Announcing 2023 Exhibitions
Seattle, WA—The Henry is pleased to announce the museum's 2023 exhibitions. The program includes the group exhibition Thick as Mud featuring an international roster of artists including Dineo Seshee Bopape, Ali Cherri, and Rose B. Simpson; large-scale commissions by Raúl de Nieves and rafa esparza; site-specific installations by Kelly Akashi and Sarah Cain; and a major solo presentation by Sophia Al-Maria. The Henry's collection will be highlighted through several presentations, including Taking Care: Collections Support Studio and A/political Rocks.
Thick as Mud
FEB 4 – MAY 7, 2023
Thick as Mud explores how mud animates relationships between people and place, with works by an international roster of artists: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Diedrick Brackens, Ali Cherri, Christine Howard Sandoval, Candice Lin, Rose B. Simpson, Eve Tagny, and Sasha Wortzel. Across multiple geographies and a range of aesthetic approaches—from figurative clay sculpture to audio recordings of the swamp—these artists engage mud as a material or subject that shapes personal and collective histories, memory, and imagination. Read the press release.
Taking Care: Collection Studio Support
MAR – SEP 2023
Over the course of several months, the Henry will publicly display an unprecedented number of works from the museum’s permanent collection while the collection storage space undergoes an important upgrade. Visitors will have the unique opportunity to experience over 200 large, framed photographs, prints, and drawings that will be removed from storage and hung salon-style in the Henry’s expansive South Gallery. Read more.
Sarah Cain
APR 1 – AUG 27, 2023
Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Cain (born 1979 in Albany, NY; lives and works in Los Angeles) paints exuberant abstractions that often extend beyond the canvas into installations, site-specific painting, stained glass, and furniture that draw from sources as disparate as Abstract Expressionism, graffiti, and pop music, and incorporate materials as diverse as fabric, sand, feathers, jewelry, crystals, and ribbons. For this commissioned exhibition, Cain will create a site-specific project responding to the museum’s East Gallery, which will engage the double-height space through wall and floor paintings, as well as furniture and other architectural interventions. Read more.
Dana Claxton: Monsen Photography Lecture
MAY – JUL 2023
This presentation offers a focused selection of work by acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, and performance artist Dana Claxton (Hunkpapa Lakota, born 1959), whose body of work has long dealt with the colonial histories of the United States and Canada, as well as issues of Native representation. This presentation is organized in conjunction with Claxton’s Monsen Photography Lecture on May 12, 2023. Read more.
2023 University of Washington MFA + MDes Thesis Exhibition
MAY 28 – JUN 26, 2023
The Henry is pleased to present 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. Read more.
A/political Rocks
JUL 2023 – JAN 2023
Drawn from the Henry collection, A/political Rocks ;explores the role landscape photography has played in shaping experience of the American West, paying particular attention to among the most superficially banal and apolitical of landscape subgenres: images of rocks. Spanning a roughly hundred-year period, the works in the exhibition range from documentary images produced as part of nineteenth-century geological surveys to modernist pictures made with artistic intent in the twentieth century, featuring works by Ansel Adams, Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and Edward Weston, among others. Read more.
Sophia Al-Maria
JUL 2023 – JAN 2024
Across her work in moving image, text, and collage, Sophia Al-Maria (born 1983 in Tacoma, Washington; lives and works in London) addresses the orientalist gaze and residual histories of colonialism in the context of contemporary culture and society. Al-Maria’s exhibition at the Henry brings together for the first time her trilogy of recent films Beast Type Song (2019), Tender Point Ruin (2021), and Tiger Strike Red (2022). This trilogy exemplifies the artist’s fractured approach to narrative and enacts a process of writing counter-histories as a means to consider alternative visions for the future. Collages and sculptural additions will weave throughout the installation. Read more.
Kelly Akashi
SEP 30, 2023 – FEB 24, 2024
Known for sculptures and installations that emphasize the reciprocity of touch, Kelly Akashi’s (b. 1983, Los Angeles) practice centers on the tactile properties of physical materials, and challenges and transforms traditional ways of using them. Originally trained in photography, Akashi brings that medium’s concern with questions of time and truth to her work in sculpture—in which she works across a variety of materials, such as wax, bronze, fire, glass, silicone, and rope. Drawing attention to the fluidity and interconnectedness of her chosen media, Akashi aims to capture the tension created by using materials in ways that work against their typical definitions—glass that reacts like a soft pillow, dirt that functions like stone, wax that substitutes for permanence. Read more.
Raúl de Nieves
SEP 30, 2023 – SEP 1, 2024
Across painting, sculpture, and performance, Raúl de Nieves (born 1983 in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) fuses aesthetic traditions of Mexican craft, queer club culture, and religious iconography. His densely textured works are steeped in symbolism and personal mythology and are often evocative of ritual and celebration. At the Henry, de Nieves will create a site-specific installation that turns the museum’s South Gallery into a container of colored light. Using acetate and tape, he will make a series of faux stained-glass story panels for the three immense skylights that span the gallery. The panels will transmit the transitional natural light to create a kaleidoscopic, continually changing atmosphere inside the gallery. In conversation with the physical subterranean qualities of the gallery, de Nieves’s installation considers the abundance of life in the cultural and social underground and the potential of building alternative worlds by recasting who and what narratives matter. Read more.
Henry OffSite — rafa esparza: Temple of Boom
FALL 2023 – SPRING 2024
rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes around memory, family, and community, and frequently includes collaborative elements. Esparza’s recent projects consider labor and land, and are grounded in adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. For his commission, Temple of Boom, esparza will construct a multi-sensory space along Seattle’s waterfront at Pier 62 that will host site-specific music and sound compositions. Read more.
Thick as Mud is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator. Lead support for this exhibition is provided by generous gifts from David and Catherine Eaton Skinner and William True. Media sponsorship generously provided by The Seattle Times. Hospitality sponsorship provided by Graduate Seattle.
Taking Care: Collections Support Studio is organized by Dr. Ann Poulson, Curator of Collections.
Sarah Cain is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs.
Dana Claxton: Monsen Photography Lecture is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator, and Mariah Ribeiro, Graduate Curatorial Assistant.
The 2023 University of Washington MFA + MDes Thesis Exhibition is organized by Eric Zimmerman, Exhibition Designer and Preparator, and Rachel Ann Kessler, Senior Preparator.
A/political Rocks is organized by Adam Monohon, Curatorial Department Coordinator.
Sophia Al-Maria is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator.
Kelly Akashi is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs.
Raúl de Nieves is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator at the Henry Art Gallery, and Risa Puleo, Independent Curator.
Henry OffSite — rafa esparza: Temple of Boom is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs. Lead sponsorship is provided by a grant from VIA Art Fund.
ABOUT THE HENRY
The Henry advances contemporary art and ideas. The museum is internationally recognized for groundbreaking exhibitions, for being on the cutting edge of contemporary art and culture, and for championing artists at every level of creation. Containing more than 28,000 works of art, the Henry’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.