Art Galleries & Museums

Currently at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, Juventino Aranda’s Pocket Full of Posies explores how everyday objects become symbols of identity and social strata. Aranda grew up in Walla Walla, Washington, the child of Mexican immigrant workers, and was the first in his family to get a University degree. His work reflects the mixed cultural heritage of immigrants in the US. As an activist and artist, Aranda uses his installations to draw attention to socioeconomic, political and cultural issues. 

An innovative photography exhibition at New York’s Waterhouse & Dodds Gallery, Kim Keever: Water Colors showcases the artist’s first series of completely abstract explorations of color in motion. Keever’s earlier photographs involved intricately constructed miniature landscapes that he photographed submerged in a 200-gallon water tank. Lit with colored lights and using dispersed pigment for cloud effects, Keever created dramatic foreign landscapes. Intrigued by the dispersal patterns, Keever began focusing solely on photographing the colors moving through water.

The Art Institute of Chicago has brought together a stunning collection of works by one of America’s greatest portraitists. The recently opened John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age includes over 100 objects, both borrowed and from the museum’s collection, highlighting the connections the painter had with the city of Chicago. Though Sargent is best known for his portraits, his artistic practice was wide-ranging, and this exhibition covers all of his output, including the en plein air landscapes of his late career, sketches, and watercolors.

Pinpoint a figure staring directly out at you in an early Renaissance painting and chances are it’s a surreptitious self-portrait, slipped into a crowded scene. It took time for artists to feel comfortable devoting entire canvases to their own likenesses, and longer for masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn to return to self-portraiture over and over. But with the invention of photography in 1839, things changed. Artists could quickly and cheaply craft self-images that were divorced from their work, playing with their personas without wielding paintbrushes or chisels.

Now showing at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C. is the latest installment of the museum’s ongoing Women to Watch Series. Heavy Metal includes over 50 works from 20 contemporary artists, covering the huge breadth of techniques, materials, and artworks that encompass contemporary metal work. Seeking to defy the conventional association with metal work as a male-dominated art form, the exhibition shows all that woman are accomplishing in this diverse range of materials.

A powerful new exhibition at New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery, Ravelled Threads brings together work by ten African artists utilizing fabric in different ways. Cloth has cultural and spiritual significance throughout Africa, with a long history of use in storytelling, historical record keeping, political activism, and cultural expression.

At an exhibition opening this week, the Broad Museum of Art celebrates some of its latest acquisitions. Having only opened in 2015, the Broad has a collection of more than 2,000 contemporary works, including some of the most prominent artists working today. A Journey That Wasn't groups together 50 works representing 20 artists in the permanent collection, several of which are being displayed in the museum for the first time.

An exhibition that defies patriarchal modes of looking, Multiply, Identify, Her is currently on view at the International Center of Photography. Curated by Marina Chao, who was inspired by late photographer and Chicana feminist Laura Aguilar, the exhibition assembles portrait, photo collage, and video among other digital media.

Opening at Friedman Benda this week, the London-based artist Jonathan Trayte invites you into an alternate universe of bizarre but friendly furnishings. In his first US solo exhibition, Fruiting Habits, Trayte creates a world of his own, filled with idiosyncratic functional objects with multiple uses. With a background in fine arts as well as in food service and as a foundry worker, Trayte brings a sense of humor and a playful interest in texture to this collection.

Now at the Seattle Art Museum, Double Exposure juxtaposes the work of iconic early American photographer Edward S. Curtis with contemporary Indigenous artists Marianne Nicolson, Tracy Rector and Will Wilson. Double Exposure contrasts Curtis’s haunting photos of a world he believed would soon be lost with current artistic expressions of Indigenous culture that’s very much alive.