Images: Derrick Adams, Style Variation 14, 2019. Acrylic paint on digital photograph inkjet on watercolor paper. Courtesy of Salon 94 LLC, New York. Barbara Earl Thomas, Gentleman, 2021. Paper cut with hand printed color. Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York. Photo: Zocalo Studios ~ Spike Mafford.

Henry Art Gallery Fall 2021 Exhibitions

The Henry Art Gallery is pleased to announce the museum’s fall 2021 exhibitions, featuring artists Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas, Diana Al-Hadid, Math Bass, and Dean Sameshima and Anthony White.

Download a PDF with exhibition information, including artist bios, here.

Packaged Black: Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas

October 2, 2021 - May 1, 2022

Packaged Black brings together the work of artists Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, MD) and Barbara Earl Thomas (b. 1948, Seattle, WA) in a collaborative, multi-media installation developed from their shared dialogue about representation, Black identity, and practices of cultural resistance. This exhibition is a synthesis of a multi-year, intergenerational, and cross-country exchange between New York-based Adams and Seattle-based Thomas that began after the two artists exhibited work alongside each other in a group show at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017.

Adams's work in Packaged Black engages the relationship between Black culture and commerce that is core to his practice, alongside the ways fashion and self-styling communicate identity. Among the works included are large, striking collages and sculptures inspired by his ongoing research into the life and legacy of influential African-American designer Patrick Kelly (1954–1990). Other works take inspiration from the way hair salons and wig designs shape self-image in the Black community. In complement, Thomas, who often works in printmaking, glass, drawing, and monumental sculptures made from intricately cut Tyvek and paper, translates contemporary realities and lived experience through the visual language of myth and archetypal stories. For her project at the Henry, Thomas draws upon the role of media and fairytales in shaping social expectations and her own conception of self. She is presenting all new work, including an immersive installation conceived as a ‘transformation room’ and a series of new cut-paper portraits of friends and colleagues that riff on the concept of the royal court. Adams and Thomas’s work intermingles across multiple galleries, creating an exhibition that forms an interconnected constellation of relationships that span time and place, and celebrates the creative imagination, adaptation, and resilience of Black communities.

A brochure with a conversation between the artists, alongside studio images and installation images, will accompany the exhibition.

Packaged Black: Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator, and Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs. Lead support is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. This exhibition is also made possible by the generous support of Virginia and Bagley Wright. Media sponsorship provided by The Seattle Times.

Images, left to right: Derrick Adams, Style Variation 14, 2019. Acrylic paint on digital photograph inkjet on watercolor paper. Courtesy of Salon 94 LLC, New York. Barbara Earl Thomas, Gentleman, 2021. Paper cut with hand printed color. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Zocalo Studios ~ Spike Mafford.

Diana Al-Hadid: Archive of Longings

October 2, 2021 - February 6, 2022

Diana Al-Hadid’s work explores the interplay between the female body and the European art canon; Syrian, Muslim, and immigrant histories and mythologies; and architectural icons and the natural world. Born in 1981 in Aleppo, Syria, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Al-Hadid creates artworks that speak to her interest in the melding of cultures and the translation of disparate narratives. This monographic exhibition will consist of a selection of 14 sculptural works made between 2010 and 2021 brought into interpretive grouping for the first time. Together the sculptures identify the artist’s investigation of historical, mythological, and biblical narratives of women as a fundamental through-line of her practice.

While Al-Hadid’s work is often interpreted primarily in relation to her interest in the art historical canon, this show situates the artist’s deployment of these influences as advancing a network of feminist concerns: the female protagonist and its conflicted history, as well as women’s agency, power, and identity. The title refers to the artist’s ongoing interest in the incomplete nature of collective history and the palimpsest of narrative and information that constructs our sense of history; it also resists the monumentalizing (and ultimately, patriarchal and colonialist) idea of fixity and singularity. Instead, Al-Hadid foregrounds disruption and rupture in the endlessly woven fabric of our stories of self/the body, the migration of information and interpretation through space and time, and the fundamentally unfixed nature of human desire.

The exhibition is held in conjunction with the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), a nationwide initiative of art projects that seek to generate cultural awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action.

A brochure with a curatorial essay, alongside installation images, will accompany the exhibition.

Diana Al-Hadid: Archive of Longings is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs. Lead support is provided by Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. This exhibition is also made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Image: Diana Al-Hadid, Smoke Screen, 2015. Polymer gypsum, fiberglass, steel, gold lead, plaster, pigment. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Joshua White.

Math Bass: a picture stuck in the mirror

October 16, 2021 - March 6, 2022

Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass (b. 1981, New York, NY) will create a site-specific installation featuring a series of recent oil paintings (a new medium for the artist), a kinetic wall work, sculpture, and large-scale wall applications. Bass's painting and sculptural practice has evolved from their initial work as a performance and video artist, where the tracking of the body's motion and transit through the world is central. The intersection of dramatically varied scale throughout the installation becomes important as well. Drawing attention to a spectator’s progress and their relationship to each object and location in the space, Bass brings forth the ideas of being shepherded by, barred from, projecting through, and resisting space.

Bass has referred to their work as "props," foregrounding the performative interplay among art, artist, and viewer inherent to their installations. During their site visit, Bass responded to the theatrical potential and multiple perspectives of the East Gallery. These characteristics particularly shaped the kinetic sculpture, which suggests continual presence and the motion of bodies behind a curtain without ever revealing them, a preparation for performative presence endlessly held in suspense. In addition to the in-gallery components, the project will extend to the Henry’s exterior, occupying the external wall of the museum with an expansive mural “painting” in vinyl. The exhibition will open in October with a performance by the artist that highlights the relationship of the seen and unseen in the work.

Math Bass: a picture stuck in the mirror is held in conjunction with the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), a nationwide initiative of art projects that seek to generate cultural awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action.

A brochure with an essay by Leilah Weinraub and a curator’s introduction, alongside installation images, will accompany the exhibition.

Math Bass: a picture stuck in the mirror is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs. This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of 4Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Image: Math Bass, Snake Skin Ring, 2020. Oil on linen. Collection of Ms. Beth Rudin DeWoody, New York. Photo: Jeff Mclane, courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

Queer Visibility: Dean Sameshima & Anthony White

October 2021 - January 2022

Viewpoints is a rotating series that highlights work from the Henry's collection, alongside commentary and insights from members of the University of Washington community.

The upcoming iteration of Viewpoints pairs paintings by Dean Sameshima (b. 1971, Torrance, CA) and Anthony White (b. 1994, Santa Maria, CA) that reflect on queer desire and visibility. Torso (Black on Silver), 2006, by Sameshima enlarges cartoonist ‘Sean’s’ creative transformation of a pornographic image into a connect-the-dots activity, originally featured in the gay leather magazine Drummer in the 1970s. The image is only complete with participation, and draws on secret codes and hidden meanings, as well as the implied necessity of such measures. In BOYZ OF THE WILD, 2020, White engages the social power and trappings of screen culture, and places nude portraits of his male friends amid a landscape of sticker-like brand names, layered with a digital buffering symbol at the center of the composition. The figures are exalted and exposed, and appear both vulnerable and curated amid the cultural artifacts.

This iteration of Viewpoints is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator, in collaboration Kira Sue, graduate curatorial assistant. Anthony White’s BOYZ OF THE WILD is on loan from Seth Grizzle.

Images, left to right: Dean Sameshima, Torso (Black on Silver), 2006. Acrylic and screen print on canvas. Henry Art Gallery, Gift of David Hoberman, Los Angeles, 2014.287. Photo: Jueqian Fang. Anthony White, BOYZ OF THE WILD, 2020. PLA on panel. On loan from Seth Grizzle. Photo: Anthony White, courtesy of the artist and Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle.

For image and interview requests, please email press@henryart.org.

ABOUT THE HENRY

The Henry Art Gallery is internationally recognized for bold and challenging exhibitions, for being the first to premiere new works by established and emerging artists, and for highlighting contemporary art practice through a roster of multidisciplinary programs. Containing more than 27,000 works of art, the museum’s permanent collection is a significant cultural resource available to scholars, researchers, and the general public. The Henry is located on the University of Washington campus in Seattle, Washington. Visit henryart.org to learn more.