This week is particularly rich in art openings. For one thing, Seattle Art Museum's Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, an important exhibition by a queer South African artist, will throw open its doors. For another, this month, because of the July 4th holiday, three major art walks—the Pioneer Square Art Walk, the Capitol Hill Art Walk, and the West Seattle Art Walk—are taking place on the same day, this Thursday, July 11. For a third, it's also Georgetown Art Attack this weekend. To guide you through all of this local creative goodness, below, we've compiled the most promising exhibits that are having opening receptions this week, as well as our favorite new shows from other neighborhoods that aren't having art walks. You may want to check out the Belltown Art Walk and Art Up Phinneywood, too. For more art options, check out our complete visual art calendar.
Jump to: Capitol Hill | Downtown | Georgetown | Pioneer Square | South Lake Union | University District | West Seattle
Found something you like and don't want to forget about it later? Click "Save Event" on any of the linked events below to add it to your own private list.
CAPITOL HILL
(Shows open on Thursday, July 11 during Art Walk)
Capitol Hill Block Party Photo Showcase
Vicariously experience the thrills of Capitol Hill Block Parties past at this exhibition of snaps by local photographers.
Caffe Vita
Capitol Hill Block Party Poster Show
Celebrate poster art and Capitol Hill Block Party with this exhibit featuring work by more than 40 local artists, inspired by musicians who will perform at the festival. The opening reception promises a raffle, drinks, and a DJ. Buy art—all of the profits from sales will go to the designers.
Vermillion
Dede Falcone: And So It Is
Falcone's rich, jammy colors swirl together in expressions of "placement, displacement, connection, and fragmentation of human connectedness to the natural environment."
Steve Gilbert Studio
Erin Kendig: Giants
These gouache and watercolor paintings double as love letters to Northwest flora and fungi. Using mixed perspectives, patterns, curious symmetries, and sinuous lines, Kendig evokes animistic landscapes and mushrooms and plants with plenty of personality.
Ghost Gallery
Marilyn Montufar
This photo series by the Mexican American artist Marilyn Montufar highlights representation of Mexicans in a reaction to backwards American views of its southern neighbor. They're soulful and emphatically free of stereotype.
Consulate of Mexico
Pink Halloween HQ
Jordan Christianson and Anouk Rawkson, joined by Casey Morse and Stephanie Jamieson, have combined their energies and talents in the brand PINK HALLOWEEN. Their new collection of bags, apparel, pins, sinister statuettes, and more celebrates queer icons "lost to gentrification."
Private Location
Polaroid Party in the Stairwell Gallery
To accompany screenings of Instant Dreams, a documentary about the unkillable appeal of Polaroid film, check out Polaroids submitted by local photographers.
Northwest Film Forum
Rick Araluce: The Night Theater
Guggenheim Fellowship recipient Araluce specializes in detailed, illusion-filled, faintly sinister tiny dioramas that look incredibly realistic and impart feelings of delicious disorientation. It feels like you're peeking into a parallel universe that isn't quite to scale with ours.
Roq la Rue
Steven Miller: Offerte
Steven Miller burned '70s to '90s gay porn magazines in a fire pit and photographed the inferno in a tribute to "love and loss through the AIDS years." The all-consuming fire is meant to represent desire and power, countering the association of flames with Christian hell.
The Factory
Tatiana Gill
Compassionate, body-positive feminist cartoonist Tatiana Gill (Wombgenda, Blackoutings) will show her social justice-tinged works at the cupcake shop.
Cupcake Royale
Zac Boetes: Total Shig Show
Zac Boetes is a depictor of eerie, silly, grotesque beasts (and humans), often painted on repurposed materials. The designs declare the influence of tattoos, cartoons, and psychedelic grooviness.
Joe Bar
DOWNTOWN
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
(Opening Wednesday, July 10)
Zanele Muholi is a titan of art and photography. I remember first encountering their photographs of black LGBTQI South Africans in college and being stunned by the honesty, intimacy, and strength that Muholi brought out in their subjects. In a time when being a queer black South African rendered an individual invisible or subject to extreme prejudice and violence, Muholi’s work subverted and exalted this marginalized group of people. In Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Muholi becomes the subject, taking staged self-portraits using found materials like pads, cowrie shells, and washing machine tubes to “challenge perceptions of who and where they are.” JASMYNE KEIMIG
Seattle Art Museum
GEORGETOWN
(Shows open on Saturday, July 13 during Art Attack)
Clara W. Dudley
Lovers of vivid, fanciful, mythology-enriched needlepoint and silkscreen: Dudley creates fierce, docile, large, and small mythical creatures that will charm the heck out of you.
All City Coffee
Hot Off the Press Fair & Exhibition
Seattle's world-renowned Fantagraphics Books, known for their boundary-pushing cartoons and graphic novels, will host their annual Hot Off the Press book fair, featuring appearances by guest artists like Berlin-based Ulli Lust, Americans Zak Sally and Joshua Ray Stephens, Coin-op Books from Brooklyn, and many other small publishers and artists. The artwork will stay up during the Hot Off the Press Exhibition.
Fantagraphics
Paige Barnes: Mother
Prolific dance artist Barnes will spend the month of July in residency at Oxbow, developing a piece melding East Asian traditional medicine (including acupuncture and pulse listening) and dance. Join her during Georgetown Art Attack to see the work in progress, and witness the final work during performances at the end of the month.
Oxbow
Uses of History
Denzil Hurley, Kathy Slade, Jeremy Deller, and others depict various strains of regalia and other forms of self-expression related to public protest and ceremonies. Melissa E. Feldman curates this selection of video, painting, "industrial embroidery," and more. Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda has his American debut with a 35-minute film called Chimera, showing at 1:30 and 3:30 during gallery hours along with Jeremy Deller's Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992.
studio e
PIONEER SQUARE
(Shows open on Thursday, July 11 during Art Walk)
Amjad Faur and Paula Rebsom: In Our Absence
Everyone is familiar with the thought experiment “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” A riddle for the ages. The local artists of In Our Absence are interested in exploring what happens in environments they feel intimately connected to when they are not there. Using infrared motion-sensor camera traps, Amjad Faur documents a hunting reserve just south of Olympia, while Paula Rebsom documents her backyard in Greenwood. Both look to highlight parallels between their own experiences in these spaces and what happens when neither of them is around. JASMYNE KEIMIG
SOIL
As in Also: An Alternative Too
Brooklyn artist, instructor, and curator John Drury guest curates As in Also: An Alternative Too, which serves as a follow-up to his New York City exhibition from earlier this year, The Other Glass: An Alternative History. Drury continues to bring together artists of diverse backgrounds who push the boundaries (and expectations) of what glass as a medium can do. There are molecular-looking glass sculptures by Seattle-based Jen Elek, Brooklyn-based Amy Lemaire’s organic forms, and Seattle-based artist Morgan Peterson’s pieces that cull imagery from and offer commentary on popular culture. Among the others featured in this show are Scott Darlington, Eli Hansen, Robbie Miller, Jerry Pethick, Brian Pike, George Sawchuk, Buster Simpson, Megan Stelljes, Leo Tecosky, and Simon Klenell. JASMYNE KEIMIG
Traver Gallery
Bill Whipple: New Abstractions
Long preoccupied with "viewer-activated, message-driven constructions," Whipple is switching to wood and found objects to make intricate objects that suggest warped machines, Seussian cityscapes, mechanized human interactions, or alchemical apparatus.
4Culture
Dick Weiss
Avant-garde glass artist Weiss, whose ethereal-looking yet permanent pieces grace the SeaTac airport, the Pilchuck Glass School, the Museum of Glass, the City of Seattle, and more, will hang colorful stained-glass panels in the store/gallery's front windows. Enjoy the sunset rays through this no doubt lovely installation.
Vetri
Jennifer Beedon Snow and Joe Max Emminger
Jennifer Beedon Snow makes the loveliest paintings of tennis courts and subdivision pools in suburbia, while Emminger paints quirky people, animals, and figures in between.
Linda Hodges Gallery
Leah Gerrard: Element
Leah Gerrard’s wiry creations speak to the delicacy—and rigidity—of the material. Gerrard incorporates the natural (rocks, wood, organic forms) into the metallic sinew of the wire, which is often suspended from rusty iron chains. JASMYNE KEIMIG
Shift Gallery
Nine Years | Graceful Exit
It's been a brutal year for art galleries in Seattle: We've lost Mount Analogue, the Alice, and now, it seems, Prographica is going the same way. Stop in on their last exhibition to see work by more than 20 artists who've been helped along in their careers by gallery owner Norman Lundin, who writes poignantly: "While nine years is not long enough, it will have to do."
Prographica
Prince Tiao Nithakhong Somsanith: The Impermanence of Life
Laotian artist Tiao Nith uses gold and silver thread to embroider ephemeral works on dead leaves gathered during his perambulations. Contemplate the transience of life as you gaze at these shimmery patterns.
ArtXChange
Will Robinson: New Sculptures
Bremerton-born Will Robinson's stonework is described as "a study in contrasts" and "prone to impossible balancing acts." The sculptures look somehow both elemental and otherworldly, like they've suddenly condensed out of an alien atmosphere.
Foster/White Gallery
SOUTH LAKE UNION
Beili Liu: Each and Every
(Opening Thursday, July 11)
Each and Every is Austin-based Beili Liu’s first solo exhibition in Seattle. Liu creates immersive “site-responsive” and site-specific installations that create and explore various dichotomies. She often works with quotidian materials (thread, scissors, paper, water) to create her works, which both familiarizes and disorients viewers. For her show at MadArt, Liu will be suspending thousands of pieces of concrete-coated children’s clothing inches above the gallery floor. JASMYNE KEIMIG
MadArt
UNIVERSITY DISTRICT
Amber Flame: ::intrigue:: 8
(Opening Friday, July 12)
Hugo House poet-in-residence Amber Flame explores the relationship between music and poetry using "choral-heavy melodies set against loop-based harmonies" based on writings by Danez Smith, Natalie Diaz, and others; looped video shorts; and fabric window dressings.
Jack Straw New Media Gallery
Carrie Yamaoka: recto/verso
(Opening Saturday, July 13)
New York–based artist Carrie Yamaoka’s work is molten, glass-like, distorted as if you’re looking into a fun-house mirror. She skips the traditional canvas and wood panels, opting instead to compose a lot of her work using resin or reflective Mylar. The result is a slipperiness of both form and style: The material is the thing. In recto/verso, the exhibition covers Yamaoka’s work from the early 1990s to the present, including some of her early text-based explorations and chemically altered photos.JASMYNE KEIMIG
WEST SEATTLE
(Shows open Thursday, July 11 during Art Walk)
Alexandra Penglis
Recent Seattle University BFA graduate Penglis hangs multiply exposed, digitally manipulated photographs of landscapes that create complex shapes, planes, and color combinations.
Rosefit
Jessica Ry'cheal: Altar Call
Art critic Emily Pothast has written: "Jessica Rycheal is a portrait photographer whose work documents subjects drawn from Seattle's multigenerational activist community with a sensuous, effervescent joie de vivre." After her exhibition at the Northwest African American Museum, Rycheal's frank and loving visual odes to black healing and community are once again available to view, and you should seize your chance to do so.
Virago Gallery
Sandy Nelson
This graphic designer and artist's silkscreen prints exude a sweet, earthy, relaxing simplicity as they celebrate community, peace, and greenery.
John L. Scott Real Estate
Found something you like and don't want to forget about it later? Click "Save Event" on any of the linked events below to add it to your own private list.
