Henry Art Gallery Announces 2019 Exhibitions

SEATTLE— The Henry Art Gallery is pleased to announce the museum’s 2019 exhibitions. The season will begin with a strong suite of exhibitions by women artists, followed by a museum-wide activation bringing unheard voices and stories to the fore. In concert with holistically curated public and youth programming, the upcoming exhibitions will provide a platform for cross-disciplinary dialogue both within the museum and in the greater community.

2019 EXHIBITIONS

Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen 
April 27 - September 15, 2019

Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, the first major United States solo exhibition of the influential Chilean-born artist, traces Vicuña’s career-long commitment to exploring discarded and displaced materials, peoples, and landscapes in a time of global climate change. 

Working within the overlapping discourses of conceptual art, land art, poetry, and feminist art practices, Vicuña (Chile, born 1948) has long refused categorical distinctions, operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile. The exhibition includes sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and text-based work from Vicuña’s practice since the late 1960s, weaving together the artist’s many artistic disciplines as well as communities with shared relationships to the land and sea. Reframing dematerialization as both a formal consequence of 1960s conceptualism and radical climate change, the exhibition examines a process that shapes public memory and responsibility.

Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (CAC), and co-curated by Andrea Andersson, The Helis Foundation Chief Curator of Visual Arts at the CAC, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of California, Berkeley. The presentation at the Henry is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Associate Curator. Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the Walker Family Foundation. This project is also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Media sponsorship is provided by KUOW.

2019 University of Washington MFA + MDes Thesis Exhibition
May 25 – June 23, 2019

Each year, the Henry presents the University of Washington's School of Art + Art History + Design Master of Fine Arts and Master of Design thesis exhibition. Throughout their programs, fine arts and design students work with advisers and other artists to develop advanced techniques, expand concepts, discuss critical issues, and emerge with a vision and direction for their own work.

Beverly Semmes
June 22 – October 13, 2019

Beverly Semmes (U.S., born 1958) is a sculptor whose work also incorporates painting, photography, and performance. In pursuit of unpacking the paradoxes and complexities of the female body and its representation, Semmes became known for her large-scale dress works in the early 1990s, of which this installation, Six Silvers, is a characteristic example—the physical body absent, but the suggestion of presence enormous.

Semmes’s oversized articles of clothing, primarily dresses, are typically altered by elongating the arms and hemming the length to extend to the floor, often filling the entire gallery. One of the newest additions to the Henry’s collection, the suite of dresses that comprise Six Silvers embody the alternately monumental, glamorous, grotesque, and humorous nature of the artist’s sculptural installations. 

Beverly Semmes is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Senior Curator.

Carrie Yamaoka: recto/verso 
July 13 – November 3, 2019

This exhibition brings together work by Carrie Yamaoka (U.S., born 1957) from the early 1990s to the present, highlighting recurring themes of (in)visibility and perception across her practice. It includes the artist’s early text-based explorations and chemically altered photographs centered on obfuscation and erasure, as well as her ongoing work made with reflective mylar and resin. Straddling painting, drawing, and sculpture, the more recent works result from an accumulation of actions such as abrasion and folding, which record and layer information, querying the slipperiness of vision. Across a practice that is iterative and synchronous in nature, Yamaoka revels in materiality, embracing states of transformation and the indeterminate.

Carrie Yamaoka: recto/verso is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Associate Curator. Lead support is provided by Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

In Plain Sight 
November 23, 2019 – April 2020

This group exhibition engages artists whose work addresses narratives, communities, and histories that are typically hidden or invisible in our public space (both conceptually and literally defined). The presenting artists approach these themes from a breadth of directions, varying across all media as well as aesthetic and conceptual contexts. The works span multiple interpretive approaches, from deliberately activist endeavors and direct documentation; the unpacking of individual histories excluded due to race, ethnicity, or class; explorations of coded language for protection, secrecy, or both; invisible or covert systems of labor, exploitation, and capitalist control; and translation through surreal, oblique, or fantastical frameworks, among others.

The exhibition will expand into and activate the entire museum, including interstitial/transitional spaces throughout and some external sites, with physical artwork as well as programs, performance, and community activations and partnerships.  Site becomes a material through which what we have heretofore considered the complete, authoritative story is expanded and retold. 

Participating artists: Sadie Barnette  (US, born 1984), Sanford Biggers (US, born 1970), Andrea Bowers (US, born 1965), Tom Burr (US, born 1963), Fiona Connor (New Zealand, born 1981), William Cordova (Peru, born 1971), Beatriz Cortez (El Salvador, born 1971), Lauren Halsey (US, born 1987), Hayv Kahraman (Iraq, born 1981), Nicole Miller (US, born 1982), Alison O’Daniel (US, born 1979), Ebony Patterson (Jamaica, born 1981), Mika Rottenberg  (Argentina, born 1976), A.L. Steiner (US, born 1967), Oscar Tuazon (US, born 1975)

In Plain Sight is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Senior Curator.

VIEWPOINTS 

Viewpoints is a rotating series that highlights works from the Henry's collection, paired with commentary and insights from University of Washington faculty. 

Mazel Tov Group by Karl Haendel
May 11 – November 3, 2019

Karl Haendel’s Mazel Tov Group (2006–7) is a multi-part work comprised of framed works on paper arranged in the gallery according to the artist’s specifications. Known for his catalogue of found images reworked through drawing, Haendel (U.S., born 1976) creates installations that recontextualize images culled from vernacular sources and bring seemingly disparate content into conversation. The five framed pieces that comprise Mazel Tov Group include a photograph of Emmet Kelly, the popular American circus performer, in costume as his clown character “Weary Willie”; and drawings of the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Jokerman”; a smiling performer atop an elephant; a Jewish-American themed cartoon from The New Yorker; and a breaching whale. Rather than forming a single narrative, Haendel’s grouping of these pieces points to multiple themes—such as the culture of American entertainment or relationships between nature and culture—while ultimately inviting viewers to construct their own connections. 

These Are Their Stories by Samantha Scherer
December 6, 2019 – March 8, 2020

Samantha Scherer (U.S., 1970) is a Seattle-based artist, whose work often explores themes of loss and conflict. These Are Their Stories is an ongoing series of black watercolor drawings on small squares of lightly tinted paper depicting victims from the crime drama Law and Order.  Rendered from video stills of the post-crime scene, each drawing is numbered according to the season of the series and episode. This catalogue of images examines the artist’s personal fascination with vulnerability and loss, as well as the larger cultural enthrallment and the role of media in feeding this fascination. All thirty-five works from the series in the Henry collection will be on view.