So much depends on the crescent, the trigon, and the circle, the three main design elements of Salish art. This piece is a 19th-century Cowichan spindle whorl made of maple wood. It was one of the works in Seattle Art Museums Salish show a few years back.
So much depends on the crescent, the trigon, and the circle, the three main design elements of Salish art. This piece is a 19th-century Cowichan spindle whorl made of maple wood. It was one of the works in Seattle Art Museum’s Salish show a few years back. Courtesy The British Museum

Of all the questions I get asked as a critic in Seattle, one of the most recurring is about Native art. There’s no central hub for finding out information about it. (The Burke has some, and I reviewed Seattle Art Museum’s 2008 exhibition.) But increasingly, the institutions we already have are turning toward it.

The Frye Art Museum, for instance, is instituting a new Native Art History Lecture Series, starting Thursday, March 24. There are five sessions (one per month through July 28). Cost is $115 for non-members and $55 for members, or day-of tickets will be for sale depending on availability.

The lecturer is Miranda Belarde-Lewis, who is Tlingit and Zuni, and who’s part of a cadre of Native American PhDs to come out of the University of Washington’s Information Sciences program.

She’ll talk about “indigenous knowledge, bounded space, and knowledge visualization in the context of four Native art forms: weaving, carving and sculpture, jewelry, and painting.” The series will include historical and contemporary artists.

Belarde-Lewis has a lot to cover, and won’t specifically dwell on the cultural production of the Puget Sound region. For more about that, watch this. (Thanks as ever, Shaun Petersen.)

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...