EXHIBITION CALENDAR 2017 18seattleartmuseum.org/Documents/2017-18 Exhibition... ·  · 2017-03-08EXHIBITION CALENDAR 2017–18 Rachel Eggers ... Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt, Georgia

EXHIBITION CALENDAR 2017–18

Rachel Eggers Manager of Public Relations [email protected] 206.654.3151 The following information is subject to change. Prior to publication, please confirm dates, titles, and other information with the Seattle Art Museum public relations office.

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SEATTLE ART MUSEUM – NOW ON VIEW

Seeing Nature Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection Seattle Art Museum February 16–May 23, 2017 Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection

illustrates the evolution of European and American landscape painting across five centuries by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha. Drawn from Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen’s private collection, one of the most significant in the United States, the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see the natural world through the eyes of great artists. In Seeing Nature, 39 paintings organized in rough chronological order

showcase key moments in the development of the landscape genre—from intimate views of the world to an artist’s personal reflections on nature. Many of the works on view have never been publicly exhibited prior to this exhibition. As a starting point for considering European landscape painting and its relationship to sensory experience, the exhibition begins with Jan Brueghel the Younger’s allegorical series The Five Senses (ca. 1625). Evocative works

interpreting Venice, Italy, are also featured, including paintings by Canaletto, Édouard Manet, and J.M.W. Turner. At the heart of the exhibition are significant examples of French Impressionism: five paintings by Claude Monet, including The Water-Lily Pond (1919), as well as

Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1888-90). A rare landscape by Austrian

artist Gustav Klimt—Birch Forest (1903)—immerses the viewer in a forest scene; surrealist works by Max Ernst and René Magritte introduce inventive approaches to the genre. The final galleries present 20th-century American landscape paintings, including epic, wide-ranging works depicting the Grand Canyon by Thomas Moran, Arthur Wesley Dow, and David Hockney, as well as more atmospheric, contemporary works by Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, and April Gornik.

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Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series Seattle Art Museum January 21–April 23, 2017 In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of artist Jacob Lawrence’s birth, the Seattle Art Museum presents Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series. Thanks to a major loan from The Museum of Modern of Art in New York (MoMA) and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, all 60 panels from his masterwork The Migration Series—depicting the exodus of African Americans from the rural south between World War I and World War II—will be shown together for the first time in more than two decades on the West Coast. The Phillips Collection exhibited the complete series October 8, 2016–January 8, 2017, and MoMA did so April 3–September 7, 2015, bringing new attention to this important work more than 75 years since its creation. The two museums agreed to lend the combined series to the Seattle Art Museum so that it could be seen in Lawrence’s other home city. Jacob Lawrence and his wife, artist Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, moved to Seattle in 1971 when Jacob accepted a position at the University of Washington, where he taught until he retired in 1986. Lawrence conceived of The Migration Series as a single work of art, painting on

all 60 panels at the same time to achieve unity of form and color. The complete work appears rather like a large mural painting, an art form that Lawrence admired and that gained new attention in the late 1930s and 1940s, thanks to government sponsorship and the role that public art was given in bringing the US out of the Great Depression. Fittingly, SAM will install the series like a mural in its Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Gallery, which was created to honor their enduring gifts to the city. Both Lawrences were generous supporters of the museum and of the arts throughout this region—an immense legacy that continues to this day.

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John Grade: Middle Fork Seattle Art Museum February 10, 2017–ongoing Middle Fork, a large-scale sculpture by Seattle-based artist John Grade, is

presented in its largest iteration yet. More than doubling from its previous length of 50 feet to 105 feet, the tree sculpture dynamically spans the entire length of the Brotman Forum, the main entrance lobby that welcomes guests to the museum. The highly detailed sculpture was created by Grade, his team, and a cadre of volunteers using a full plaster cast of a living old-growth western hemlock tree found in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle. The cast was used as a mold to assemble a new tree from now nearly one million reclaimed cedar pieces. Suspended horizontally from the museum’s ceiling and above the viewer, Grade’s sculpture offers a mesmerizing new perspective on a familiar form. With its exhibition at SAM, Middle Fork returns home to Washington State. The

work was first conceived and built at MadArt Studio and had its Seattle debut there in January 2015. Following that, it was included in the WONDER

exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC (November 13, 2015–May 13, 2016) and was recently displayed at the 2017 Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland. With each iteration, Middle Fork has “grown” larger and added more branches. The artist plans over time to continue the sculpture’s growth to match the length of the living tree that it is based on, 140 feet. Eventually, he plans to bring the sculpture back to the forest, allowing it to decompose and return to the earth at the base of that original tree.

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Big Picture: Art After 1945 Seattle Art Museum July 23, 2016–ongoing Big Picture: Art After 1945 features significant works of abstract painting and sculpture from SAM’s collection. Tracing landmark artistic developments in the decades following World War II, the installation reveals how abstraction established itself as a dominant force to be reckoned with. Big Picture will highlight works from the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection given to the museum, such as Mark Rothko’s No. 10 (1952), Jasper Johns’ Thermometer (1959), and Eva Hesse’s No Title (1964). It will also feature key loans from other local collections, reflecting the depth and commitment of private collectors in Seattle. Virginia and her husband, Bagley Wright, who passed away in 2011, are longtime visionary leaders and legendary arts patrons of SAM and Seattle. The Wrights have donated extraordinary works to the museum for decades but within the past two years, Virginia Wright gave a large part of her and her husband’s collection to the museum. These works have transformed SAM’s modern and contemporary collection, elevating it to national status. In addition, Big Picture includes select contemporary works that point to the continuity and resonance of these ideas today, such as X (2015)—a painting recently acquired by the museum—by Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize-winner Brenna Youngblood. Also on view will be five videos that highlight the physical act and process of painting; the selection includes works by Kazuo Shiraga, Yvonne Rainer, and Margie Livingston—as well as Hans Namuth’s famed work that shows Pollock performing his drip-painting technique. Following the opening on July 23, additional installments are planned for August 20 and then again on November 19. The August installment addresses varying modes of portraiture, while November introduces works by European artists such as Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Katharina Fritsch. In subject and materiality, these works are grounded in the post-war European experience and address different concerns from the American works.

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Pure Amusements: Chinese Scholar Culture and Emulators Seattle Art Museum December 24, 2016–ongoing Pure Amusements features Chinese works ranging from prints to sculpture and furnishings to ceramics drawn from SAM's collection and focused on objects created for, and enjoyed during, the intentional practice of leisure. From the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644) onward, leisure had many rules. Gentlemanly pastimes, like drinking tea, viewing paintings, and planting bamboo in the garden, were pursuits of an elegant lifestyle. Such “pure amusements” (qingwan) were not frivolous—they helped establish one’s standing in society. Aspiring men thus collected objects like chessboards, books, paintings, calligraphy, ancient bronze vessels, and ink rubbings of antiquities. With greater social mobility, and broader literacy in the late-16th to early-17th century, knowledge and culture were accessible not only to scholars and aristocrats but also to the newly affluent.

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Views From Venice Seattle Art Museum December 10, 2016–ongoing Two divergent stories unfolded in 18th-century Venice. Once an influential city-state backed by a powerful navy and a dominant trade position, Venice slid into economic stagnation and lost military and political significance. At the same time, its distinct beauty and sensuous character attracted crowds of tourists and produced a flowering of the arts still visible in the sugary pastels and sparkling brushwork throughout this gallery. The veduta (view)—a tradition of painting unique to Venice that combines marine, landscape, and architectural elements—served visitors’ desire to remember and share what they saw in their travels. Early painters of veduta set out to document the city’s incomparable panoramas. Luca Carlevariis helped to establish the genre, devoting large canvases to architectural vistas as well as the local citizens and their festivities. Canaletto, the best known of the vedutisti, introduced brilliant light and expressed a warm optimism that made his paintings perfect collectors’ items. A school of contemporaries and many later followers would try to achieve the spirit and masterful handling that set Canaletto apart as the greatest painter of the movement.

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Jennifer West: Film is Dead… Seattle Art Museum November 19, 2016–May 7, 2017 This large-scale, site-specific installation by Jennifer West, a Los Angeles-based artist and former Seattle resident, was commissioned by SAM. The multimedia installation examines the duality of film as both material and immaterial. Film is Dead… comprises a cascading 25-foot-wide curtain of primarily 70mm

filmstrips, hung from the ceiling and spanning a large part of the gallery. West manipulates the filmstrips using everyday household materials—including ink, dye, food coloring, spray paint, nail polish, dirt, salt, and bleach—and subjects them to scratches and perforations by knives, mirror shards, vegetable peelers, and more. West, along with her friends and fellow artists, mark the filmstrips with their lips and breasts. These changes, erosions, and impressions to the film emulsion create colored splotches, grid-like patterns, and chance effects. The curtain of filmstrips curls to the floor and appears to “feed” into three flat-screen monitors placed side-by-side. On these screens plays the digitized film of the manipulated filmstrips in a continuous loop. Visitors will be able to walk around all four sides of this immersive environment for an “analog-meets-digital” experience. The installation will be on view in one of the museum’s modern and contemporary galleries on the third floor. Recent installations there dedicated to contemporary art have shown the work of Martha Rosler, Guido van der Werve, and Harun Faroki.

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Close Ups Seattle Art Museum August 17, 2016–ongoing The modern portrait serves an increasingly expanding range of purposes. Going far beyond traditional notions of the portrait as an accurate likeness, it has become a portal through which to reflect on contemporary issues and emotions. Artists deploy a wide variety of stylistic and technological means in going beyond appearance to depict more enigmatic features of identities. German artists in the first half of the 20th century used expressive colors and theatrical staging in portraiture to consider the anxieties of war, trauma, and displacement following two devastating world wars. Equally evocative, mid-century American painters fused an expressive painterly language of abstraction with their subjects’ countenance to evoke states of mind to dramatic effect. The pendulum swung in the opposite direction with the arrival of Pop Art in the 1960s. The gleaming surfaces of models and stars enter the canvas and the reproductive technologies used by the film and advertising industries became an important touchstone. Portraits of personal, historical, or allegorical significance have remained a vital outlet of artistic expression throughout time and into the present day. Close Ups provides a view across time and continents to witness developments within portraiture.

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African Renaissances Seattle Art Museum May 6, 2016–July 16, 2017 Things Fall Apart may be the title of a famous novel about Nigeria, but it also sums up a mistaken notion that the African continent is afflicted with only bad news. This installation offers a realistic vision by recognizing cultural leaders who preside over kingdoms and live in thriving communities and cities. Regalia and furnishings that were originally seen in the courts of the Benin, Asante, Kom, and Kuba kingdoms are on view. Many of these kingdoms faced extreme domination by colonial powers in the early 20th century but reestablished their own power during the last half of the century. In addition, art created by Maasai, Fulani, and Ndebele women declares their views of the world. Finally, art provided by a musical leader living in Seattle contributes a sense of how things are coming together for a 21st-century futurist renaissance.

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Emblems of Encounter: Europe and Africa Over 500 Years Seattle Art Museum January 23, 2016–ongoing Looking back 500 years, one can see the late 15th century as a major turning point in history. When Portuguese navigators first arrived on the shores of West Africa, the two continents of Europe and Africa began interacting in new ways. After a very brief period of mutual respect and commercial exchange, European traders quickly moved to exploit the region’s natural resources—including human labor—which became the basis for the massive slave trade that eventually affected twenty million Africans. The ten works of European and African art in this gallery, dating from the end of the 15th century to the end of the 20th, have been selected from SAM’s collection as examples of these interactions over time. Bringing them together in this context reminds us that works of art contain multiple meanings and associations that can be viewed through different perspectives. Even small works connect us with a long and complex history that has shaped many aspects of our world today.

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Art and Life Along The Northwest Coast Seattle Art Museum November 26, 2014–ongoing Over their long habitation of the Pacific Northwest, First Peoples have shaped their lifeways around the resources of the water, forests, valleys, and mountains. In tandem, they have developed rich oral traditions and ceremonies that link inextricably to this region. With this installation of SAM’s collection of Northwest Coast art, visitors will encounter the creative expressions of generations of artists who created forms for daily life, for potlatch ceremonies, and for spiritual balance. The presence of contemporary arts, shown alongside historical forms, highlight the vitality of traditions that are being re-envisioned for present times. The installation also includes a new acquisition: twelve masks representing supernatural creatures associated with the Animals Spirits Dance by Gwaysdams carver Sam Johnson. Originally commissioned for the opening celebration of the Pacific Science Center’s Seamonster House in 1971, the masks were transferred to SAM in 2006 and are now on view for the first time. The interpretation and context for the masks are being defined though a collaboration with community members. The colorful, boldly carved masks represent a modern interpretation of the principles of Kwakwaka’wakw art and the dramatic nature of the dance privilege associated with them. The twelve masks—representing mouse, raccoon, deer, wolf and others—and a commissioned button blanket to adorn one of the masks, will be installed in July, 2026, accompanied by a video of the masks being danced in 1971. This display compliments the interactive video component about the history of the houseposts that will be installed in an adjacent gallery.

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Paintings and Drawings of the European Avant-Garde: The Rubinstein Bequest Seattle Art Museum April 23, 2014–ongoing Gladys (1921–2014) and Sam Rubinstein (1917–2007) were driven by a desire “to make things better for Seattle,” as Gladys put it. Their passion for music and art led to generous support of the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Symphony, the Seattle Opera, and many other arts organizations in our region. On their travels, they became interested in artists who lived and worked in Paris in the early 20th century. Exquisite examples of paintings and drawings from their collection, including works by Orphist painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Surrealists Joan Miró and Max Ernst, are on view in the third floor gallery dedicated to the Rubinstein’s memory. The Rubinsteins’ bequest, which also includes American and Japanese paintings not currently on view, will transform the Seattle Art Museum’s collection and inspire audiences now and in the future.

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France: Inside and Out Seattle Art Museum March 15, 2014–ongoing This installation of landscapes, domestic interiors, and decorative arts from the museum’s collection showcases stylistic developments in 19th-century French painting and design. It also invites us to think about the different worlds of men and women at that time. Beginning in the middle of the century, male artists began to paint outside, capturing intimate landscape views near Paris, scenes of laborers in the fields, and dramatic coastline vistas. The sense of immediacy that permeates those landscapes can also be found when artists turned their attention indoors. Like Vermeer before them, they were fascinated by the unremarkable moments of daily life at home. Images of women, somewhere between formal portrait and genre scene, give a limited picture of female lives toward the end of the century. The two women artists featured in this installation represent the beginning of broader opportunities for women, but even as they developed professional careers their subject matter was limited to family scenes, still lifes, and portraits.

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Pacific Currents & Billabong Dreams Seattle Art Museum March 14, 2014–ongoing

Paddling after swarming sharks

Embracing a totemic crocodile

Dancing with a sea bear hat

And watching a canoe prow cut through waves

All are powerful points of inspiration for the sculptures on view here. The theme of water connects two adjacent installations, Pacific Currents and Billabong Dreams. Waterways in their myriad manifestations—rivers, Australian billabongs, saltwater seas—are not only places for navigation and subsistence. They also contain great ancestral forces that have shaped the lives and laws of indigenous people across the Pacific, as well as the sacred water sources of Australia.

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Porcelain Room Seattle Art Museum May 5, 2007–ongoing Vast quantities of translucent, elegantly decorated white-bodied porcelain from China and Japan, arriving in Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, heightened Europeans’ fervor for these wondrous wares. In royal palaces, great houses of the aristocracy, and homes of the rising merchant class made wealthy by trade, specially designed rooms showcased porcelain from floor to ceiling as crowning jewels in an integrated architectural and decorative scheme. Brimming with more than one thousand magnificent European and Asian pieces from SAM's collection, the Porcelain Room has been conceived to blend visual excitement with an historical concept. Rather than the standard museum installation arranged by nationality, manufactory, and date, our porcelain is grouped by color and theme. Today, when porcelain is everywhere in our daily lives, this room evokes a time when it was a treasured trade commodity—sometimes rivaling the value of gold—that served as a cultural, technological, and artistic interchange between the East and the West.

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SEATTLE ART MUSEUM – COMING SOON

Common Pleasures: Art of Urban Life in Edo Japan Seattle Art Museum April 15–October 22, 2017 Japan saw an urban culture bloom during the Edo period (1603–1868). Residents in growing city centers, especially in Edo (present-day Tokyo), Kyoto, and Osaka, participated in many pastimes: theater, pleasure quarters, and festivals were among the most popular ones. Townspeople—made up of artisans and merchants, the two lower classes in the social hierarchy of the Edo period—became the catalyst of a vibrant artistic landscape. These paintings depict popular indulgences such as letting loose in the company of courtesans and seasonal events such as picnicking under cherry blossoms in the spring and dancing at festivals. The primary philosophical view of the time—“live for the moment”—fostered an aesthetic that is manifested in much of the art that engaged subjects dear to the townspeople’s sensibilities. Drawn from Seattle Art Museum as well as a private collection, the works on view showcase a diversity of leisure activities and common pleasures of ordinary people.

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Denzil Hurley Seattle Art Museum May 20–November 5, 2017 Denzil Hurley was born in Barbados and is Professor in the School of Art at the University of Washington. Hurley is dedicated to abstraction and his work has centered on the tension between formal elements—either a series of elements within a single painting--or the relationships between paintings and their surrounding architecture in a constellation. In earlier works, his paintings showed traces of the artist’s process, layers of additions and subtractions that remained visible in each finished piece. In his exhibition at SAM, we will be featuring his most recent body of work, which introduces entirely new ideas and hovers between painting and sculpture. His monochrome black canvases have been modified with broomsticks, poles and other found objects, some of them reminiscent of protest signs. At times clustered, they become unyielding signs without specific message. Although abstract, they allude to larger social and political events and a culture of protest. If the black monochromes read as abstract signs, his canvases in the shape of frames literally mark a void and create a boundary for the empty space of the wall. Taken together, these works continue a conversation with the history of abstraction—Malevich’s black square is a distant relative. Yet as modified objects mounted on sticks and poles they are no longer static objects but suggest a different history and use and read as metaphors for a culture of protest that unfolds in the streets.

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Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors Seattle Art Museum June 30–September 10, 2017 Spanning over five decades, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors focuses on the evolution of the Japanese artist’s immersive, multi-reflective Infinity Mirror Rooms. Central to the exhibition is Kusama’s original 1965 mirror room, in which she displayed a vast expanse of red-spotted, white tubers in a room lined with mirrors, creating the illusion of an infinite space, a surreal landscape in which the viewer is situated at the center. The exhibition explores how Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms developed from a more material engagement with sculptural forms to ethereal mirror rooms in which light and reflections extend in all directions, allowing the visitor to seemingly float in a magical space. While the Infinity Mirror Rooms form the core of the exhibition, the drawings and paintings, created across her career, will demonstrate the evolution of Kusama’s ideas and their resonance with contemporary artistic ventures. Kusama showed with the German Zero group in the early 1960s, which had an interest in kinetic and participatory installations. These projects, as much as her encounter with happenings in New York, the city where Kusama took up residence in the late 1950s, informed her subsequent artistic development. In addition to the Infinity Mirror Rooms, there will also be a gallery that viewers will create and complete with their participation and a “landscape” of mirrored stainless steel spheres that reflect the people in the room. Two early videos are also included in this exhibition. By examining the early, destabilizing installations alongside the more ethereal mirror rooms she created later in her career, the show hopes to place this body of work in relation to a resurgence of experiential practices in contemporary art. Following its debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the exhibition will travel to four major museums in the United States and Canada, including the Seattle Art Museum (June 30–September 10, 2017), The Broad in Los Angeles (October 2017–January 2018), the Art Gallery of Ontario (March–May 2018), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (July–October 2018).

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Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect Seattle Art Museum October 19, 2017–January 15, 2018 Enter Andrew Wyeth’s reality. On the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth, Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect examines the American master’s 75-year career and offers unexpected perspectives on his art and legacy. Organized in partnership with the Brandywine River Museum, this major exhibition presents over 100 of the artist’s paintings and drawings. It looks back on a century in America when Wyeth confounded critics and deviated from the American art mainstream, but continued to figure prominently in much of the country’s artistic discourse. Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect follows the evolution of one of America’s most famous painters by bringing together well-known and rarely seen works. From depictions of his life in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to the coastal villages of Maine, Wyeth created timeless images of places, people, and things—layered with acute observation and a boundless imagination—all imbued with the artist’s mysterious temperament. Often out of synch with the time, Wyeth’s art challenged the norms of realism and abstraction. The exhibition begins in the late 1930s with Wyeth’s breakthrough works of brilliantly colored, boldly gestural, transparent watercolors of the Maine coast. These were soon set aside for the somber-toned and tightly rendered tempera paintings often associated with the artist. They include some of the artist’s most famous paintings, such as portraits of Christina Olson of Maine and Karl Kuerner, his neighbor in Chadds Ford. Also on view are the artist’s little known portraits of African Americans, a major focus of Wyeth’s work in the 1950s and ‘60s, followed by work from the 1970s and ‘80s, including the eroticism of the once-secret Helga paintings, and other deeply psychological but lesser known paintings from the Helga years. Finally, the exhibition reflects on images of his later life as he closed the book on his earlier subjects and looked for new ones. It brings to Seattle Wyeth’s last painting, Goodbye, which has not been seen since it was briefly shown to those who attended the artist’s memorial service in 2009. Andrew Wyeth investigated the possibilities of the portrait, the figure, and the places we inhabit—shunning narrative and rising above cliché—to convey the very emotions that make us human. Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect is co-organized by the Brandywine River Museum of Art and Seattle Art Museum.

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A Broad and Luminous Picture: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian (working title) Seattle Art Museum June 14–September 9, 2018 More information coming soon.

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ASIAN ART MUSEUM – CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS

SAM’s Asian Art Museum closed its doors on Monday, February 27, 2017 to begin preparations for the renovation of the historic building. For more than 80 years in Volunteer Park, SAM has served the community. The original home of SAM, the Asian Art Museum building has not been substantially restored or renovated since its inception in 1933. The structure is in need of seismic and climate control upgrades, and the museum’s program and exhibition space is inadequate to meet educational and exhibition demands. The renovation addresses critical infrastructure issues, increases ADA accessibility to the museum, and creates a better connection to Volunteer Park. The proposed expansion adds more than 12,500 square feet of usable space, but alters the building’s footprint in Volunteer Park by less than 3,600 square feet. The expansion offsets space lost by the addition of new heating and cooling system equipment and will provide a much-needed education classroom, as well as gallery, conservation, and programming space. It will also restore historic Olmstedian paths, stretching east from the museum. These paths will better connect the elements within the park, including the museum. The goal of the renovation is not only to restore a historic icon and to protect a major Asian art collection, but also to create a modern museum equipped to function as an important cultural resource for the community—all while enhancing and respecting the natural beauty of Volunteer Park. SAM has been working with the City, parks groups, and the community to finalize a design that will allow the Asian Art Museum to continue its role as a world-class museum. The proposed design has changed over time to reflect feedback received from these important stakeholders. The improved Asian Art Museum will reopen in 2019 with a community celebration. Additional information can be found at seattleartmuseum.org/inspire.

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OLYMPIC SCULPTURE PARK – NOW ON VIEW

Echo Olympic Sculpture Park May 29, 2014–ongoing

Jaume Plensa is renowned for his monumental and psychologically engaging public art.

His sculpture Echo is named for the mountain nymph of Greek mythology who offended the goddess Hera—she kept her engaged in conversation and prevented her from spying on one of Zeus’ amours. To punish Echo, Hera deprived the nymph of speech, except for the ability to repeat the last words spoken by another. Plensa created this monumental head of Echo with her eyes closed, seemingly

listening or in a state of meditation. The work is situated on the shoreline of the park, where Echo looks out over Puget Sound in the direction of Mount Olympus.

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OLYMPIC SCULPTURE PARK – COMING SOON

Spencer Finch Olympic Sculpture Park April 1, 2017–March 3, 2019

As the sun slips away and daylight turns into twilight, we become keenly attuned to the shifting colors of the sky and our surroundings. New York–based artist Spencer Finch has dedicated his practice to the study of light and color and the ways in which we perceive them. At the Olympic Sculpture Park, Finch has installed a nebulous formation of suspended glass panes that are, in his words, “creating a moving abstraction of a sunset, based on actual sunsets photographed from Seattle over Puget Sound. Using ninety square panes of glass of three different sizes and sixteen different colors, the installation straddles the line between abstraction and representation, shifting composition in real time as the panes of glass gently rotate in space.” Spencer Finch spent many years studying representations of landscape in painting, literature, and poetry. In the 19th century, Impressionist painters studied a single view at different points throughout the day in an attempt to capture the light of outdoor settings, resulting in dramatically different images and moods. Similarly, Finch’s nonrepresentational landscape uses a collection of visual data to create abstraction and abstraction to represent visual data. Spencer Finch asks, “What if, instead of painting a picture of a place you could re-create the light of a place? If we were as sensitively attuned to the color of light as we are to a convention like perspective, for example, maybe we could have the experience of saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Paris at dusk. . . . There’s the Hudson River Valley on a winter afternoon.’ It’s a way of thinking about how to represent landscape in an unconventional but totally accurate way.” At the PACCAR Pavilion, Finch calls upon fleeting moments to create the descriptive equivalent of a sunset. Unlike a photograph, the evocation of a sunset in this installation is not fixed. Our experience of Finch’s installation differs depending on the light—subdued or radiant. During sunrise and sunset, this constellation of colored glass doubles the natural event. Ultimately, the sunset is merely a starting point from which the artist explores “optical mixes of light and color,[…]Creating a prismatic experience that will be constantly changing.” Each visit to the Olympic Sculpture Park will bring new insights and appreciation for the subtleties of light as a medium.

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Image credits: Installation view of Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Installation view of Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Middle Fork, 2016, John Grade, American, b. 1970, wood, 30 x 28 x 105t., Collection of the artist. Installation view of Big Picture: Art After 1945 at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Birdcage, Pentagon, 1850–1920, Chinese, bamboo and metal, 22 x 9 x 9 in. Gift of Henry and Mary Ann James, in Honor of the 75th anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2007.9. The Doge's Palace And The Grand Canal, Venice, ca. 1710, Luca Carlevariis, Italian, Venice, 1663-1729, oil

on canvas, 37 3/4 x 75 3/4 in. (95.9 x 192.4 cm), Gift of Floyd A. Naramore, 50.70. Installation view of Jennifer West: Film is Dead... at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. The Pompeii Clowns, 1950, Max Beckmann, German, 1884–1950, oil on

canvas, 36 x 55 in., Gift of Sidney and Anne Gerber, 55.74, © Artist or Artist’s Estate. Installation view of African Renaissances at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Installation view of Emblems of Encounter at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Installation view of Art and Life Along the Northwest Coast at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Mondlicht, 1925, Alexei von Jawlensky, Russian, 1864–1941, oil on canvasboard, 16 1/2 x 12 3/4 in., Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Gladys and Sam Rubinstein. Photo: Nathaniel Willson. Fishing Boats at Étretat, 1885, Claude Monet, French, 1840-1926, oil on canvas, 29 x 36 in., Seattle Art Museum, Partial and promised gift of an anonymous donor, 92.88. Installation view of Pacific Currents & Billabong Dreams at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Installation view of Porcelain Room at the Seattle Art Museum. © Seattle Art Museum, Photo: Lara Swimmer. Picnicking under Cherry Blossoms and Boating on the River, mid-18th century, Nishikawa Sukenobu, pair of six-panel screens; ink, color and gold on paper, 40 x 18 1/2 in., "Gift to a City: Masterworks From the Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection in the Seattle Art Museum," Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 1965, no. 141., 62.133.1. Installation view of the artist’s studio. © Denzil Hurley, Photo: Catharina Manchanda. Installation view of Infinity Mirror Room–Phalli’s Field at Castellane Gallery, 1965 ©Yayoi Kusama. Winter 1946, 1946, Andrew Wyeth, tempera on hardboard panel, 31 3/8 x 48 in.,

North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina, © 2017 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS). An Oasis in the Badlands – Sioux, 1905. Asian Art Museum exterior photo by Benjamin Benschneider. Echo, 2011, Jaume

Plensa, Spanish, born 1955, Polyester resin, marble dust, steel framework, height 45 ft.11 in., footprint at base 10 ft. 8 in. x 7 ft. 1 in., Seattle Art Museum, Barney A. Ebsworth Collection, 2013.22, ©Jaume Plensa, Photo: Benjamin Benschneider. Spencer Finch: Installation detail of Following Nature, 2013, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Spencer Finch, American, born

1962. ©Spencer Finch, image courtesy of the artist.

ABOUT SEATTLE ART MUSEUM As the leading visual art institution in the Pacific Northwest, SAM draws on its global collections, powerful exhibitions, and dynamic programs to provide unique educational resources benefiting the Seattle region, the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. SAM was founded in 1933 with a focus on Asian art. By the late 1980s the museum had outgrown its original home, and in 1991 a new 155,000-square-foot downtown building, designed by Robert Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, opened to the public. The 1933 building was renovated and reopened as the Asian Art Museum in 1994. SAM’s desire to further serve its community was realized in 2007 with the opening of two stunning new facilities: the nine-acre Olympic Sculpture Park (designed by Weiss/Manfredi Architects)—a “museum without walls,” free and open to all—and the Allied Works Architecture designed 118,000-square-foot expansion of its main, downtown location, including 232,000 square feet of additional space built for future expansion. The Olympic Sculpture Park and SAM’s downtown expansion celebrate their tenth anniversary in 2017. From a strong foundation of Asian art to noteworthy collections of African and Oceanic art, Northwest Coast Native American art, European and American art, and modern and contemporary art, the strength of SAM’s collection of approximately 25,000 objects lies in its diversity of media, cultures and time periods.