In 1927, the Henry Art Gallery opened as Washington State’s first public art museum, with a founding collection of 172 works of art gifted to the University of Washington by Seattle business and civic leader Horace C. Henry. One hundred years later, the museum’s collection has grown to nearly 30,000 objects across media. To celebrate the Henry’s centennial, the museum’s curatorial team has developed a presentation from the permanent collection featuring both iconic and lesser-known works that examine shared narratives and layered histories. Installed within the Henry’s original 1927 building, this presentation comprises a series of focused selections centered around enduring questions that inform our individual and collective humanity and resonate with the entangled dynamics of our world today.

The resulting selections explore a broad range of artistic processes and interrelated topics: the power and perils of representation, national mythologies, image economies, cross-cultural exchange, life amidst advancing technologies, and queer and feminist forms of embodiment. These focused selections span time, geography, and medium, inviting reflection on a rich legacy of artistic experimentation and production amidst social and cultural changes.

Among the works anchoring the presentation are Winslow Homer’s oil painting An Adirondack Lake (1870) from the Henry’s founding collection, in dialogue with nineteenth-century American landscape photography; Robert Rauschenberg’s groundbreaking lithograph Booster (1967) paired with early computer and video works by Seattle legend Doris Totten Chase from the late-1960s and ‘70s; textiles from the Indian subcontinent collected by Elizabeth Bayley Willis and the fashion designs her diplomatic work inspired; a selection of photographs from Fred Lonidier’s documentary archive Draft Resistance Seattle; and internationally acclaimed artist Isaac Julien’s three-channel video installation The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), exhibited at the Henry for the first time.

Learn more about the Henry’s collections here.