Henry Art Gallery Announces 2020 Exhibitions

SEATTLE, WA— The Henry Art Gallery is pleased to announce the museum’s 2020 exhibitions. This summer/fall, the museum will dedicate its complete gallery footprint to exhibitions 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. In concert with holistically curated programming, the 2020 exhibitions will provide a platform for cross-disciplinary dialogue both within the museum and in the greater community.

2020 University of Washington MFA + MDes Thesis Exhibition
May 23 – June 21, 2020

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 advisors and other artists to develop advanced techniques, expand concepts, discuss critical issues, and emerge with a vision and direction for their own work. The Henry is pleased to champion, help realize, and bring exposure to these artists’ work.

The 2020 University of Washington MFA + MDes Thesis Exhibition is organized by Jes Gettler, Exhibition Designer and Lead Preparator. 

Math Bass
July 11, 2020 – February 7, 2021

Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass (U.S., born 1981) will create a site-specific installation featuring a commissioned series of paintings, kinetic wall work, and sculpture inspired by the Henry’s architecture. Bass’ 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. In their latest work, Bass brings forth ideas around suggested but unseen movement, as well as shaping and resisting space. The artist is particularly interested in responding to the theatrical possibilities and multiple perspectives offered by the Henry’s East Gallery. Bass has referred to their sculptural pieces as “props,” foregrounding the performative interplay among art, artist, and viewer inherent in their installations.

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.

Math Bass is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Senior Curator.

Diana Al-Hadid
July 25, 2020 – February 7, 2021

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 Arab, Muslim family background in concert with an interest in the melding of cultures and the translation of disparate narratives. This monographic exhibition will consist of a selection of approximately ten large-scale sculptural works made between 2010 and 2020—including one major new commission and several newly created bronze sculptures—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, and women’s agency, power, and identity.

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 is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Senior Curator.

Bambitchell: Bugs and Beasts Before the Law
August 8, 2020 – January 10, 2021

Bugs and Beasts Before the Law (2019) is an experimental essay film by Bambitchell, the artistic collaboration of Sharlene Bamboat (b. 1984, Pakistan; lives and works in Canada) and Alexis Mitchell (b. 1983, Canada; lives and works in Scotland). The artists’ single-channel film, shot in 16mm color and HD video, poses questions about the administration of justice and rights under the law.

The film explores the history and legacy of the “animal trials” that took place in medieval and early modern Europe and its network of colonies, in which nonhuman animals and inanimate objects were put on trial for various crimes and offenses, ranging from thievery to assault and murder. The film follows events from the fourteenth through the early twentieth century, questioning how power is performed through the body of the other. Each of the film’s five chapters centers on a specific “trial” or type of trial that engages questions about how the law mediates social relations and personhood through such processes as the formation of property and the criminalization of sexual difference. These stories of the past are narrated against contemporary landscapes and within constructed tableaux, blurring past and present, fact and fiction, and creating an absurdist narrative of the justice system that is all too resonant today.

The installation features an immersive audio score developed by Richy Carey with Bambitchell, and a built amphitheater structure that accentuates the spectacle and function of the animal trials as tools of social control. At the Henry, on the occasion of their first museum exhibition in the United States, the artists will create a complementary installation of their research material, which consists of archival documents that conjure how the animal trials figure in the historic imaginary and lay the groundwork for the mechanisms of legal practice that shape contemporary society.

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 publication produced with the artists and designed by Gary Robbins of Container Corps, with essays by Sarah Keenan and Marianne Shaneen and a curatorial introduction, will accompany the exhibition.

RELATED PROGRAM

Co-created by the Henry Art Gallery and UW faculty, the Henry will host a three-day colloquium in October 2020 in conjunction with Bugs and Beasts Before the Law. Designed as an interdisciplinary exchange, the colloquium will consist of lightning talks, creative workshops, and social gatherings engaging topics around representation, rights, and justice. Funding for the colloquium comes from the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Bambitchell: Bugs and Beasts Before the Law is developed in collaboration with Mercer Union, Toronto, and is organized for the Henry by Nina Bozicnik, Associate Curator.

Collection Exhibitions
August 8, 2020 – January 10, 2021

Two presentations drawn from a feminist and social justice reading of the Henry’s permanent collection are being planned 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. These shows will consist of works selected for their resonance with the themes, content, and aesthetic approaches of the concurrent exhibitions at the Henry. 

One of these presentations, inspired by Bambitchell’s film Bugs and Beasts Before the Law, features visual and written forms of communication that circulated as tools to galvanize dialogue, public consciousness, and solidarity against injustice. Included in the exhibition are nineteenth-century prints by Honoré Daumier that lampoon the court and judicial system of France, and photographs from Danny Lyon’s photo book project Conversations with the Dead, which Lyon made over fourteen months in 1967 and 1968 recording life within the Texas prison system. Presented alongside these works from the Henry collection are prison newsletters from the Washington Prison History Project at the University of Washington, Bothell. Among these materials are issues of Through the Looking Glass: A Women and Children Prison Newsletter, first published in 1976 as a grassroots, anti-prison publication out of Seattle. 

An additional presentation from the Henry collection features a contemporary grouping of artworks that address the gendered construction and deconstruction of the woman-identified body and its representation, including work by Helen Chadwick, Patty Chang, Graciela Iturbide, and Suzanne McClelland, among others. 

The collection exhibitions related to the Feminist Art Coalition are organized by Nina Bozicnik, Associate Curator, and Ann Poulson, Associate Curator of Collections.

VIEWPOINTS

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

A Dialogue Between Jean-François Millet and Jeanne Dunning
May 9 – September 20, 2020

This iteration of Viewpoints features representations of women and domestic labor in works by Jean-François Millet (France, 1814-1875) and Jeanne Dunning (U.S., born 1960). Millet’s nineteenth-century prints depict idealized images of rural women performing acts of childcare and handcraft in pastoral and household scenes. In the context of critical social change within France, Millet’s female figures embody ideals of virtuous labor, maternal care, and religiosity, in opposition to the perceived moral threat of urban women. These prints are paired with Icing (1996), a video on loan from the Collection of William and Ruth True, in which a disembodied hand, through a mechanical process, covers a woman’s head with cake frosting, transforming her into a static sculpture and suppressing her identity. Made in the wake of the reclamation of domestic labor by a generation of feminist artists, Icing questions how elevating “women’s work” might also lead toward a confining fetishization. 

A Gee’s Bend Quilt by Mary L. Bennett
September 26, 2020 – January 10, 2021

This iteration of Viewpoints features “Housetop”—nine-block variation (1975) by Mary L. Bennett (U.S., born 1942), a quiltmaker from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Since at least the second half of the nineteenth century, women from this small and geographically remote community of mostly slave decedents, have made quilts using a range of available materials, including flour and fertilizer sacks, old work clothes, and factory remnants, with the practical purpose of keeping their families warm. The quilts, however, are much more than utilitarian objects, and the range of patterns and styles exemplifies ingenuity, creativity, and resourcefulness. The pattern variations are also markers of cultural continuity as the practice of quilting is passed down through generations, illustrating a rich history of resistance to and survival within the realities of economic and racial oppression. One of the most enduring patterns in Gee’s Bend is the “housetop,” which features blocks of fabric pieced in concentric formation around a central patch. In Bennett’s nine-block variation, she creates a dynamic composition that emphasizes her individual expression within a shared, collective history and quilt-making tradition.

The 2019-20 Viewpoints series is supported with a generous gift from T. William and Beatrice Booth.

COLLECTION RELATED PROGRAMS

This fall/winter, the Henry will present a four-part series to highlight the museum’s extensive holdings in the decorative and design arts, including ceramics, jewelry, textiles, and costume. Each edition of the series will include both a public talk and a workshop allowing for direct engagement with objects from the Henry’s collections. Outside experts will select items that illustrate key concepts and considerations of aesthetics, cultural context, and process. The series is made possible in part by the Guendolen Carkeek Plestcheeff Endowment. 

Ongoing collection programs include the recurring Re/frame program, which highlights a different group of objects from the museum’s collection of more than 27,000 objects. The program is held on the second Thursday of each month (except for July and August). Visit henryart.org for details.