On the first Thursday of every month, Seattleites flock to the streets of Pioneer Square for the city's central and oldest art walk, which offers opportunities to stroll, sip on wine, and attend as many gallery openings as possible. But, in most cases, the shows are up for longer than just one night, and the historic neighborhood is a great place to check out art any day of the year. So, below, we've compiled the most promising exhibits that are having opening receptions on April 5—complete with a handy Google map at the bottom. You can also find more options on our First Thursday calendar or our complete visual art calendar

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Amanda Kirkhuff: Everything Is Hard
According to a recent interview, self-proclaimed “militant homosexual” Amanda Kirkhuff’s work in this show explores “the role the gay community plays in the revolution.” Many of her lush oil portraits show women and queers in more or less ordinary scenes. Shotgun captures the stoner rite of passage, one tattooed twentysomething woman purses her lips to pass (presumably) pot smoke to the waiting mouth of another woman. Their eyes nearly closed, this erotic moment of not-quite-but-nearly-French-kissing has played out among stoner duos everywhere. Passing the Joint features a gesture resembling Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, where Adam reaches out to touch the hand of God. One hand with squared-off, red-painted fingernails reaches for a joint from another hand with long, embellished, manicured fingernails. Like Shotgun, the eroticism is understated but very much present in this simple act. KATIE KURTZ
Gallery 4Culture

Anne Siems: To Shed
Anne Siems's work reflects the influence of medieval, early modern, and romantic art, setting delicate portraits with Byzantine eyes against abstract backgrounds that suggest mists, storms, and gardens of now-extinct flora. Pale, thickly painted faces contrast with sketched-in or detail-less clothing—and how alien these traditional styles are to our sensibilities today, despite their iconic place in Western cultural history. To see the acrylics of this German artist (who's now based in Seattle) is to glimpse a compression of European art through the centuries, given its own idiosyncratic, feminist spin. This exhibition responds to #MeToo and #TimesUp, exhorting the viewer to "let go of toxic beliefs, shame, and harmful patterns of behavior." JOULE ZELMAN
Patricia Rovzar Gallery

Dave Calver: Limbo Lounge
The title of Dave Calver's graphic novel, Limbo Lounge, is quite literal: The dead wait in a bar to find out their final destination, passing the time with wandering denizens of hell. Calver's work is informed by his time in New York City, where he won an award for a poster commissioned by the public transport agency. Limbo Lounge looks like it portrays the same atmosphere of transience as in the public waiting spaces of a city. You'll want to see this sinister bedlam of doomed souls, homicidal princesses, vigilante nuns, and a couple of "flower-headed freaks," rendered in Calver's muffled textures and circus colors. JOULE ZELMAN
BONFIRE

Gabriel Stromberg: A Series of Shapes
This gallery will display designer Gabriel Stromberg's bold typographic and graphic works and sell books, totes, and prints from Cold Cube Press. Stromberg has made beautiful, bright posters as director of the design firm Civilization (which houses this gallery).
A Non-Breaking Space

In Danger: Fragile Ecosystems
This group exhibition will feature work by Pacific Northwest artists Jennifer Caldwell, Jason Chakravarty, Mark Clarson, Jamie Randall, Kelly O'Dell, and Raven Skyriver that uses flora and fauna to "raise awareness of environmental loss and preservation in our changing ecosystem."
Vetri Gallery

Jess Joy: The Singing Mime
Jess Joy is the lead singer of Moon Honey, an acid rock band that produces what Stranger music calendar editor Kim Selling describes as "rabid pastoral sounds." Her bright and vibrato-heavy voice juicily wraps itself around rich, lyrical, wild, spiritual imagery. Joy's installation and performances as the Singing Mime reveal another side of rural sensibilities: those she developed "growing up with depression in rural Louisiana." Surrounded by relics of her childhood and adolescence—journals, drawings, photos, and a "first little pink Precious Moments bible," mulched into papier-mâché—Joy will perform as an unsilent mime, accompanying non-semantic body motion with theremin, guitar, and voice. It's the latest ambitious show inviting visitors to explore the visualization of an artist's inner self. Judging from Joy's work, this one seems like it may have absorbed equal influences from Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and a highly esoteric alternate-universe version of Lisa Frank. Come at 7 pm on First Thursday for a performance. JOULE ZELMAN
Mount Analogue

Masters of Vancouver Island and Beyond
This gallery will display masks and sculptures by Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Musqueam, Cree, Tlingit, Haida, and non-indigenous artists primarily from Vancouver Island. Contributors to the exhibit include Jay Brabant, Art Thompson, Beau Dick, Mervyn Child, Junior Henderson, and many others.
Stonington Gallery

Michael Spafford
Three Seattle galleries—Davidson, Woodside/Braseth, and Greg Kucera—are displaying works by the legendary Michael Spafford, whose flat yet dynamic figurative works clash together with all the brutality of classical myth. The print Europa and the Bull #2 reduces the bodies of the bull and his victim into curved lines and blocks of black and white. Chimera and Bellerophon uses a diptych structure with a cut-out attachment to render the goat-lion-snake beast of legend, ingeniously mimicking its hybrid nature with disparate colors and materials. Perhaps the most impressive paintings are Coatlicue #1 and #2, the Aztec mother of the gods, depicted as four or six severed hands ensnared in a whorl of intestine-like snakes. Alongside the exhibition, University of Washington Press (Spafford is a professor emeritus at UW) will be selling a monograph on this important Northwest artist, and you can attend its release on April 6 at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery. JOULE ZELMAN
Davidson Galleries, Woodside/Braseth Gallery, & Greg Kucera Gallery

Nathalie Krick: Apocalypstick
In a capitalist economy, beauty is a marketing strategy. The science of advertising consists of a series of tricks to fool the eye into desiring a commodity, which often has little or nothing to do with what one has seen. In her photographic series Natural Deceptions and How She Got Her Body Back, artist Natalie Krick explores the relationship between desire, falsehood, and cultivated images of beauty in an era where representations of bodies are increasingly removed from their flesh-and-blood context. Krick's images are double-edged swords—they simultaneously elicit desire and encourage us to question the nature of that desire. EMILY POTHAST
Glassbox Gallery

Preston Singletary: The Air World
Over the course of a career spanning more than 40 years, contemporary Tlingit artist Preston Singletary has become one of the biggest names in the Northwest's thriving, collaborative glass-art community. Challenging the notion that indigenous art must be defined by a relationship to traditional materials, Singletary's work has expanded the notion of what constitutes a "traditional material," creating objects rooted in both history and innovation. Singletary's work is in the collections of many museums around the world. For this show, he plans to unveil new handblown, sand-carved glassworks. EMILY POTHAST
Traver Gallery

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