock tree
found in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle. The cast was used as a mold to
assemble a new tree from now nearly one million reclaimed cedar pieces.
Suspended horizontally from the museum’s ceiling and above the viewer,
Grade’s sculpture offers a mesmerizing new perspective on a familiar form.
With its exhibition at SAM, Middle Fork returns home to Washington State. The
work was first conceived and built at MadArt Studio and had its Seattle debut
there in January 2015. Following that, it was included in the WONDER
exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in
Washington, DC (November 13, 2015–May 13, 2016) and was recently displayed
at the 2017 Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
With each iteration, Middle Fork has “grown” larger and added more branches.
The artist plans over time to continue the sculpture’s growth to match the
length of the living tree that it is based on, 140 feet. Eventually, he plans to
bring the sculpture back to the forest, allowing it to decompose and return to
the earth at the base of that original tree.
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Big Picture: Art After 1945
Seattle Art Museum
July 23, 2016–ongoing
Big Picture: Art After 1945 features significant works of abstract painting and
sculpture from SAM’s collection. Tracing landmark artistic developments in the
decades following World War II, the installation reveals how abstraction
established itself as a dominant force to be reckoned with.
Big Picture will highlight works from the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection
given to the museum, such as Mark Rothko’s No. 10 (1952), Jasper Johns’
Thermometer (1959), and Eva Hesse’s No Title (1964). It will also feature key
loans from other local collections, reflecting the depth and commitment of
private collectors in Seattle.
Virginia and her husband, Bagley Wright, who passed away in 2011, are
longtime visionary leaders and legendary arts patrons of SAM and Seattle. The
Wrights have donated extraordinary works to the museum for decades but
within the past two years, Virginia Wright gave a large part of her and her
husband’s collection to the museum. These works have transformed SAM’s
modern and contemporary collection, elevating it to national status.
In addition, Big Picture includes select contemporary works that point to the
continuity and resonance of these ideas today, such as X (2015)—a painting
recently acquired by the museum—by Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence
Prize-winner Brenna Youngblood. Also on view will be five videos that highlight
the physical act and process of painting; the selection includes works by Kazuo
Shiraga, Yvonne Rainer, and Margie Livingston—as well as Hans Namuth’s
famed work that shows Pollock performing his drip-painting technique.
Following the opening on July 23, additional installments are planned for
August 20 and then again on November 19. The August installment addresses
varying modes of portraiture, while November introduces works by European
artists such as Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Katharina Fritsch. In subject
and materiality, these works are grounded in the post-war European
experience and address different concerns from the American works.
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Pure Amusements: Chinese Scholar Culture and Emulators
Seattle Art Museum
December 24, 2016–ongoing
Pure Amusements features Chinese works ranging from prints to sculpture and
furnishings to ceramics drawn from SAM's collection and focused on objects
created for, and enjoyed during, the intentional practice of leisure.
From the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644) onward, leisure had many rules.
Gentlemanly pastimes, like drinking tea, viewing paintings, and planting
bamboo in the garden, were pursuits of an elegant lifestyle. Such “pure
amusements” (qingwan) were not frivolous—they helped establish one’s
standing in society. Aspiring men thus collected objects like chessboards,
books, paintings, calligraphy, ancient bronze vessels, and ink rubbings of
antiquities. With greater social mobility, and broader literacy in the late-16th to
early-17th century, knowledge and culture were accessible not only to scholars
and aristocrats but also to the newly affluent.
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Views From Venice
Seattle Art Museum
December 10, 2016–ongoing
Two divergent stories unfolded in 18th-century Venice. Once an influential citystate backed by a powerful navy and a dominant trade position, Venice slid
into economic stagnation and lost military and political significance. At the
same time, its distinct beauty and sensuous character attracted crowds of
tourists and produced a flowering of the arts still visible in the sugary pastels
and sparkling brushwork throughout this gallery.
The veduta (view)—a tradition of painting unique to Venice that combines
marine, landscape, and architectural elements—served visitors’ desire to
remember and share what they saw in their travels. Early painters of veduta set
out to document the city’s incomparable panoramas. Luca Carlevariis helped to
establish the genre, devoting large canvases to architectural vistas as well as
the local citizens and their festivities. Canaletto, the best known of
the vedutisti, introduced brilliant light and expressed a warm optimism that
made his paintings perfect collectors’ items. A school of contemporaries and
many later followers would try to achieve the spirit and masterful handling that
set Canaletto apart as the greatest painter of the movement.
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Jennifer West: Film is Dead…
Seattle Art Museum
November 19, 2016–May 7, 2017
This large-scale, site-specific installation by Jennifer West, a Los Angeles-based
artist and former Seattle resident, was commissioned by SAM. The multimedia
installation examines the duality of film as both material and immaterial.
Film is Dead… comprises a cascading 25-foot-wide curtain of primarily 70mm
filmstrips, hung from the ceiling and spanning a large part of the gallery. West
manipulates the filmstrips using everyday household materials—including ink,
dye, food coloring, spray paint, nail polish, dirt, salt, and bleach—and subjects
them to scratches and perforations by knives, mirror shards, vegetable peelers,
and more. West, along with her friends and fellow artists, mark the filmstrips
with their lips and breasts. These changes, erosions, and impressions to the film
emulsion create colored splotches, grid-like patterns, and chance effects.
The curtain of filmstrips curls to the floor and appears to “feed” into three flatscreen monitors placed side-by-side. On these screens plays the digitized film
of the manipulated filmstrips in a continuous loop. Visitors will be able to walk
around all four sides of this immersive environment for an “analog-meetsdigital” experience.
The installation will be on view in one of the museum’s modern and
contemporary galleries on the third floor. Recent installations there dedicated
to contemporary art have shown the work of Martha Rosler, Guido van der
Werve, and Harun Faroki.
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Close Ups
Seattle Art Museum
August 17, 2016–ongoing
The modern portrait serves an increasingly expanding range of purposes.
Going far beyond traditional notions of the portrait as an accurate likeness, it
has become a portal through which to reflect on contemporary issues and
emotions. Artists deploy a wide variety of stylistic and technological means in
going beyond appearance to depict more enigmatic features of identities.
German artists in the first half of the 20th century used expressive colors and
theatrical staging in portraiture to consider the anxieties of war, trauma, and
displacement following two devastating world wars. Equally evocative, midcentury American painters fused an expressive painterly language of
abstraction with their subjects’ countenance to evoke states of mind to
dramatic effect.
The pendulum swung in the opposite direction with the arrival of Pop Art in the
1960s. The gleaming surfaces of models and stars enter the canvas and the
reproductive technologies used by the film and advertising industries became
an important touchstone. Portraits of personal, historical, or allegorical
significance have remained a vital outlet of artistic expression throughout time
and into the present day. Close Ups provides a view across time and continents
to witness developments within portraiture.
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African Renaissances
Seattle Art Museum
May 6, 2016–July 16, 2017
Things Fall Apart may be the title of a famous novel about Nigeria, but it also
sums up a mistaken notion that the African continent is afflicted with only bad
news.
This installation offers a realistic vision by recognizing cultural leaders who
preside over kingdoms and live in thriving communities and cities. Regalia and
furnishings that were originally seen in the courts of the Benin, Asante, Kom,
and Kuba kingdoms are on view. Many of these kingdoms faced extreme
domination by colonial powers in the early 20th century but reestablished their
own power during the last half of the century. In addition, art created by
Maasai, Fulani, and Ndebele women declares their views of the world.
Finally, art provided by a musical leader living in Seattle contributes a sense of
how things are coming together for a 21st-century futurist renaissance.
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Emblems of Encounter: Europe and Africa Over 500 Years
Seattle Art Museum
January 23, 2016–ongoing
Looking back 500 years, one can see the late 15th century as a major turning
point in history. When Portuguese navigators first arrived on the shores of
West Africa, the two continents of Europe and Africa began interacting in new
ways. After a very brief period of mutual respect and commercial exchange,
European traders quickly moved to exploit the region’s natural resources—
including human labor—which became the basis for the massive slave trade
that eventually affected twenty million Africans.
The ten works of European and African art in this gallery, dating from the end
of the 15th century to the end of the 20th, have been selected from SAM’s
collection as examples of these interactions over time. Bringing them together
in this context reminds us that works of art contain multiple meanings and
associations that can be viewed through different perspectives. Even small
works connect us with a long and complex history that has shaped many
aspects of our world today.
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Art and Life Along The Northwest Coast
Seattle Art Museum
November 26, 2014–ongoing
Over their long habitation of the Pacific Northwest, First Peoples have shaped
their lifeways around the resources of the water, forests, valleys, and
mountains. In tandem, they have developed rich oral traditions and ceremonies
that link inextricably to this region.
With this installation of SAM’s collection of Northwest Coast art, visitors will
encounter the creative expressions of generations of artists who created forms
for daily life, for potlatch ceremonies, and for spiritual balance. The presence of
contemporary arts, shown alongside historical forms, highlight the vitality of
traditions that are being re-envisioned for present times.
The installation also includes a new acquisition: twelve masks representing
supernatural creatures associated with the Animals Spirits Dance by
Gwaysdams carver Sam Johnson. Originally commissioned for the opening
celebration of the Pacific Science Center’s Seamonster House in 1971, the masks
were transferred to SAM in 2006 and are now on view for the first time.
The interpretation and context for the masks are being defined though a
collaboration with community members. The colorful, boldly carved masks
represent a modern interpretation of the principles of Kwakwaka’wakw art and
the dramatic nature of the dance privilege associated with them. The twelve
masks—representing mouse, raccoon, deer, wolf and others—and a
commissioned button blanket to adorn one of the masks, will be installed in
July, 2026, accompanied by a video of the masks being danced in 1971. This
display compliments the interactive video component about the history of the
houseposts that will be installed in an adjacent gallery.
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Paintings and Drawings of the European Avant-Garde: The Rubinstein Bequest
Seattle Art Museum
April 23, 2014–ongoing
Gladys (1921–2014) and Sam Rubinstein (1917–2007) were driven by a desire “to
make things better for Seattle,” as Gladys put it. Their passion for music and art
led to generous support of the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Symphony, the
Seattle Opera, and many other arts organizations in our region.
On their travels, they became interested in artists who lived and worked in
Paris in the early 20th century. Exquisite examples of paintings and drawings
from their collection, including works by Orphist painters Robert and Sonia
Delaunay and Surrealists Joan Miró and Max Ernst, are on view in the third floor
gallery dedicated to the Rubinstein’s memory.
The Rubinsteins’ bequest, which also includes American and Japanese
paintings not currently on view, will transform the Seattle Art Museum’s
collection and inspire audiences now and in the future.
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France: Inside and Out
Seattle Art Museum
March 15, 2014–ongoing
This installation of landscapes, domestic interiors, and decorative arts from the
museum’s collection showcases stylistic developments in 19th-century French
painting and design. It also invites us to think about the different worlds of men
and women at that time.
Beginning in the middle of the century, male artists began to paint outside,
capturing intimate landscape views near Paris, scenes of laborers in the fields,
and dramatic coastline vistas. The sense of immediacy that permeates those
landscapes can also be found when artists turned their attention indoors. Like
Vermeer before them, they were fascinated by the unremarkable moments of
daily life at home.
Images of women, somewhere between formal portrait and genre scene, give a
limited picture of female lives toward the end of the century. The two women
artists featured in this installation represent the beginning of broader
opportunities for women, but even as they developed professional careers their
subject matter was limited to family scenes, still lifes, and portraits.
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Pacific Currents & Billabong Dreams
Seattle Art Museum
March 14, 2014–ongoing
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Paddling after swarming sharks
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Embracing a totemic crocodile
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Dancing with a sea bear hat
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And watching a canoe prow cut through waves
All are powerful points of inspiration for the sculptures on view here.
The theme of water connects two adjacent installations, Pacific Currents and
Billabong Dreams. Waterways in their myriad manifestations—rivers, Australian
billabongs, saltwater seas—are not only places for navigation and subsistence.
They also contain great ancestral forces that have shaped the lives and laws of
indigenous people across the Pacific, as well as the sacred water sources of
Australia.
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Porcelain Room
Seattle Art Museum
May 5, 2007–ongoing
Vast quantities of translucent, elegantly decorated white-bodied porcelain
from China and Japan, arriving in Europe in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, heightened Europeans’ fervor for these wondrous wares.
In royal palaces, great houses of the aristocracy, and homes of the rising
merchant class made wealthy by trade, specially designed rooms showcased
porcelain from floor to ceiling as crowning jewels in an integrated architectural
and decorative scheme.
Brimming with more than one thousand magnificent European and Asian
pieces from SAM's collection, the Porcelain Room has been conceived to blend
visual excitement with an historical concept. Rather than the standard museum
installation arranged by nationality, manufactory, and date, our porcelain is
grouped by color and theme. Today, when porcelain is everywhere in our daily
lives, this room evokes a time when it was a treasured trade commodity—
sometimes rivaling the value of gold—that served as a cultural, technological,
and artistic interchange between the East and the West.
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SEATTLE ART MUSEUM – COMING SOON
Common Pleasures: Art of Urban Life in Edo Japan
Seattle Art Museum
April 15–October 22, 2017
Japan saw an urban culture bloom during the Edo period (1603–1868).
Residents in growing city centers, especially in Edo (present-day Tokyo),
Kyoto, and Osaka, participated in many pastimes: theater, pleasure quarters,
and festivals were among the most popular ones. Townspeople—made up of
artisans and merchants, the two lower classes in the social hierarchy of the Edo
period—became the catalyst of a vibrant artistic landscape.
These paintings depict popular indulgences such as letting loose in the
company of courtesans and seasonal events such as picnicking under cherry
blossoms in the spring and dancing at festivals. The primary philosophical view
of the time—“live for the moment”—fostered an aesthetic that is manifested in
much of the art that engaged subjects dear to the townspeople’s sensibilities.
Drawn from Seattle Art Museum as well as a private collection, the works on
view showcase a diversity of leisure activities and common pleasures of
ordinary people.
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Denzil Hurley
Seattle Art Museum
May 20–November 5, 2017
Denzil Hurley was born in Barbados and is Professor in the School of Art at the
University of Washington. Hurley is dedicated to abstraction and his work has
centered on the tension between formal elements—either a series of elements
within a single painting--or the relationships between paintings and their
surrounding architecture in a constellation. In earlier works, his paintings
showed traces of the artist’s process, layers of additions and subtractions that
remained visible in each finished piece.
In his exhibition at SAM, we will be featuring his most recent body of work,
which introduces entirely new ideas and hovers between painting and
sculpture. His monochrome black canvases have been modified with
broomsticks, poles and other found objects, some of them reminiscent of
protest signs. At times clustered, they become unyielding signs without
specific message. Although abstract, they allude to larger social and political
events and a culture of protest. If the black monochromes read as abstract
signs, his canvases in the shape of frames literally mark a void and create a
boundary for the empty space of the wall. Taken together, these works
continue a conversation with the history of abstraction—Malevich’s black
square is a distant relative. Yet as modified objects mounted on sticks and
poles they are no longer static objects but suggest a different history and use
and read as metaphors for a culture of protest that unfolds in the streets.
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Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors
Seattle Art Museum
June 30–September 10, 2017
Spanning over five decades, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors focuses on the
evolution of the Japanese artist’s immersive, multi-reflective Infinity Mirror
Rooms. Central to the exhibition is Kusama’s original 1965 mirror room, in
which she displayed a vast expanse of red-spotted, white tubers in a room
lined with mirrors, creating the illusion of an infinite space, a surreal landscape
in which the viewer is situated at the center. The exhibition explores how
Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms developed from a more material engagement
with sculptural forms to ethereal mirror rooms in which light and reflections
extend in all directions, allowing the visitor to seemingly float in a magical
space.
While the Infinity Mirror Rooms form the core of the exhibition, the drawings
and paintings, created across her career, will demonstrate the evolution of
Kusama’s ideas and their resonance with contemporary artistic ventures.
Kusama showed with the German Zero group in the early 1960s, which had an
interest in kinetic and participatory installations. These projects, as much as her
encounter with happenings in New York, the city where Kusama took up
residence in the late 1950s, informed her subsequent artistic development. In
addition to the Infinity Mirror Rooms, there will also be a gallery that viewers
will create and complete with their participation and a “landscape” of mirrored
stainless steel spheres that reflect the people in the room. Two early videos are
also included in this exhibition.
By examining the early, destabilizing installations alongside the more ethereal
mirror rooms she created later in her career, the show hopes to place this body
of work in relation to a resurgence of experiential practices in contemporary
art.
Following its debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the
exhibition will travel to four major museums in the United States and Canada,
including the Seattle Art Museum (June 30–September 10, 2017), The Broad in
Los Angeles (October 2017–January 2018), the Art Gallery of Ontario (March–
May 2018), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (July–October 2018).
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Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect
Seattle Art Museum
October 19, 2017–January 15, 2018
Enter Andrew Wyeth’s reality. On the 100th anniversary of the artist’s
birth, Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect examines the American master’s 75-year
career and offers unexpected perspectives on his art and legacy. Organized in
partnership with the Brandywine River Museum, this major exhibition presents
over 100 of the artist’s paintings and drawings. It looks back on a century in
America when Wyeth confounded critics and deviated from the American art
mainstream, but continued to figure prominently in much of the country’s
artistic discourse.
Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect follows the evolution of one of America’s most
famous painters by bringing together well-known and rarely seen works. From
depictions of his life in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to the coastal villages of
Maine, Wyeth created timeless images of places, people, and things—layered
with acute observation and a boundless imagination—all imbued with the
artist’s mysterious temperament. Often out of synch with the time, Wyeth’s art
challenged the norms of realism and abstraction.
The exhibition begins in the late 1930s with Wyeth’s breakthrough works of
brilliantly colored, boldly gestural, transparent watercolors of the Maine coast.
These were soon set aside for the somber-toned and tightly rendered tempera
paintings often associated with the artist. They include some of the artist’s
most famous paintings, such as portraits of Christina Olson of Maine and Karl
Kuerner, his neighbor in Chadds Ford.
Also on view are the artist’s little known portraits of African Americans, a major
focus of Wyeth’s work in the 1950s and ‘60s, followed by work from the 1970s
and ‘80s, including the eroticism of the once-secret Helga paintings, and other
deeply psychological but lesser known paintings from the Helga years. Finally,
the exhibition reflects on images of his later life as he closed the book on his
earlier subjects and looked for new ones. It brings to Seattle Wyeth’s last
painting, Goodbye, which has not been seen since it was briefly shown to those
who attended the artist’s memorial service in 2009.
Andrew Wyeth investigated the possibilities of the portrait, the figure, and the
places we inhabit—shunning narrative and rising above cliché—to convey the
very emotions that make us human.
Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect is co-organized by the Brandywine River
Museum of Art and Seattle Art Museum.
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A Broad and Luminous Picture:
Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian (working title)
Seattle Art Museum
June 14–September 9, 2018
More information coming soon.
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ASIAN ART MUSEUM – CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS
SAM’s Asian Art Museum closed its doors on Monday, February 27, 2017 to
begin preparations for the renovation of the historic building.
For more than 80 years in Volunteer Park, SAM has served the community. The
original home of SAM, the Asian Art Museum building has not been
substantially restored or renovated since its inception in 1933. The structure is
in need of seismic and climate control upgrades, and the museum’s program
and exhibition space is inadequate to meet educational and exhibition
demands.
The renovation addresses critical infrastructure issues, increases ADA
accessibility to the museum, and creates a better connection to Volunteer Park.
The proposed expansion adds more than 12,500 square feet of usable space,
but alters the building’s footprint in Volunteer Park by less than 3,600 square
feet. The expansion offsets space lost by the addition of new heating and
cooling system equipment and will provide a much-needed education
classroom, as well as gallery, conservation, and programming space. It will also
restore historic Olmstedian paths, stretching east from the museum. These
paths will better connect the elements within the park, including the museum.
The goal of the renovation is not only to restore a historic icon and to protect a
major Asian art collection, but also to create a modern museum equipped to
function as an important cultural resource for the community—all while
enhancing and respecting the natural beauty of Volunteer Park.
SAM has been working with the City, parks groups, and the community to
finalize a design that will allow the Asian Art Museum to continue its role as a
world-class museum. The proposed design has changed over time to reflect
feedback received from these important stakeholders.
The improved Asian Art Museum will reopen in 2019 with a community
celebration.
Additional information can be found at seattleartmuseum.org/inspire.
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OLYMPIC SCULPTURE PARK – NOW ON VIEW
Echo
Olympic Sculpture Park
May 29, 2014–ongoing
Jaume Plensa is renowned for his monumental and psychologically engaging
public art.
His sculpture Echo is named for the mountain nymph of Greek mythology who
offended the goddess Hera—she kept her engaged in conversation and
prevented her from spying on one of Zeus’ amours. To punish Echo, Hera
deprived the nymph of speech, except for the ability to repeat the last words
spoken by another.
Plensa created this monumental head of Echo with her eyes closed, seemingly
listening or in a state of meditation. The work is situated on the shoreline of the
park, where Echo looks out over Puget Sound in the direction of Mount
Olympus.
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OLYMPIC SCULPTURE PARK – COMING SOON
Spencer Finch
Olympic Sculpture Park
April 1, 2017–March 3, 2019
As the sun slips away and daylight turns into twilight, we become keenly
attuned to the shifting colors of the sky and our surroundings.
New York–based artist Spencer Finch has dedicated his practice to the study
of light and color and the ways in which we perceive them. At the Olympic
Sculpture Park, Finch has installed a nebulous formation of suspended glass
panes that are, in his words, “creating a moving abstraction of a sunset, based
on actual sunsets photographed from Seattle over Puget Sound. Using ninety
square panes of glass of three different sizes and sixteen different colors, the
installation straddles the line between abstraction and representation, shifting
composition in real time as the panes of glass gently rotate in space.”
Spencer Finch spent many years studying representations of landscape in
painting, literature, and poetry. In the 19th century, Impressionist painters
studied a single view at different points throughout the day in an attempt to
capture the light of outdoor settings, resulting in dramatically different images
and moods. Similarly, Finch’s nonrepresentational landscape uses a collection
of visual data to create abstraction and abstraction to represent visual data.
Spencer Finch asks, “What if, instead of painting a picture of a place you could
re-create the light of a place? If we were as sensitively attuned to the color of
light as we are to a convention like perspective, for example, maybe we could
have the experience of saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Paris at dusk. . . . There’s the
Hudson River Valley on a winter afternoon.’ It’s a way of thinking about how to
represent landscape in an unconventional but totally accurate way.”
At the PACCAR Pavilion, Finch calls upon fleeting moments to create the
descriptive equivalent of a sunset. Unlike a photograph, the evocation of a
sunset in this installation is not fixed. Our experience of Finch’s installation
differs depending on the light—subdued or radiant. During sunrise and sunset,
this constellation of colored glass doubles the natural event. Ultimately, the
sunset is merely a starting point from which the artist explores “optical mixes
of light and color,[…]Creating a prismatic experience that will be constantly
changing.” Each visit to the Olympic Sculpture Park will bring new insights and
appreciation for the subtleties of light as a medium.
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Image credits:
Installation view of Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family
Collection at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman.
Installation view of Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series at the Seattle Art Museum. ©
Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Middle Fork, 2016, John Grade, American, b.
1970, wood, 30 x 28 x 105t., Collection of the artist. Installation view of Big Picture: Art After
1945 at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Birdcage,
Pentagon, 1850–1920, Chinese, bamboo and metal, 22 x 9 x 9 in. Gift of Henry and Mary Ann
James, in Honor of the 75th anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2007.9. The Doge's
Palace And The Grand Canal, Venice, ca. 1710, Luca Carlevariis, Italian, Venice, 1663-1729, oil
on canvas, 37 3/4 x 75 3/4 in. (95.9 x 192.4 cm), Gift of Floyd A. Naramore, 50.70. Installation
view of Jennifer West: Film is Dead... at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum,
Photo: Natali Wiseman. The Pompeii Clowns, 1950, Max Beckmann, German, 1884–1950, oil on
canvas, 36 x 55 in., Gift of Sidney and Anne Gerber, 55.74, © Artist or Artist’s Estate.
Installation view of African Renaissances at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum,
Photo: Natali Wiseman. Installation view of Emblems of Encounter at the Seattle Art Museum.
© Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Installation view of Art and Life Along the
Northwest Coast at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman.
Mondlicht, 1925, Alexei von Jawlensky, Russian, 1864–1941, oil on canvasboard, 16 1/2 x 12 3/4
in., Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Gladys and Sam Rubinstein. Photo: Nathaniel Willson. Fishing
Boats at Étretat, 1885, Claude Monet, French, 1840-1926, oil on canvas, 29 x 36 in., Seattle Art
Museum, Partial and promised gift of an anonymous donor, 92.88. Installation view of Pacific
Currents & Billabong Dreams at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali
Wiseman. Installation view of Porcelain Room at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art
Museum, Photo: Lara Swimmer. Picnicking under Cherry Blossoms and Boating on the River,
mid-18th century, Nishikawa Sukenobu, pair of six-panel screens; ink, color and gold on
paper, 40 x 18 1/2 in., "Gift to a City: Masterworks From the Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection
in the Seattle Art Museum," Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 1965, no. 141., 62.133.1.
Installation view of the artist’s studio. © Denzil Hurley, Photo: Catharina Manchanda.
Installation view of Infinity Mirror Room–Phalli’s Field at Castellane Gallery, 1965 ©Yayoi
Kusama. Winter 1946, 1946, Andrew Wyeth, tempera on hardboard panel, 31 3/8 x 48 in.,
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Purchased with funds from the State of North
Carolina, © 2017 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS). An Oasis in the Badlands –
Sioux, 1905. Asian Art Museum exterior photo by Benjamin Benschneider. Echo, 2011, Jaume
Plensa, Spanish, born 1955, Polyester resin, marble dust, steel framework, height 45 ft.11 in.,
footprint at base 10 ft. 8 in. x 7 ft. 1 in., Seattle Art Museum, Barney A. Ebsworth Collection,
2013.22, ©Jaume Plensa, Photo: Benjamin Benschneider. Spencer Finch: Installation detail of
Following Nature, 2013, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Spencer Finch, American, born
1962. ©Spencer Finch, image courtesy of the artist.
ABOUT SEATTLE ART MUSEUM
As the leading visual art institution in the Pacific Northwest, SAM draws on its
global collections, powerful exhibitions, and dynamic programs to provide
unique educational resources benefiting the Seattle region, the Pacific
Northwest, and beyond. SAM was founded in 1933 with a focus on Asian art. By
the late 1980s the museum had outgrown its original home, and in 1991 a new
155,000-square-foot downtown building, designed by Robert Venturi, Scott
Brown & Associates, opened to the public. The 1933 building was renovated
and reopened as the Asian Art Museum in 1994. SAM’s desire to further serve
its community was realized in 2007 with the opening of two stunning new
facilities: the nine-acre Olympic Sculpture Park (designed by Weiss/Manfredi
Architects)—a “museum without walls,” free and open to all—and the Allied
Works Architecture designed 118,000-square-foot expansion of its main,
downtown location, including 232,000 square feet of additional space built for
future expansion. The Olympic Sculpture Park and SAM’s downtown expansion
celebrate their tenth anniversary in 2017.
From a strong foundation of Asian art to noteworthy collections of African and
Oceanic art, Northwest Coast Native American art, European and American art,
and modern and contemporary art, the strength of SAM’s collection of
approximately 25,000 objects lies in its diversity of media, cultures and time
periods.