Held in conjunction with Seattle Art Fair, join
Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator at the Henry, for a conversation with
Amir H. Fallah and
Charlene Liu. Both artists reclaim, juxtapose, and interrogate visual histories and cultural imagery across their work. Deeply informed by their diasporic upbringings, Fallah and Liu render vibrant works that reference ornament and decorative aesthetics from a variety of visual traditions. Both will share about their use of pattern and layers as a means to explore cultural hybridity and flatten cultural hierarchies. Liu’s mural
Scallion is on view at the Henry through summer 2027 and Fallah is currently at work on a large-scale commission for the Henry set to open in conjunction with the museum’s centennial in 2027.
Bios
Amir H. Fallah (b. 1979, Tehran, Iran; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, AZ; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; San Diego ICA; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS. Fallah was the founder and creative director of art & design publication Beautiful/Decay from 1996-2013. In 2009, he was chosen to participate in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. In 2015, Fallah received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2019, Fallah’s painting Calling On The Past received the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago. In 2020, he was awarded the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and the Artadia grant. In addition, the artist had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, accompanied by a catalogue, and a year-long installation at the ICA San Jose.
Born in Taiwan and raised in the American Midwest, Charlene Liu is a Professor of Art and Printmaking at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Her work has been exhibited at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts, Pendleton, OR; LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University, New York; Oregon Center for Contemporary Art, Portland; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR; Feves Art Gallery at Blue Mountain Community College, Pendleton, OR; and the 14th Biennale internationale d’estampe contemporaine de Trois-Rivières, and is held in private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and the Tacoma Art Museum. Liu was awarded a 2024 Halie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts from the Ford Family Foundation.
Nina Bozicnik is the Senior Curator at the Henry Art Gallery, the contemporary art museum on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. Bozicnik joined the Henry in 2014 and during her ten-year tenure, she has worked extensively with contemporary artists on a national and international scale through commissions and organized exhibitions of loans as well as works from the Henry Collection. Previous to joining the Henry, Bozicnik was the assistant curator at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire and was the Koch Curatorial Fellow at the De Cordova Sculpture Park + Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Bozicnik received an MA in Art History, Museum Studies at Tufts University and a BA in Art History, Arts Management at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Her curatorial work advances a feminist and queer perspective rooted in questions related to the body, environment, agency, and knowledge production.