According to the Victoria
and Albert Museum these
artworks give us a different perspective on contemporary Asiam art. Indeed I felt as I looked at them that they were entirely different from Asian Contemporary art that I have seen previously. The artists draw on
recent political events, mixing them with age old mythmaking, contemporary materials and tradtitional practices. 
Such as these pieces by Ken Thaiday senior, they combine the idea of a headdress with a black bamboo hamerhead shark. The second piece shark with bait fish is also an elaborate headdress.
Hi
Amura gives us the llast royal family of Tahiti. It combines hand stiched applique and nama”o a sewing technique inspired by woodworking, and taken from French Polynesia.bThis type of media experimentation is truly extraordinary, resulting in the blending of various sources. 
Matthew Kauge is an example of an artist who is innovative in his use of color and style, He is “a leading figure in the develoopment of contemporary art in New Guinea”! His stunning painting gives us the joy of independence.
Captain Cook By Elizabeth Kauge gives us a straightforward frontal representation of the Captain Cook sailors on the top and the slaves on the bottom of the ship. The enslaved people who are not dark may represent the slaves on their way to Australia from England. They are wearing Melanesian ceremonial headresses. The artist is honoring the slaves.
John Siune looks at the Revolutionary Civil War caused by enrionmenatl damage in Papua New Guinea by the occupying force. extracting copper. The vivid painting depicts soldiers shooting and poorly armed PapuanNew Guineans .
this terrifying image of genocide ( Lamentation of the Innocents) uses Mughal forms to present a world of hate and death for both humans and animals.
Again a reference to war annd inhumanity through Mughal miniatures
This artist Adeela Suleman refers to a specific painting and medieval event as a metaphor of contemmporary violence.
The hero with wings, Rustam, here as seen from the perspective of an Hazari who had to flee as a persecuted minority in Afghanistan. He is suggesting that the Taliban took on t
his identiy of the Hero of the Book of Kings Shahnameh) Rustam
Boonma is actually familiar to me from contemporaray art shows in the West. He is Thai and this piece evokes temple bells and lotus growing into enlightement. It has a spare aesthetic that fits with western artk although he is steeped in Buddhism.
Ah Xian moved to Australia after Tiananmen Square but then went beck to China to learn traditionsl porcelain techniques, These three heads are compelling and original each one expressin a distinct emotion,
This work by Iwasaki Reflection Model Perfect Bliss is an iconic wooden temple with its reflection. in the Byodo- in temple complex in Kyoto, It is called the Phoenix pavillion perhaps because it looks like it could take off.
This is not all the works in the exhibition, there was other media and paintings . Since the museum did not send me a checklist I am relying on my own pictures. I included the extended captions because they are eloquemtly detailed.
As you can see the artists draw on many traditions to create strikingly original expressions. Some might say it has a folk look in some of the works. I find all of them deeply compelling and worth more than a cursory look. They are complex and layered between myth and the contemporary world.
There were four distinct types of artworks in this exhibition.
That is what intrigued me.
It demonstrates Ellen Sollod’s experimental approach to photography
Above you see an overview of the installation. The large bw digital image below “La Flaneuse” has a ghost image of the artist. the artist explained to us that ” I place myself in the scene and the shutter opens based on a time delay. I stand in the scene for about half of the exposure and exit while the camera continues to record the image. When the shutter closes, based on the time that I have set, my image is ‘ghosted’. ”
Flaneuse of course takes us back to the male flaneur of late 19th century, the idea of walking the streets of a city dabbling in this and that. In Sollod’s photographs the artist is invisible to others, a ghost that wanders freely.
La flanêuse (Hotel de Ville), 35 x 44”, archival pigment print, capture 2024, print 2026
La flanêuse (Lugdunum), 35 x 44”, archival pigment print, capture 2024, print 2026
The works below are taken by a pinhole camera . They are much smaller and have incredible nuances of shades of gray
Tete D’or
See the bronze branch above!
And finally this amazing group of intimate photographs of flowers gel transfered onto old book pages.
Three completely contrasting works, different techniques, different scales, different sensibilities. And the bronze branch!
Hats off to Ellen for being willing to tryso many types of work
Below are public art works called“Collection and Transformation from the Brightwater Treatment Plant by Ellen Sollod showing yet another aspect of her work.
Ellen’s work is illustrated in my chapteron “Water Cycles and Water treatments included in my book Setting Our Hearts on Fire. I descirbed them as glass microcosms set into a stainless steel honeycomb structure incased in blue mirrored glass and lighted from above.” Pretty astonishing!
The great contrast to the works on exhibit demonstrates Sollod’s versatility as an artist.
During her artist convrsation with Liz Brown
Sollod is holding her small pinhole cameragla
Teresita Fernandez Island Universe 2
This amazing exhbition at Vancouver Art gallery (BC) ( up until January 10) begins with this challenge and this image
“As new ecological realities reshape the planet, what role does art play?
Artists are not scientists, but they invite us to think differently and imagine new futures. Journalism too addresses the same territories. This exhibition offers no singular answer but rather a plurality of responses, from poetic to urgent.”
The exhibition had four themes; Consumed Earth , Living Knowledge, Material Memory, and Speculative Worlds
The art was more or less evenly divided but there was no sense of strong demarcations. Some of the artists were in more than one category.
The entire catalog for the exhibition is online at https://futuregeographies.nationalobserver.com/
This was addressing climate change by not using paper.
Included in the “catalog” are links to excellent videos about the individual artists. there seem to be many women of color, appropriate for an exhibition that was addressing the crises of the planet.
So each artist can be viewed often with in depth interviews or articles in The National Observer, an online climate magazine. So the only glitch was that several of the exhibits refer to articles in the magazine which we couldn’t read unless we subscribed to the magazine for $100 a year!
But this was part of the radicality of the exhbition that some of the exhibitors were actually climate journalists: Rory White, John Woodside, Cloe Logan, Natasha Bulowski, Jennifer Cole. Each of these writers were represented by a photograph of the issue they were addressing and a lead to their article in The Natioanl Observer
“Ontario First Nation battles Australian-owned company over Ring of Fire mine” by John Woodside
“World’s biggest carbon capture project could ‘essentially drain Alberta’, experts warn” By Darius Snieckus & Rory White
One data centre or one million homes? Mapping Ontario’s proposed hyperscaler boom
Fish are flooding back into Toronto’s Don River
By Cloe Logan
Critical minerals an ‘ace’ in Canada’s hand ahead of trade negotiations.
By Natasha Bulowski
Massive mine expansion looms over calls to halt thermal coal exports
By Natasha Bulowski
Unpacking Big Oil’s fierce pushback against new truth-in-advertising rules By John Woodside
A US climate conspiracy has spread to Canada — and local politicians haven’t been warned
By Rory White
As ice road melts, a First Nation eyes solid ground
By Cloe Logan
this is only some of the articles. the combination of journalism and art was really effective. Clearly the imagery that went with the articles ranged from imaginary ( Trojan Horse) to docmentary.
These articles with their single photograph did not eclipse the art at all rather they expanded the breadth of the exhibition.
Theme 1 Consumed Earth
For Consumed Earth it is easy to have photographs, unfortunately. Edward Burtynsky, Oil Spill #10, Oil Slick, Gulf of Mexico, June 24 (2010)
Edward Burtynsky has been photographing the effects of industrial projects and thier impact on the land for decades. He was an obvious choice.
But my favorite work in Consumed Earth is by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun,
The Impending Fire Storms (2024)
This incredible painting gives us the full flames of destruction with animals afire and other creatures and trees about to be devoured shortly. But the wall of fire also suggests that the creatures behind it are resisting.
“These paintings are history paintings, and when you look into these paintings, you are looking into a mirror. The environment, land title, being native in this country, it’s all there.”
—Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun
Another work about consumed earth by Liz Larner, Meerschaum Drift (Blue) (2020–21), created from plastic, also speaks direclty to us clearly ( plastic is a particular obsession of mine)
this sculpture made from plastic waste assumes a lovely wave like quality from afar.
Judy Chicago ! is part of the consumed earth section with her multi part piece The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2015–16). Here are three of them
Gorillas (Collected)
Frogs ( Disappearing) and Birds (Silenced)
John Akomfrah Vertical Sea ( three screens changing )
“The sea has its own independence, its own power and ontology, and it is ‘playing’ the space in which these dramas are unfolding…The sea is enormous, but it doesn’t care much who we are. It is not there to form a backdrop to our becoming or unbecoming.”
—John Akomfrah
Ths piece was shown a few years ago at the Seattle Art useum as part of an Akomfrah show that closed after one day because of the outbreak of Covid.
La Toya Ruby Frazier
Also part of Consumed Earth La Toya Ruby Frazier
A Flint Community Member Holding Her Water Jugs at the Atmospheric Water Generator on North Saginaw Street Between East Marengo Avenue and East Pulaski Avenue, Flint, Michigan,
Frazier has been addressing the toxic effects of industry in Braddock Pa where she grew up and documentedher family there. In Flint there are huge toxic water problems.. She herself funded the water generator in the photo.
Also in the category of Consumed Earth
Reena Saini Kallat, River Drawing electric wires, nails and pigment
“Our connection to water lies both internally and externally, water being the origin of all known forms of life and our bodies primarily being composed of it.”
—Reena Saini Kallat
“River Drawing is an in-situ work that traces the borders of nations locked in conflict over shared river systems. Using electrical wires as a drawing tool, Reena Saini Kallat (b. 1973, Delhi, India) maps geopolitical boundaries that cut across waterways, revealing the tension between fluid natural forces and territorial claims. In her rendering, that typically separate seem to loosen and conjoin, echoing the flow of the river rather than the authority of the state.”
Living Knowledge
Carolun Cayceda’s fishng net To Drive Away Whiteness/Para alejar la blancura with detritus attachedis in the category living knowledge
“created from handmade fishing nets collected by Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978, London, United Kingdom) along river communities in Latin America affected by the privatization of those waterways.
Each Cosmotarraya is linked to specific people, rivers, traditions, and cultures, just as each net is linked to the individual who wove it. The resultant sculptures are talismanic embodiments of local resistance to corporate and governmental attempts to control the flow of water.”
—Carolina Caycedo
we see the toxic bottles in the river here, but the living knowledge has to do with the people who fish.
Also in Living Knowledge is Andrea Bowers
Andrea Bowers, Eco Grief Deforestation Series (Old Growth Stump 2) (2024)we see the stump with the artist crouched inside it.
“This work calls attention to old-growth forest logging practices in Northern California, where the stumps of 1,000- to 2,000-year-old trees exist as shadows of a once-thriving rain forest. Bowers was arrested in 2011 for tree-sitting in Arcadia, California.”
Bowers is intensely politically active and sees her art as embedded in activism.Cerainly this image of her inside a tree stump gives us a sense of the intensity.
“Alberta gets its way in deal with Ottawa”
By John Woodside & Natasha Bulowski
is part of Living Knowledge
Is the phtograph is “art” ? but the comment as the lead of an article refers to a crucial issue highlighted by all these ridiculously smiling faces as they decide to tear the earth apart further Alberta of course is alreadynotorius for their exploitation of tar sands, and the horrendous environmental conditions that have resulted.
So against these clean orderly smiling faces is the ghastly polluton in Alberta.
In another version of Living Knowlege you can just see the human body under the ricks
The artist is buried under there
asinnajaq, Rock Piece (Ahuriri Edition) (2018)
This is a still from a video
“The weight of the stones as they pile on your body is an opportunity. . . I refuse to let the weight keep me down. Pushing myself up from the stones slowly and carefully. As I rise from underneath the weight of the stones the stones fall and slide away. It takes effort from the body and mind to be out from under the pressure of the stones but, as they fall, my body I must accept that I’m in a cycle.
—asinnajaq
What we heard was the rumbling of the rocks , but we never saw him emerge- this is certainly an example of living knowledge!
“Pathways Alliance’s flagship project looks like a big money loser
By John Woodside
Living Knowledge
This odd photograph is obviously constructed. I think it shows carbon exploding out of a pipe. The reference is to a carbon capture project and piping carbon to an underground stoage that is runnng way over budget.
Living Knowledge Teresita Fernandez’s work.
Teresita Fernández, Island Universe 2 (2023)
“I often use the word landscape because it’s a word that is perceived to be passive—as opposed to territory or country. But place is an entirely social construct, always attached to narratives of power and dominance. The places are named by the winners, by the oppressors. Maps are drawn up in the same way.”
—Teresita Fernández
The map of the world created in charcoal invokes the continents but they are all connected and recognizable even as they have been rearranged and reshaped.
Material Memory
Clarissa Tossin, Future Geography: Cosmic Cliffs (2023)
This work which gives the show its title is emtirely made from Amazon boxes. It is a very amusing title and to put it in the category of material memory is also funny.
The piece, like so many of the works in the exhibition, looks like an attractive abstract work until the meanng of the title and material sink in.So our future is Amazon boxes, creating lanscapes of rubbish.
Also in Material Memory is this piece, which I found fascinating
Firelei Báez, Unbound (one way ashore, a thousand channels), 2024
the large female figure in the foreground partially obscures
the print behind it which is identified as an “early nineteenth-century map—titled “Picture of Organized Nature as Extending over the Earth” and composed by British cartographer Charles Smith (1776–1854). Smith’s chart reflects the drive to categorize and contain the natural world, compressing the Earth’s oceans, polar ice, mountain ranges, flora and fauna into a single, totalizing image. ”
By placing a huge body in front of it, the artist contradicts and cancels that endeavor: the body is blue green, a marine color, her pose is temporary, about to go forward, so the overall effect is that we are with her as she balances on one knee.
Another example of Material Memory
Rebecca Belmore, nindinawemaganidog (all my relations), keeper (2017)
This unassuming image is a recreation of performance art work. the actor ( artists sister) is cleaning a clay floor with a claysoaked rag.
the artist is Asishinaabe ( a group of indigneous peoples from various tribes) from the Great Lakes area. The idea is labor, especially women’s role in caring for the land.
Another favorite from Material Memory
Jean Shin’s Huddled Masses
Guess what, they are all cell phones that have been discarded!
This really works as an indivual sculpture and a big comment.The Huddled Masses have also been referred to as Scholars Rocks!!
as in China.
The final category is Speculative Worlds.
Rose B. Simpson Co Pilot A
Another work with clay and other sacred materials, this proud guardian figure is going to lead withut fear.
Rose Simpson is from the Santa Clara Pueblo. and she has transformed the traditons there. There is a long tradition of transforation among Pueblo women, her mother is Roxanne Swetzell
another well known artist.
Another Speculative Worlds
Josh Kline, Desperation (2024)
“Scientists and politicians do a very poor job of making people understand what sea level rise means for them. . . Art has the ability to place people inside a story and help them understand those connections emotionally.
—Josh Kline
we saw this piece with the video recounting two paople marroned without any place to go. The raft suggests the travel, the video gives us an imaginary situation of someone adrift on a raft, who have been turned back by immigration authorities. and are the victims of sea level rise ( two actors played the part).
Speculative worlds:
Huma Bhabha, Lifetime (2013)
“Monsters are beautiful to some of us, depending on how we were informed by different experiences in our upbringing. For me, I have always had a passion for extreme visual imagery which responds to the horror and science fiction films I have watched.”
—Huma Bhabha
By way of grand conclusion there was an installation ouside the four themes.
On another floor was this amazing full room installation
Sanctuary: the Ancient Forest Experience
Curated by Dr.T’uy’t’anat Cease Wyss with filmakers Damien Gillis and Olivier Leroux
Inside the replica of the oldgrowth tree stump is a video that immerses us. the forest we see is on the Sunshine coast where some forests have survived since the last ice age, and others have been clear-cut.
In the video we see Dr.Wyss wandering through the forests and the clearcuts with the music of birds, and waterfalls as she narrates what she is harvesting in the way of small plants. Logging was stopped after a decade of activism in this foresst, but many other ancient forests still need protectiion
So what conclusion can I draw from the exhibition?
Future Geographies is amazing in its breadth and detail. It covered so many approaches to addressing climate change.
But of course there is so much more to say.
Zadie Smith in an article titled “Art for Our Sakes” in the New York Review of Books started with “why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned down in the streets?”
She concluded “Such art is made by us and for us. It is for our sakes. Its power is not the kind ths president recognizes, but it has its own kind of force. It will outlast both him and his regime. It will outlast us all.”
Don’t miss it Future Geographies. Or at least access the online catalog with the artists interviews. We can all take some steps to save our precious planet.
As we enter the exhibition of Preston Singletary’s “A Clockwork Raven,” we first see this extraordinary construction with Raven lying under a contraption that is dripping oil rendered from salmon heads, a traditional healing oil for the Tlingit.
We stand shocked as we look down on Raven and wonder what ths is about.
A Clockwork Orange was a film about gang violence in the early 70s. So how do we see it applyig here. Raven goes through several iterations in the exhibition, each of them representing a side of R aven we have not seen before, enmeshed in greed and violence.How can we understand it??
The answer lies in the stories that Garth Stein wrote to accompany the exhibition. He begins :
“It began as a way to save the world from itself. Or rather to save the People of the world from their own self destructive nature. For the People hd groooooown sick verily- they were pale, bloated, hairless thngs covered wth rashes, bags under their eyes…”
Raven’s plan was to provide healing for his people through feeding them rendered oil from fish heads.
But the plan didn’t work.
Raven built a rendering faciltiy but when it was finished he lay under it and became intoxicated. “Raven lolled on his back, bloated, the fish oil pumping ceaselessly into his belly. He couldnt move, couldnt think and the contraption pumped .”
But then he woke up and grabbed a seal who ignored him because he was so fat.
Lazy Raven/Strong Raven (below) suggests he is regaining his power
So he jumped into the water and got hold of a log and floated and drifted.
“The sea carried them”
Eventually they landed and dried out and Raven flew up and over Seattle where he has several adventures . First he meets a man who looks like a homeless man who says he is Raven.
He is shadow raven .
They are going between worlds!
Underneath Pioneer Square is a whole world Raven and the shadow raven go into a nightclub underneath pioneer square
Two other works give us the backgound on Raven . Both called “Upon the Mountain Top: Raven started as a whie bird, but as a result of stealing the sun ( Box of Daylight) he was singed black.
Finally we have Inner Dialogue” This is a piece that suggests the two sides of Raven, the trickster, the violent and the greedy as opposed to the caring. 
the final piece in the story is “noble truth” in which Raven talks to Killer Whale. He says to Raven
“Raven the cycle of violence can be stopped if the Will is present. If there is no will, the poeple will become like cannibals and eat each other until there are none left”
But raven slept on.
At te opening of the exibition Preston told more animalstories, not this one, that encompassed the oter animals in the exhibition. while he was talking, the technology misbehaved, but he never paused.He continued to tell his story.
It was a moving experience.
The exhibtion ended this weekend, I am sorry to say, but the book with the story is available through the gallery.
Although Traver’s new gallery is not as atmosphereic as the old gallery on Pioneer Square, the new expansiveness givess space for each sculpture to breathe.
But I can’t resist ending wth ths photo of his last exhibition at the old Traver, about which I wrote on this blog
.
A.McLean Emenegger! That is the name of the dynamic director of the unusually titled AMcE Creative Arts gallery. As I walked along 19th Street, its small storefront popped out with bizarre ceramics by Sonja Peterson. The director herself was explaining the significance of several offbeat cookie jars by Ryan Kelly.
It was clear that this dynamic woman was articulate! She told me she came from Los Angeles and had worked in all aspects of art for over 20 years. She began in television, ran a gallery, curated, career coached artists, edited an art magazine, marketing, and she also makes art. And writes about it. Whew. Her goal is to bring people together for a shared human experience.
The current exhibition is edgy, although its title would not suggest that.
“Sacred” includes five artists: painter, Niki Keenan, painter and ceramic artist Kendra Larson, ceramic artist Holly Hudson, experimental mixed media photographer Christine Nguyen and mixed media, Io Palmer.
The theme of the exhibition is the intersection of humans and nature, but more than that the idea of sublime, the sense that nature is overwhelming and uplifting. The paintings in the exhibition seem to most directly express the sublime.
Kendra Larson’s Tree of Knowledge Niki Keenan ‘s Sunbeam Marsh are both landscapes but emphasizing trees with strange colors and light.
Keenan’s painting in particular emphasizes the sun breaking through a forest that is dense with tangled trees . Larson’s Astral Slugs feels more like swamp trees. In the sky are “astral slugs” large slugs curling around the blue sky!
I just came from the new exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum “Mystic Modern” which suggests the intersection of especially surrealism with the earlier well known “mystics” like Mark Tobey and Kenneth Callahan. I see the same intersection here, only more removed from classical surrealism. These artists are surreal in their own original way.
Christine Nguyen creates magic with a unique technique. She draws and paints on both sides of a negative (her background is in photography). She overlays the two sides and photographs them, then prints it. She then immerses it in a salt bath which adheres serendipitously to the surface The result is a sparkling image. My favorite is Deer Spirit in which the deer’s antlers become a tree and echo in the tree-like form nearby. As articulately explained on the website “The pieces fluctuate between the micro and macro-worlds while connecting the flora and fauna to the celestial heavens of stars and planets as part of her ongoing investigations of our connection to the natural world.”
Holly Hudson is a bigger stretch to connect to the “the Sacred” or the sublime. Her oddball ceramics are pure fantasy though:
Jerome’s Lion is a young lion covered in flowers No sign of a thorn as in the story of Saint Jerome.
Rooted features
a ceramic foot with a thick tangle of roots growing out of its sole. G
The Seer is a large eye surrounded by flowers. What these ceramics have in common ( they are both glazed and unglazed) is a sense of eerie fantasy.
Io Palmer’s work achieves the “sacred” in an entirely different way. She creates a combination of glazed ceramic shapes that become clusters of organic forms as they almost seem to move in clusters across a wall. She has spoken of her open, winding forms as transforming and liberating, overcoming the restrictions she has experienced as a woman of color. The work speaks of flowering branches that are clustered in segments. They do not relate to a specific natural form, but to a sense of nature as freeing. She lives in the Palouse ,a Professor of Art at Washington State University where the landscape is open and has few trees or shrubs: she seems to be providing that in her work.
To return to the gallery and its director, the location of AMce Creative Arts, far from other galleries, seems to liberate the owner to pursue her own path. She said people drop in all the time – her neighbors are her friends, but she does not participate in art walks because no one came.
In short, you are in for a treat when you visit this gallery. The next exhibition is a selection of artists with the title “Ad-Lib”
You can preview them on the gallery website. I am not familiar with most of them but it is clear that A.McLean Emenegger is bringing an entirely new vibe to our small Seattle art scene.
Esther Ervin: Sculptor, Jeweler, Curator
Esther Ervin was born in a small town in New Jersey, but moved to California at the age of 16. Her house was near the Irvine ranch where she actually saw cowboys herding cattle, now, of course, developed with housing. She went to Palestine /Israel as an undergraduate in high school in California and after college with a BA in Biology she went into the Peace Corps for three years from 1977 to 1980. She was assigned to Columbia where she worked with street boys who were wild and poor and sometimes homosexuals. She gave them language training in both art and science. From there she went on to work at a Catholic school and then to Bogota. Finally she was home economist part for the families of a coffee grower committee where they did food canning and created mats from fique ( a type of grass).
In 1980 she returned to California and went to Graduate School at Cal State Long Beach where she studied art and science medical illustration. In 1994 she came to Seattle where she pursued another career in insurance and securities. She connected to the Festival Sundiata where she had seen an art show and began meeting artists in the late 1990s. She first met Al in 1997. Meanwhile she began making jewelry.
She went to a Native American workshop where they used gourds to make art . She was inspired to make her own gourd art. (Her father was raised on a Cree reservation). She is holding one of her gourd pieces n the photograph at the top)
A major turning point in her career was receiving a residency at Pratt Fine Arts Center where she learned jewelry making, metalsmithing and welding.
Another important honor was a residency at the Dr. James W. Washington, Jr. & Janie Rogella Washington Foundation where she made sculpture from materials that were in the house.
Ervin was also Acting Director of the Washington House 2013-2018.
In 2016 she collaborated with Doggett on the extensive Liberty Bank Building artist project. On Union Street near 24th avenue Esther created drum shaped seats with a tiled basketweave pattern and
above them transparent window designs of the redlined area of the Central District.
In the central courtyard of the building are several bronze salmon struggling to go upstream. There is a sporadic flow of water that does not support them, a metaphor for the struggles of African Americans to succeed.
Ervin has created other public art works in the neighborhood, most visibly at Jackson and 23rd street, an abstract design based on cowrie shells.
And at Boren and Yesler, in the Wayfarer complex. As Ervin explains “The Wayfarer building works are large jewelry art pieces with one having a cedar tree and the other having a Douglass fir tree. The works speak to the deforestation of the CD. They are made of glass and semi precious beads, potato pearls, bronze chain, steel support structure, laser etched wood trees.
Even as Ervin creates more public art, she also works as a curator for an exhibition with Black Arts West Alumnae Association and the Garfield Super Block. In addition she continues to create exquisite art in many media, ceramics, jewelry, metal, and sculpture. Her work is imbued with a sense of history. One of her missions is to celebrate the work of lesser known black artists and history .
“Beau Dick : Insatiable Beings “ until January 18th Frye Art Museum 704 Terry Ave, Wed- Sun 11-5
When I first came into the Frye Art Museum and saw the mask by Beau Dick in the front gallery I was horrified and frightened. They seemed so aggressive and ugly. But by a stroke of good fortune I was able to see a long film about Beau Dick in the museum and it explained how his unique masks are created and animated with performances at gift giving potlatches at Alert Bay Canada.
As he performs he creates a magical atmosphere with the mask. Each mask has its own particular function and name and as you begin to get used to his incredible distortions and originality it becomes a fascinating exploration.
Beau Dick belonged to a secret society called Hamt’sa. To become part of this secret society the young man must become possessed by and purged from the spirit of Bax wbakwalanuksiwe’, a cannibalistic giant. In the end they are cured of the disease to consume everything. Beau Dick’s subtitle of his catalog is “devoured by consumerism.” suggesting that most of society is not yet cured.
Consumption of animals as well as the planet itself by humans is the driving force behind Beau Dick’s work. In 2012 he took 40 Atlakima masks from an exhibition of his work in Vancouver, brought them back to his home in Alert Bay and burned them as a strong statement to “short circuit the commodification of northwest coast ceremonial objects.” Valuable objects are traded not sold between the people of the Kwakwaka’wakw. By burning the masks the objects were returned to the ancestors. The Atlakima also known as the “Dance of the Forest Spirits” includes 40 different characters ranging from supernatural to human.
“Winalagalis The War Spirit Puppet” creates trouble wherever he goes. In the exhibition there were several examples of this disruptive spirit. Under the theme of Hamat’sa we saw Moogums four masks representing the “bird henchman” of the cannibalistic giant. Another group are the ghosts who seem to be taking care of the giant and they can resurrect people from the dead. Apparently there is also a reference to Dickens’ Christmas Carol ghosts! The layers of meaning and materials are complex and can only be touched on here.
A second exhibition by an indigenous artist features multimedia work by Priscilla Dobler Dzul. “Water carries the story of our stars.” (Ja’e’ ku bisik u k’ajláayil k Eek’/El agua lleva las historias de nuestras estrellas”) (until April 19).
In niches in the wall outside the gallery blown glass vessels make reference to various specific animals and activities with the collective title:
“’When the three armadillos arrived with the water, the lords of the underworld brought the offerings and vessels removed their thorns to weave the threads together.”
All of these vessels have unique forms with precise titles such as “Turtle rabbit also known as armadillo has been called many names, knows many things that the water, land, and winds carry.”
The artist is a mix of Mayan and Mexican heritage as well as Scottish. She, like Beau Dick, is making reference to the critical situation on the planet, in her case with a focus on water.
At the entrance to the gallery the artist has placed a large embroidery with the title “here is the beginning the lands of the Mayas.” Looking carefully we can see a myriad of traditional gods, headdresses, people dancing , animals running around and the river flowing at the bottom of the tapestry also filled with creatures.
A second embroidery facing the other way is titled our “skies were once filled with stars.” It shows the deterioration of the environment. All is chaos, fear and conflict. A white man in the foreground stands on a pile of bones.
A smaller work made in collaboration with Doña Chela (Maria Graciela Cante Peraza) references that Kulkulcan descends from the skies.
We see a feathered serpent deity who descends from the sky and bridges earth and sky as a symbol of protection.
In the center of the exhibition an installation large ceramic vessels suggest women’s torsos. “The four winds gathered around Tree and her threads.” They contain whistles and are connected by backstrap weaving, a long tradition in Mayan culture, to a “tree” representing the Mayan tree of life.
In the last corner of the exhibition a video documents a performance that Priscilla created focusing on polluted water in the Yucatan and Tacoma (where she also lives). Near it are guardian figures in clay.
These two exhibitions are remarkable examples of contemporary indigenous artists that address environmental concerns in entirely different media. The Frye Art Museum shines as it gives us new ways to understand our contemporary crisis. We are indeed fortunate to have it in our neighborhood (and it is free!).
Note: I have some better picutres of Alan from the opening but for some reason the website won’t let me
put them in blog
Alan Lau focuses on nature intimately.`“Walks Along the Kamogawa: The Kyoto Series Part I” gives us lyrical paintings in sumi, watercolor and pastel on rice paper that evoke hanging vines and swirling waters, sometimes birds (tracing migration patterns of small birds) and animals (when the zebra lost her spots).
Immerse yourself in this paintng: arctic ledge
It suggests different temperatures in cool grays
or in the peach orchard with soft pinks, much warmer
“trapped within my garden of longing (in memory of peach blossom spring)” is entirely different in stroke, texture and color.
The titles, all written in lower case by the artist, suggest a poetic enchantment in themselves.
We can imagine the artist in Kyoto in his “make shift studio in my in-laws’ house…the only room in the house where the sun filters in. Below I see the tiny garden with a lone persimmon tree with orange bursts of fruit and a spindly Japanese tree blushing with red and yellow leaves.”
That quote is from his recent book This Single Road. The book is an experimenatl format, with drawings, writing in script and printed narrative, making it into a collage. The book includes his observations along the Kawagama river : along the sidewalks beside it he sees a playground, musicians, seniors doing aerobics , and children in a race. The minuteness of his observations really affected me. I started doing the same thing,looking at a space with careful observations.
A painting of a giant grasshopper standing on a rock invites us into the Woodside Braseth Gallery for an exhibition of Gaylen Hansen, age 104.
As we enter the gallery we see a swarm of bright blue fish with intense red eyes, mouths open and teeth bared. Turning to the right we see a red wall with irregular bricks and large grasshoppers climbing on it. But the painting is titled “Red Wall Two Ducks.” I asked the gallery owner where the ducks were and he said, “Behind the wall.” Hansen’s sense of humor!
There is one painting with Gaylen’s alter ego Kernal, the only black and white work. A swarm of ducks fill the sky behind the Kernal who is paddling a striped canoe with a dog in the bow. Fish leap up for the birds across the bottom of the painting.
Other topics in the exhibition (and trademarks in much of his earlier work) include huge tulips, a swarm of bees that fills an entire canvas, and a dense pack of wolves. A closeup of a bear’s face peers at us rather agreeably.
Hansen was a professor at Washington State University for many years. After he retired, he lived in Palouse, a small town nearby. He had plenty of opportunities to experience the scenes that he depicts, but he never settles for “scenery.” The huge scale of the wildlife and small scale of his figure suggests his respect for these creatures as well as his sense of humor.
He moved to Whidbey Island in 2014. It was a radical change of environment. The Palouse is a wide-open horizontal landscape while Whidbey Island is filled with tall closely packed trees. A loosely painted image of a bear in the forest from 2021, suggests that bears are still running through his life, but now they are taking second place to the forest.
Hansen grew up on his grandfather’s farm immersed in geese, goats, chickens, cattle, pigs, and ducks many of which are the subject of his paintings. He rode horses and did heavy farm labor from the age of nine. Such a childhood must be the foundation for his incredible longevity.
The paintings of the 1980s are characterized by intense confrontations of different species and humans (mostly the Kernal). But in later work like Dog and Many Ducks of 2012 ( above)there is no human present. The dog faces many ducks who seem to all be squawking at him. He is obviously outnumbered and daunted.
Another format is the still life composition, which juxtaposes, for example, a large glove and a magpie. Hansen loves to experiment with scale and here the glove and magpie are the same size. Another painting is only one large glove. In another, a red fish fills the canvas. We can see here the formal strengths of the artist as he takes a familiar object and transforms it into an imposing shape.
On Whidbey Island the tall trees overwhelm rather than the large creatures
Hansen is a phenomenal painter. His colors, his compositions, his brushstrokes dazzle. Close looking reveals the complexity of his painting. Wandering through these brightly colored paintings of so many creatures, most of them hugely enlarged, immerses us in Hansen’s fantasy world.
Ruth Asawa had an extraordinary childhood. In her early years she grew up on a farm with her immigrant parents, sharing in the hard work. That ethic of hard work stayed with her throughout her career as an artist. In April 1942, when she was sixteen, her family was sent to a detention camp, first the Santa Anita Assembly Center, then the Rohwer Relocation Camp in Arkansas. At the Santa Anita camp, she had the fortune of learning from three Asian American artists who worked for Walt Disney.
After she graduated from high school in the Rohwer camp in August 1943, Asawa was allowed to leave, provided she stayed away from the West Coast. She attended the Milwaukee State Teachers College and then the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental interdisciplinary arts school. It changed the course of her life.
These are some of the details with which Marilyn Chase begins her biography of Asawa, Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa (2020).
In a Philadelphia office, R. Buckminster Fuller holds up a tensegrity sphere one of his inventions thats inspired a space project April 18, 1979. Dr. Enrest Okress of the Franklin Center envisions the structure, made of rods and cables, as the basis for a Spherical Tensegrity Atmospheric Research Station Stars. A giant tensegrity sphere could be light and strong enough to support a floating space station a mile in diameter. (AP Photo/Bill Ingraham
Chase carefully describes Asawa’s unusual education at Black Mountain College, her study with the artist Josef Albers and the architect and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, as well as the courtship between her and the architect Alfred Lanier, her future husband. After completing her education, Asawa moved to San Francisco with Lanier to start her family and her career.
Chase’s book is an easy read. It includes a continuous narrative that focuses on Asawa’s professional activity and her personal life, much of it based on Asawa’s letters.
In her recent book Ruth Asawa and The Artist-Mother at Midcentury (2025), Jordan Troeller emphasizes the ways in which Asawa, together with other what she calls “artist-mothers,” managed to produce extraordinary art while they were raising children. Troeller’s method is to examine both motherhood and creativity together (she leads a research group on “The M/Other Project: Creativity, Procreation, and Contemporary Art,”). Asawa raised six children, defying the idea that having children prevents women from making creative art, Troeller argues. Various Asawa techniques such as weaving and knitting connect to female traditions, Troeller suggests, because they enable the artist to start and stop as is necessary to attend to children.
In actuality however, Asawa’s incorporation of her children into her art process might undermine that argument. Asawa’s work ethic and ability to embrace creativity as a generous gift meant that she worked almost nonstop, with her children helping as they grew older. Other chapters in Troeller’s book focus on flowers, folding, or pregnancy, to name only a few themes, integrating them with aspects of Asawa’s work.
Asawa’s best known image of pregnancy is the “Andrea” cast bronze public sculpture in San Francisco. I found Troeller’s book a bit insistent in connecting everything to a feminist analysis. At the same time, it clearly demonstrates a feminist answer to patriarchal tropes and the traditional parameters of making art as a woman.
As an art historian, I have to say that the large book accompanying Asawa’s major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is comprehensive and invaluable. Edited by Janet Bishop, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective (2025) includes essay after essay on themes such as “From Tool to Ornament, Ruth’s Intricate Refusals,” and “What Cannot Be Produced Alone : Ruth Asawa’s Public Art.”
The SFMOMA exhibition itself follows all the stages of Asawa’s artistic career, from single woven-wire baskets to complex hanging sculptures enclosing one orb inside another. Then a new technique of tying wire, electroplating it, and much more. These dazzling hanging works are Asawa’s best known work. The complete discussion of her public art is also represented in the catalog and the exhibition, where we seestudies and photographs. The installation at the SFMOMA even includes a sample from Asawa’s garden.
As we learn in this thorough study, Zen Buddhism was part of Asawa’s worldview, as well as nature itself. Her drawings of leaves and plants show her understanding of the intricacies of the natural world. In the chapter on public art, bronze casting is a major departure, as well as the scale of the works she took on, a huge low relief of the Japanese incarceration camps, a wall called San Francisco Fountain, with many small reliefs of life in San Francisco and many more.
Asawa’s creativity also extended to schoolchildren, teaching them innovative ways to make art with materials such as milk cartons, and “bakers clay” (flour, salt and water). Asawa also engaged in civic affairs, founding an art school, now called the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, and lobbying for more art education in the public schools.
The magnificent sculptures that Ruth Asawa created hang in space, and surround space. They embrace interior and exterior, the delicate and the strong, the idea of growth and the idea of stasis. It is hard to overstate her contribution: her wire-based art, at first seen as simply decorative, is now understood as major accomplishments of twentieth century sculpture.
