Calendar

Asia Pacific Cultural Center Presents the First Annual Khmer New Year

FREE ADMISSION • FUN FAMILY EVENT
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• Cultural Arts
• Religion (Monks Chanting)
• Games, Live Performances
• Singing Contest
• Bok La Hong (Papaya salad) Contest
• Dessert Dash
• Silence Aution
• Food Booths and Retail Vendors

The sixth annual Traditional Games will be held in Juneau Saturday and Sunday,  April 1-2, 2023. Registration for athletes ages 11 and older will be available online beginning Jan. 9.

The games will include teams from around the region and state competing in 10 events and will be live streamed on Sealaska Heritage Institute’s YouTube channel.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Lummi House of Tears Carvers along with the Alliance of Earth, Sky & Water Protectors, Catskill Mountainkeeper and the Apache Stronghold welcome you to join their unified effort to bring awareness and prayers for Oak Flat, an Apache holy site. It is through generous contributions that help provide these campaigns internationally, inter-tribally and intergenerationally.

The Lummi House of Tears Carvers gratefully accept donations to help with fuel and food on their cross-country journey. They will join the Alliance of Earth, Sky & Water Protectors to defend traditional Apache lands from Resolution Copper a division of British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. According to Apache Stronghold founder Wendsler Nosie Sr., Resolution Copper’s mine will swallow the site in a massive crater and render “longstanding religious practices impossible.”

33 days , 41 stops, and 6497 miles. All stops and gatherings are free and open to the public.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Excited about starting your own garden but not sure where to begin? In support of this weekend’s garden supply pick-up, Shanelle and Kalee, our spectacular farmers, are offering free advice and consultation at Beacon Food Forest. It is all free and with no barriers to receive it! Just show up to pick-up. Please come prepared to carry your items home! Supply include: soil, compost, gloves, plant starters, and other gardening supplies.

Come with questions! Leave with answers and your future garden in your hands.

Specializing in intricate natural and oil-dyed wooden and paper mosaics, artist Naoko Morisawa invites viewers to experience Happy Room — Mosaic Collage, a collection of over 50 small, mid, and large-scale works that evoke a sense of joy and draw from the Hygge lifestyle. The installation is divided into four rooms, Shoes/Closet, Kitchen/Living Room, Theater Japonism/Living Room, and Heart Room.

Each piece and room transforms everyday objects like a dependable pair of shoes or a pastry from a café into ornate, dynamic mosaics that invite viewers to find beauty in the details. Happy Room — Mosaic Collage features pieces from various bodies of work from the past 15 years including pieces from My Collection Shoes, Mosaic Café, Japanese Opera – Noh Mask, and newer abstract works.

A showcase of transgender and sacred gender indigenous artists working in digital media, transmedia, film, 360 video, glitch art, contemporary interpretations of traditional forms, and future mediums. digital indigiqueer: a showcase of trans transmedia includes 11 individual pieces exploring the diversity of contemporary indigenous creativity and touching their futures and pasts. Work from Raven TwoFeathers, Ty Defoe, Raven Kameʻenui-Becker, Communidad Catrileo+Carrion, Elijah Forbes, and organizer Hexe Fey.

Grand Opening event at the new Portland Indigenous Marketplace office space!!

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Join us and celebrate together our tradition over 50 years old! Eat delicious, traditional food, and traditional Polish pastries and get gifts, traditional crafts, t-shirts, and much more for yourself or family and friends!

Delicious dinners of pickle soup, white borscht, pierogi, and more were served all day. Whole menu 
Take-home dinners and sweets are available. Frozen menu to go
Delectable pastries like Pączki, poppy seeds cakes, and traditional Polish cheesecakes as well as coffee/tea at the dessert booth.

Upstairs features an excellent selection of amber, books, crafts, Bolesławiec pottery, and more!

The Lane PowWow 2023, presented by students of Native American Student Association (NASA) will be held this year on Saturday, April 1.

The annual Lane Community College PowWow will take place at the LCC Main Campus inside Titan Coliseum (Lane gymnasium). This powwow is a family friendly, free event. All drums and dancers are welcome. No alcohol or drugs are permitted.

A night market highlight Black and BIPOC owned businesses.
Shop local and handmade clothes, candles, art, jewelry, massage therapy, healing tools, body care, hair care and more!
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– 100 vendors
– African drummers and dancers
– Fashion show
– Art Installations
– Cash bar
– Live Performers
– Food trucks

FREE ENTRY AND KID FRIENDLY!

Join us in person or via live stream (YouTube or Facebook) for an afternoon of music from Jack Straw Artists So’le Celestial, Kaley Lane Eaton, LaVon Hardison, Vibhuti Kavishwar, and Paul Kikuchi with Stan Shikuma and Mako.

The Black Night Market (BNM) is an innovative market that features Black/ BIPOC owned businesses and performing artists.
BNM is known for creating exposure, representation and new clientele for local artists, performers and businesses.
The Black Night Market invites the surrounding communities for an alluring celebration of black culture and creativity through art, food, music and more. 80+ vendors, Food trucks, Jazz musicians, two fashion shows, Live DJs, Spoken Word and more.

FREE ENTRY! KID FRIENDLY!

Intermediate/Advance Cedar Bark Plaiting
Instructor: Kandi McGilton
March 25 – April 2, 2023
Mon. – Fri. 5:30-8:30 p.m., Sat. & Sun. 10:00 a.m.– 4:30 p.m.
Kandi McGilton is a weaving student of master weavers, Delores and Holly Churchill, focusing on the endangered Annette Island style of Tsimshian basketry. In this class students will focus on the unique and subtle intricacies of plaiting. Students are responsible for supplying their own red cedar bark.
Class fee: $225
(materials: supplied by student)
This class counts toward a Certificate of Merit in Weaving.
Three ways to register for classes:
• Call 907-228-2792 to register via phone.
• Fill out the PDF form online and email it to MarniR@ktn-ak.us.
• Register in person at the Totem Heritage Center. We are open Tuesday – Saturday from 1 – 5:00 p.m.

It’s back, almost a year to the date (almost like we planned that)
Join us April 1 for Blooming with Grief this is an evening for us to gather in our grief, in our joy, our full self.
There will be space to be creative, a covid memorial interactive art piece, delicious food, music, space to sit and be, space to learn.
The live portion of the evening is from 7-8:30 and will have visual offerings from local burlesque artists, poems and pose from local writers and of course a little space for an open mic- cause this is for us.

Come join us for an evening of Scandinavian themed food and entertainment!
Consider supporting us by participating in our Silent Auction.

6:00pm Meal Served, Auction Bidding Begins
6:00-8:00pm Entertainment
7:30pm Auction Bidding Closes
8:00-9:00pm Community Dance!

At the peak of the 19th century, the Tacoma Method was praised as an effective method to eradicate Chinese communities on the West Coast. This is the operatic retelling of Tacoma’s dark history.

The sixth annual Traditional Games will be held in Juneau Saturday and Sunday,  April 1-2, 2023. Registration for athletes ages 11 and older will be available online beginning Jan. 9.

The games will include teams from around the region and state competing in 10 events and will be live streamed on Sealaska Heritage Institute’s YouTube channel.

Join us for our new lei making cultural workshop – Lei Haku Series #1! Please keep reading this caption as we are making changes to our lei workshop sign-ups.

Due to popular demand, our team understands it is so, SO important to host cultural programming for our Pasifika and QTPI community. We also understand the importance of continuing these workshops and making sure they are sustainable. To keep up with this type of workshop, we will now be asking for a registration or suggested donation fee of $20 per person for each lei workshop session. You can register for your desired session by securing a spot on our website utopiaportland.org/store.

Accessibility is highly valued by our team at UTOPIA PDX, SO: You can get $5 off your order for 2 spots using discount code: LEIHAKU

Our upcoming Lei Haku Series #1 workshop will run exactly the same as our other workshops. There will be two sessions Session #1 (9am-11:30am) and Session #2 (1pm-3:30pm). Our lei making workshops will be held on the 3rd Sunday of each month unless stated otherwise.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Specializing in intricate natural and oil-dyed wooden and paper mosaics, artist Naoko Morisawa invites viewers to experience Happy Room — Mosaic Collage, a collection of over 50 small, mid, and large-scale works that evoke a sense of joy and draw from the Hygge lifestyle. The installation is divided into four rooms, Shoes/Closet, Kitchen/Living Room, Theater Japonism/Living Room, and Heart Room.

Each piece and room transforms everyday objects like a dependable pair of shoes or a pastry from a café into ornate, dynamic mosaics that invite viewers to find beauty in the details. Happy Room — Mosaic Collage features pieces from various bodies of work from the past 15 years including pieces from My Collection Shoes, Mosaic Café, Japanese Opera – Noh Mask, and newer abstract works.

A showcase of transgender and sacred gender indigenous artists working in digital media, transmedia, film, 360 video, glitch art, contemporary interpretations of traditional forms, and future mediums. digital indigiqueer: a showcase of trans transmedia includes 11 individual pieces exploring the diversity of contemporary indigenous creativity and touching their futures and pasts. Work from Raven TwoFeathers, Ty Defoe, Raven Kameʻenui-Becker, Communidad Catrileo+Carrion, Elijah Forbes, and organizer Hexe Fey.

Grand Opening event at the new Portland Indigenous Marketplace office space!!

It’s time for another Rastro Flamenco! The Rastro is a market place for all things flamenco! Originally inspired by visits to the Rastro in Madrid, and El Jueves market in Sevilla, this annual event offers an opportunity to buy and sell a full range of new and used flamenco items. For the past several years, Espacio de Arte has hosted the Rastro as a fun way to get together and raise some money for our organization and programs. Proceeds from our event this year will be donated to Rubina and Marcos Carmona to assist with medical expenses and care for Rubina.

Stop by the Rastro to shop and network with other flamencos! We will have a ton of great merchandise to purchase as well as a silent auction with goods from Lunares, Flamenco West, Fábrica Flamenca and others.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Lets kickoff Khmer Arts Heritage and New Year month over food and drinks. Feel free to bing something to share.

Intermediate/Advance Cedar Bark Plaiting
Instructor: Kandi McGilton
March 25 – April 2, 2023
Mon. – Fri. 5:30-8:30 p.m., Sat. & Sun. 10:00 a.m.– 4:30 p.m.
Kandi McGilton is a weaving student of master weavers, Delores and Holly Churchill, focusing on the endangered Annette Island style of Tsimshian basketry. In this class students will focus on the unique and subtle intricacies of plaiting. Students are responsible for supplying their own red cedar bark.
Class fee: $225
(materials: supplied by student)
This class counts toward a Certificate of Merit in Weaving.
Three ways to register for classes:
• Call 907-228-2792 to register via phone.
• Fill out the PDF form online and email it to MarniR@ktn-ak.us.
• Register in person at the Totem Heritage Center. We are open Tuesday – Saturday from 1 – 5:00 p.m.

At the peak of the 19th century, the Tacoma Method was praised as an effective method to eradicate Chinese communities on the West Coast. This is the operatic retelling of Tacoma’s dark history.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Specializing in intricate natural and oil-dyed wooden and paper mosaics, artist Naoko Morisawa invites viewers to experience Happy Room — Mosaic Collage, a collection of over 50 small, mid, and large-scale works that evoke a sense of joy and draw from the Hygge lifestyle. The installation is divided into four rooms, Shoes/Closet, Kitchen/Living Room, Theater Japonism/Living Room, and Heart Room.

Each piece and room transforms everyday objects like a dependable pair of shoes or a pastry from a café into ornate, dynamic mosaics that invite viewers to find beauty in the details. Happy Room — Mosaic Collage features pieces from various bodies of work from the past 15 years including pieces from My Collection Shoes, Mosaic Café, Japanese Opera – Noh Mask, and newer abstract works.

A showcase of transgender and sacred gender indigenous artists working in digital media, transmedia, film, 360 video, glitch art, contemporary interpretations of traditional forms, and future mediums. digital indigiqueer: a showcase of trans transmedia includes 11 individual pieces exploring the diversity of contemporary indigenous creativity and touching their futures and pasts. Work from Raven TwoFeathers, Ty Defoe, Raven Kameʻenui-Becker, Communidad Catrileo+Carrion, Elijah Forbes, and organizer Hexe Fey.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Chris Abani is an acclaimed novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. Born to an Igbo father and English mother, Abani grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria. His experiences in his home country inspire much of Abani’s work, equally informed by his research into African poetics, twentieth century Anglophone literature, Yoruba and Igbo philosophy and religion, and many other areas of study.

Abani’s latest work is a book of poetry entitled Smoking the Bible, in which he illustrates the connective geography between harm, regret, and release, as his poems move through landscapes of Nigeria, the Midwestern United States, adulthood, and childhood.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Specializing in intricate natural and oil-dyed wooden and paper mosaics, artist Naoko Morisawa invites viewers to experience Happy Room — Mosaic Collage, a collection of over 50 small, mid, and large-scale works that evoke a sense of joy and draw from the Hygge lifestyle. The installation is divided into four rooms, Shoes/Closet, Kitchen/Living Room, Theater Japonism/Living Room, and Heart Room.

Each piece and room transforms everyday objects like a dependable pair of shoes or a pastry from a café into ornate, dynamic mosaics that invite viewers to find beauty in the details. Happy Room — Mosaic Collage features pieces from various bodies of work from the past 15 years including pieces from My Collection Shoes, Mosaic Café, Japanese Opera – Noh Mask, and newer abstract works.

A showcase of transgender and sacred gender indigenous artists working in digital media, transmedia, film, 360 video, glitch art, contemporary interpretations of traditional forms, and future mediums. digital indigiqueer: a showcase of trans transmedia includes 11 individual pieces exploring the diversity of contemporary indigenous creativity and touching their futures and pasts. Work from Raven TwoFeathers, Ty Defoe, Raven Kameʻenui-Becker, Communidad Catrileo+Carrion, Elijah Forbes, and organizer Hexe Fey.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Specializing in intricate natural and oil-dyed wooden and paper mosaics, artist Naoko Morisawa invites viewers to experience Happy Room — Mosaic Collage, a collection of over 50 small, mid, and large-scale works that evoke a sense of joy and draw from the Hygge lifestyle. The installation is divided into four rooms, Shoes/Closet, Kitchen/Living Room, Theater Japonism/Living Room, and Heart Room.

Each piece and room transforms everyday objects like a dependable pair of shoes or a pastry from a café into ornate, dynamic mosaics that invite viewers to find beauty in the details. Happy Room — Mosaic Collage features pieces from various bodies of work from the past 15 years including pieces from My Collection Shoes, Mosaic Café, Japanese Opera – Noh Mask, and newer abstract works.

A showcase of transgender and sacred gender indigenous artists working in digital media, transmedia, film, 360 video, glitch art, contemporary interpretations of traditional forms, and future mediums. digital indigiqueer: a showcase of trans transmedia includes 11 individual pieces exploring the diversity of contemporary indigenous creativity and touching their futures and pasts. Work from Raven TwoFeathers, Ty Defoe, Raven Kameʻenui-Becker, Communidad Catrileo+Carrion, Elijah Forbes, and organizer Hexe Fey.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Specializing in intricate natural and oil-dyed wooden and paper mosaics, artist Naoko Morisawa invites viewers to experience Happy Room — Mosaic Collage, a collection of over 50 small, mid, and large-scale works that evoke a sense of joy and draw from the Hygge lifestyle. The installation is divided into four rooms, Shoes/Closet, Kitchen/Living Room, Theater Japonism/Living Room, and Heart Room.

Each piece and room transforms everyday objects like a dependable pair of shoes or a pastry from a café into ornate, dynamic mosaics that invite viewers to find beauty in the details. Happy Room — Mosaic Collage features pieces from various bodies of work from the past 15 years including pieces from My Collection Shoes, Mosaic Café, Japanese Opera – Noh Mask, and newer abstract works.

A showcase of transgender and sacred gender indigenous artists working in digital media, transmedia, film, 360 video, glitch art, contemporary interpretations of traditional forms, and future mediums. digital indigiqueer: a showcase of trans transmedia includes 11 individual pieces exploring the diversity of contemporary indigenous creativity and touching their futures and pasts. Work from Raven TwoFeathers, Ty Defoe, Raven Kameʻenui-Becker, Communidad Catrileo+Carrion, Elijah Forbes, and organizer Hexe Fey.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

Showcasing the customs of Native Americans in full regalia, the competition draws performers from all over the U.S. and Canada. The Seven Arrows Powwow attracts participants from all over the northwest and Canada.

The event is planned with the student organization Intertribal Native Council and the support of the community. Powwow also features demonstrations, storytelling, and craft vendors.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Across Mexico, mask-making is a vibrant and playful artform with roots in the celebration of religious holidays. Worn by dancers in rollicking performances known as danzas, the masks depict devils and holy men; celebrities from media and politics, and other known individuals who personify sinners and false idols.

In contextualizing masks and the expressive art forms through the life and work of contemporary Mexican mask artists, the exhibition dispels the common notion that masks and danzas are “archaic” Indigenous customs that are disappearing in the face of encroaching modernity. Instead, they are presented as expressions of contemporary living culture in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives are combined to communicate about spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

Showcasing the customs of Native Americans in full regalia, the competition draws performers from all over the U.S. and Canada. The Seven Arrows Powwow attracts participants from all over the northwest and Canada.

The event is planned with the student organization Intertribal Native Council and the support of the community. Powwow also features demonstrations, storytelling, and craft vendors.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Space is limited – reservations are recommended. Program and exhibit are recommended for grade 6 and up.
11:00-12:00pm – Survival and Luck: Holocaust Survivor Peter Metzelaar Shares His Story
Peter will share his remarkable story of hiding in the Netherlands during the Holocaust, his mother’s ingenuity that saved their lives, and the close calls where luck was on their side.
2:00-3:00pm – Shedding Our Stars: Holocaust Survivor Laureen Nussbaum Shares Her Story
Born in Germany, Laureen and her family fled to Amsterdam when the Nazis seized power. Her family lived among many other German Jewish refugees, including Anne Frank and her family. Through a loophole and a supportive German official, Laureen was re-classified as non-Jewish, giving her the ability to help support other Jewish people, including her future husband Rudi. Offered in partnership with the SJCC.
Explore the Holocaust Center’s Museum and the new temporary exhibit, “Memories Unboxed: Rare Photos From Our Archives” which includes photos of Peter Metzelaar and Laureen Nussbaum.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Tidwell Social Work Multicultural Community Dinner is the third Tuesday of every month at the Global Lounge Commons. We would love to have you join us for the wonderful evening, celebrating the food of different cultures each month.
This event is always free and child-friendly and always starts at 6pm.
Please feel free to bring a side dish or dessert to share.
Each month will bring new cultural experiences with food, possibly music and always laughter!

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.

SAM presents American Art: The Stories We Carry, a transformation of its American art galleries, created through a wide-ranging collaboration among SAM curators and staff, artists, and advisors from the Seattle community. Funded primarily by a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the project features work from SAM’s collection and new works and curation by contemporary artists, and it deepens the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices with a shared-authorship model that reflects and responds to community knowledge.

Each new generation of artists responds to and builds on the art of earlier periods. Bringing together artworks that bridge decades, Reverberations seeks to spark a hum between historical works and those by artists working today. Organized in thematic groups, Reverberations introduces a different topic in each gallery, ranging from landscape and lyrical abstraction to the use of the body in addressing psychological, social, and political concerns. As you move through the modern and contemporary galleries, you will encounter harmonies and dissonance as younger artists stake their claim. In turn, works from earlier decades will acquire new meaning and new layers of relevance.

This installation draws from SAM’s growing collection and incorporates many works acquired in recent years, by artists including Margarita Cabrera, Dana Claxton, Senga Nengudi, Rashid Johnson, Woody De Othello, Jenny Saville, Sarah Sze, and Naama Tsabar. Many works are on view for the first time. Among the modern classics, viewers will find works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and David Smith on view. The museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection with equity and diverse points of view can be seen when perusing the galleries.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The six artists featured in the exhibition call their paintings in beads ndwangos, which translates as “cloth” or “rag.” The black fabric on which the Ubuhle women work is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts which many of them grew up wearing. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form colored with Czech glass beads.

Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” according to artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.

Showcasing abstract art featuring the works of Northwest artists: Vincent Keele, Shantell Jackson,Lo Mar Metoyer, and Yeggy Michael.

Black cowboys have long been an integral part of the American West. Thousands of Black cowboys, for instance, rode in the Western cattle drives of the 1860s. Their stories are largely untold in popular narratives, but modern-day Black rodeos keep their traditions alive. A new, original High Desert Museum exhibit celebrates this thriving culture.

In the Arena: Photographs from America’s Only Touring Black Rodeo running from November 19, 2022 – June 25, 2023. Through the lens of San Francisco Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun, this exhibit documents the exhilarating atmosphere of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo—the only touring Black rodeo in the country—and the show stopping style and skill of the Black cowboys and cowgirls who compete in it year after year.

The exhibit features a wide range of stories including the Quinault Nation fighting climate change, water protectors resisting fossil fuel development, Duwamish River stewardship, rising seas threatening Pacific Islands and other coastal communities, Native Hawaiians opposing military installations via traditional ceremony, and local community groups fighting disproportionate airplane noise and pollution on Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the theme, conjuring dynamics embedded in the landscape that include colonial and racialized forms of dispossession, cultural reclamation, narratives of self-actualization, and ecological loss and adaptation.
Mud moves through the exhibition as a metaphor as well as a tangible material. Both water and earth, mud exists in an in-between state. A medium that dissolves binaries, mud invites a blurring of past and present, personal and political, bodies and landscape, feeling and knowing. In various ways, the artworks in Thick as Mud move across these porous boundaries, disrupting linear narratives and dominant hierarchies that shape which places and stories matter.
Across the artworks, mud becomes an agent of time and transformation and a medium of decomposition and creation. As such, Thick as Mud tracks the afterlives of violence against people and the environment while also evoking the potential for regeneration. The exhibition is an invitation to ask what lives in the mud and to reconnect with the possibilities that this material holds.

For many Native communities throughout the High Desert, what constitutes art spans beyond the walls of a gallery or a museum. Objects are alive, tied to purpose and intrinsic to thriving communities. Art is at once utilitarian and ceremonial, as well as part of the continuation of Native traditions.

Opening on January 28, 2023, Creations of Spirit will immerse High Desert Museum visitors in the Indigenous Plateau worldview, reflecting knowledge systems of tribes along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Six Native artists commissioned for this new, original exhibition are creating artwork that will be used in Native communities before arriving at the Museum. A seventh artist is creating an interactive piece for the center of the gallery. Creations of Spirit will be a one-of-a-kind, celebratory experience featuring the stories of these living works of art. Videos, audio and large projections will immerse visitors in the landscapes and communities in which these objects are used, highlighting the theme of artwork as alive, full of stories and created for specific purposes and people. The original works will be supplemented with nine cultural items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt and the resulting mass incarceration of Japanese American families living on the West Coast is among the single most traumatic events in the history of Asian America, but many history books present an incomplete view of the full story. The truth is that this event did not happen in a vacuum nor did the people who lived this event do so quietly.
The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear, and varied faces of resistance from within the community. Through the following decades, the story illustrates the generational trauma and cultural aftershocks of incarceration, while highlighting the lingering sense of injustice and awakening to justice movements at home and abroad. Fast forward to 2001 and beyond, the exhibit draws parallels between the stigmatization of Japanese Americans and modern-day anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant policies. Visitors leave with a final prompt to consider: In the pursuit of justice, how will you show solidarity for movements today and into the future?
Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this exhibit connects Japanese American resistance movements during the WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today.

From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers celebrates the enduring innovation and impact of Black architects across the United States. This traveling exhibit highlights individual architects and designers from the late 1800s to today who have broken barriers formed by racism and have created spaces and places that support communities and culture with projects ranging from public housing, to places of worship, museums and universities. Visitors will recognize iconic landmarks from across the country and experience stories of people who paved the way for future generations.

Visitors will also learn about historic and contemporary Black architects and designers from the Seattle-area who have had a local impact, such as Benjamin F. McAdoo Jr., the first Black architect registered in Washington.

Black architects continue to bring their designs to life as a creative response to ever-changing needs, and as a testimonial to a rich heritage. In this exhibit, learn about past and present influential Black architects, hear from Black leaders in the architecture and design fields in video interviews, and engage with tactile interactives. From the Ground Up: Black Architects and Designers encourages guests to discover how Black architects and designers respond to the ever-changing needs of humanity and not only make changes to their communities but the world.

The Holocaust Center maintains an archive of over 8400 items, including more than 2700 photographs. These items come from Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, U.S. liberators and army personnel, all with a connection to Washington State. A selection of photographs from the archive is on display, highlighting the humanity of individuals and reshaping our narrative of the Holocaust.

Open every Sunday from March 12th – May 28th

Art and history come together to tell a multidimensional story about humanity. Art is a catalyst for healing cultural pain, both personal and collective. In this exhibition, four artists address stories of immigration where art is a sanctuary, resulting in regeneration and innovation. They speak through their works about histories and heritage, using non-traditional media and configuring materials in new ways. Through their practices, they unearth a life purpose and an empowered self.

When artist Victor Kai Wang arrived in the United States in 1980 from China, he felt alone and adrift, struggling to comprehend his new surroundings. Suchitra Mattai’s ancestors navigated a bewildering and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Balancing between two cultures unsettled Tuan Nguyen and Jean Nagai. In childhood, they felt a need to adapt to survive. Each of these artists turned to creative innovation to change their focus and direction.

We have all felt a sense of disorientation since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We have had to adjust and find our way to a new reality. What does it take to reorient yourself to joy? Creating art, of any kind, is an active meditation. Creative innovation leads to joy, and joy brings healing.

China’s rich legacies in art, language, and culture are conceptualized by the artists in Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms as visual, auditory, and kinetic experiences to tackle urgent and complex issues facing our globalized world. They allude to Chinese tradition—from the materials of ink, brush, and paper to the time-honored genre of landscape painting—to depict present-day events, such as street protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. New works by Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang join those by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan from SAM’s collection in contemplating the societal tolls of modernity and globalization and the challenge that humans create for the natural world. Developed in collaboration with University of Washington students, Beyond the Mountain is the second special exhibition presented in the newly renovated Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Paradice Avenue Souf and the Wing Luke Museum join in collaboration to explore the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe, in the present day and through time immemorial.

This exhibition will feature the “Black and Brown Solidarity” mural by Paradice Avenue Souf along with new work and a video short documenting the story of Paradice Avenue Souf and their travels and connections throughout African and Southeast Asia.

Explore the second run of this past exhibit with stories sourced from the local Burmese / Myanmar community. With the original exhibit run cut short due to our closure during the pandemic, we’ve taken the opportunity to update the exhibit to include new content covering the military coup that happened in February 2021.