In 1927, the Henry Art Gallery opened as Washington State’s first public art museum, with a founding collection of 178 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 shape 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.

Museum collections are inherently fragmentary pictures of history and culture. This presentation seeks not a cohesive perspective, but a way to look with care and critical insight at artistic convergences and divergences that structure the Henry collection, and by extension shape the way we see ourselves, each other, and the world around us. The presentation aims to transcend linear and hierarchical approaches to the history of art and to explore the notion of the “contemporary” as an expansive, ever-evolving dialogue.