2026 Spring/Summer Exhibition Announcements

Seattle, WA [April 15, 2026]–This spring/summer, the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington presents a group of exhibitions reflecting the museum’s commitment to being a catalyst for artists and a space for inquiry, connection, and change.

The annual University of Washington MFA + MDes Thesis Exhibition highlights emerging artists and designers at a pivotal moment in their practice. Exploring the relationship between printmaking and painting, “Every Picture Somewhat of an Experiment”: Helen Frankenthaler Prints foregrounds the artist’s expansive print practice, alongside works by Analia Saban. Day-to-Day: Rhythm, Routine, Resistance considers how ordinary experiences and materials become sites of reflection on—and resistance to—structural forces. Joiri Minaya examines the artist’s versatile use of textiles to deconstruct stereotypes and weave new mythologies about the Tropics. The continuing exhibition Eric-Paul Riege: ojo|-|ólǫ́ engages Diné cosmology, histories of exchange, and questions of authenticity in Indigenous art.

Exhibitions will be activated through a range of public programs that provide visitors with first-hand experiences, including artist talks, performances, and opportunities for deeper engagement.

The Henry presents the University of Washington’s School of Art + Art History + Design Master of Fine Arts and Master of Design Thesis Exhibition. Developed in close collaboration with Henry staff, this annual exhibition marks a milestone for graduating students as they refine their practices and present new work.

Artists include: Stephanie Alacon, Dahae Cheon, Li-Yuan Chiou, Jeff Jiang, Victoria Mackender, Alex Moni-Sauri, Oscar Pearson, Chave Pichardo, Andrew Roibal, and Ryan Walters.

July 5, 2026 – January 3, 2027

This exhibition brings together contemporary artworks across media that explore the poetics and politics of everyday life. Using the day-to-day as both material and subject, these works explore how the ordinary and seemingly incidental can become a powerful source for artistic inquiry, critical reflection, and imagination.

From Rashid Johnson’s film chronicle of his family’s day-to-day routines to Dawn Clements’ monumental drawing of her temporary living space and Tony Feher’s delicate, hanging mass of disposable plastic bottles, artworks in the exhibition reveal the contradictions of daily life—feelings of belonging and alienation, and the tension between permanence and transience.

Most of the works were made within the last thirty years by a diverse group of U.S.-based artists. They show how personal experience is intertwined with larger social, economic, and historical realities. Everyday rituals and routines, common objects, and private spaces become sites for reflection on—and resistance to—these larger structural forces that shape who and what society values, from gendered and racialized labor to the built environment and design.

The exhibition draws primarily from the Henry’s permanent collection, alongside several works borrowed from private collections in the region. Together the artworks in Day-to-Day trace individual and shared narratives of survival and joy, inviting us to contemplate the transformative power of everyday materials and acts of living.

July 5, 2026 - April 25, 2027

By the age of thirty-two, Helen Frankenthaler(1928—2011) had established herself in a white male-dominated art world as one of the leading American Abstract Expressionist painters of the twentieth century. Her distinctive “soak-stain” technique—applying thinned paint onto unprimed canvases on the floor to produce watercolor-like effects—introduced chance as an integral part of her artistic process. Printmaking, a technical process involving chemistry, collaboration, and repetition, might appear at odds with the spontaneity and physicality of her painting.

Beginning in 1961 through the 2000s, Frankenthaler made more than three hundred print editions, experimenting with etching, lithography, silkscreen, woodcut, and more. In collaboration with workshops including Universal Limited Art Editions, 2RC, Tyler Graphics, Ediciones Polígrafa, and Garner Tullis—each represented in this exhibition—she translated her painterly concerns into print, in her words, “with new materials.” Over the course of her decades-long explorations in print, she distinguished herself not only as one of the few Abstract Expressionists to deeply engage the print medium, but also as an artist who innovated across painting and printmaking, pushing both in new directions.

In 2023, the Henry received a transformative gift of prints and proofs through the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s Prints Initiative. Now on view at the Henry for the first time, these works trace the arc of Frankenthaler’s print career from early experiments to later technical innovations. Collectively, they highlight the collaborative ethos of printmaking as a creative practice while revealing how Frankenthaler reimagined the possibilities of both mediums to forge new dialogues.

Two recent works by Analia Saban (b. 1980, Buenos Aires; lives and works in Los Angeles) extend Frankenthaler’s experiments into the present. Saban’s multidisciplinary practice explores how emerging technologies relate to traditional histories of art, sharing with Frankenthaler’s work a commitment to materiality, abstraction, and reconfiguring what a painting—or a print—is.

July 25, 2026 - May 2, 2027

Joiri Minaya (b. 1990, New York City; raised in the Dominican Republic) is a multidisciplinary artist who examines the Tropics as a constructed place and identity. As both performer and saboteur, Minaya challenges misrepresentations that reduce tropical geographies and their inhabitants to imagined fantasies of the colonial imagination. In her work, she reclaims Afro-Indigenous narratives of resistance, ancestral knowledges, and regenerative practices—especially those rooted in plant and botanical traditions.

The exhibition at the Henry will showcase the versatile language of textiles that Minaya has developed to critique the making of a global Tropics—a fabricated realm for the “exotic” extending from the Caribbean to the Pacific. From her storied Aloha shirts to the floral spandex cloths she designed to cloak colonial monuments, the works on view will weave new myths and cannibalize worn stereotypes, using Seattle as a touchpoint to imagine shared histories that connect across the global South.

Engaging the scale and openness of the double-height gallery at the Henry, the exhibition plays with concealment and revelation, inviting visitors to think expansively about the Tropical, and consider art’s role in challenging the grand narratives that shape our understandings of place and culture.

Through October 25, 2026

Eric-Paul Riege: ojo|-|ólǫ́ [Installation view, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2026]. Photo: Jueqian Fang.

ojo|-|ólǫ́ is an exhibition of recent and newly commissioned work by Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Na’nízhoozhí [Gallup, New Mexico]) that includes sculpture, textile, collage, and video, activated by moments of performance. Across this work, Riege combines customary Diné practices of weaving, silversmithing, and beading with contemporary cultural forms, exploring Diné cosmology, the history of Euro-American trading posts in and adjacent to the Navajo Nation, and the notion of “authenticity” as a value marker of Indigenous art and craft.

Developed in partnership between the Henry and The Bell Gallery at Brown University, ojo|-|ólǫ́ emerged from Riege’s material research with Navajo collections housed at Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The resulting body of work celebrates the ancestral knowledge and labor contained within Indigenous-made objects, while investigating the role of museums and other institutions in the dissemination and dispossession of knowledge about Indigenous cultures. For his tactile and modular soft sculptures, Riege employs exaggerated scale and combines synthetic and natural materials to playfully question ideas of authenticity and Indigenous artistic production. Processes of making and remaking embody a living practice of exchange that draws together webs of connection across time and space.

The exhibition also includes objects from the Burke collection displayed alongside assorted personal collections from Riege’s own home and studio. The resulting non-hierarchal display blurs lines between past and present, private and public, and real and fake, animating the dynamism and dimensionality of Indigenous cultures and identities. ojo|-|ólǫ́ invites collective reflection on the practices of institutions that have accumulated Indigenous art, while advancing a call for Indigenous cultural resurgence in the present and toward our shared future.

The Henry is a museum for contemporary art and ideas, rooted in the belief that art has the power to challenge norms, inspire change, and create a more equitable world. As Washington State’s first art museum, the Henry is internationally recognized for groundbreaking exhibitions, dynamic programs, and a long-standing commitment to championing artists at every stage of their careers. With a collection of nearly 30,000 objects and a deep partnership with the University of Washington, the Henry serves as a welcoming cultural hub, amplifying a diverse range of artistic voices and offering transformative, first-hand experiences that spark curiosity and new perspectives. Visit henryart.org to learn more.