MFA+MDes Thesis Exhibition opens on this Saturday (Preview Tonight!)

Max Pethe, Henry prep crew, readies the Stroum Gallery for the MFA+MDes exhibition opening.

On Saturday, May 25th, the Henry’s Stroum Gallery will feature the work of 17 graduating UW School of Art Master of Fine Art and Master of Design students. The students have been in the galleries preparing their pieces for over a week, with the help of the Henry prep crew and in particular, Jim Rittimann, Henry Art Gallery head preparator and exhibition designer. Jim, a UW School of Art MFA himself, helped the students select which work to show in this culminating exhibition.

Presenting students are: Jared Bender, Phillip Carpenter, Carly Cummings, Lacy Draper, Mike Fretto, Kari Gaynor, Dakota Gearhart, Meg Hartwig, Margarita Iordache, Dave Kennedy, Stephanie Klausing, Josh Nelson, Adriel Rollins, Travis-David Smith, Melanie Wang, Marcus Watson, and Ryan Weatherly.

The School of Art will award diplomas in a private ceremony and reception on Friday evening, which will be followed by a public opening at 7 pm. Join us to celebrate the 2013 MFA+MDes thesis exhibition and to meet this new generation of artists!

The Week Ahead @ the Henry

Here’s what’s happening this week at the Henry!

Wednesday, May 22th
12-12:30 - Student-Led Tour: Join a Henry Student Exhibition Guide for a 30-minute tour. All tours meet in the museum lobby.

Thursday, May 23rd
7-8:30 – Collection in Focus: Off with the Corset. Join Kimberly Hereford, UW Art History PhD candidate, for a discussion about the key characteristics of Aesthetic attire while examining a selection of garments from the Henry’s extensive costume collection. Please RSVP by Tuesday, May 21 to contact-collections@henryart.org.

Friday, May 24th
7-9 pm - May Openings: Sanctum & the 2013 UW School of Art MFA + MDes Exhibiton. Join the artists, their friends, and families for a reception at the Henry to celebrate the opening of Sanctum and the 2013 UW School of Art Master of Fine Arts and Master of Design exhibition. Please note: The preview (5-7 pm) is limited to students, faculty, and their guests. At 7 pm, the reception opens to the public.

Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty is open through Sept 1 (Photo credit: R.J. Sanchez)

Last Chance: Now Here Part II & The Dowsing

Now Here is Also Nowhere: Part II ends this Sunday, May 5th. This exhibition is the second part in a two-part meditation and non-linear account of how—in making artworks about ideas and intangible concepts— artists continually question and destabilize the nature of the art object. The artworks in Now Here is also Nowhere are ephemeral, immaterial, and embrace contingency; many of them are the result of orchestrated private and/or public actions. The works in the exhibition act as a reminder that the desire to pose questions and address issues related to mind, body and soul are central to artistic practice.Featured artists include: Jason Dodge, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Elliman,  Agnes Martin, Pablo Helguera, Robert Indiana, and NASA. This is your last chance to see it before it vanishes into nowhere.

Photo courtesy of Dan Bennett

Vanguard Seattle wrote a review about the exhibition when the show first opened:

“Now Here is Nowhere: Part 1” began a conversation about how we look at and qualify objects, including artwork. The second part of this builds on the concepts presented in the original (what is familiar, but largely intangible), but further delves into the fundamental power of media to convey what is intangible with what is familiar. Just as artists “continually question and destabilize the nature of the art object,” we as viewers investigate and excavate each piece for a deeper meaning—though perhaps the intent all along was to be indecipherable.”

Read the entire article here.

The Dowsing will close NEXT Sunday, May 12th. Using fashion as point of departure, Anna Telcs’ work explores the liminal space between form, fashion, presentation and performance. The works made for the Dowsing 2013 were presented and activated in the University of Washington’s Red Square through three performances shown in one day on March 22nd. Perhaps you caught that performance while walking through Red Square that day.

In an interview with Interview Magazine’s Ryann Donnelly, Telcs articulated that:

“The goal is to explore silhouette, color, and materiality of objects. Emotional resonance is the leading factor in retention and use of an item, so by placing the garments in the realm of the art object, they can be perceived as worthwhile.”

The Week Ahead @ the Henry

Here’s what’s happening this week at the Henry!

Wednesday, April 24th
12-12:30 pm – Art Break Tour: Henry Exhibition Guides will encourage a lively discussion around a selection of objects in our exhibitions.

Thursday, April 25th
7-8 pm – Music of Today with Abby Aresty. Abby Aresty, a UW School of Music graduate student, investigates the role of breath in music through creative manipulations of a performer’s relationship to her own breath. This performance is part of the UW’s ongoing centennial celebration of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Have you seen Sean Scully: Passages/Impressions/Surfaces yet?

SANCTUM readies for a May Opening

“In an era of status updates, tweets, and check-ins, the geography of public, shared spaces needs to be reconsidered, along with our expectations of privacy in them.”
-James Coupe and Juan Pampin

Have you noticed all of the changes on the façade of the Henry? We are currently installing an interactive art piece, Sanctum, created by artists James Coupe and Juan Pampin. Coupe and Pampin were chosen in 2010 from 91 applications who answered an open international call, soliciting proposals for a site-specific project to transform the façade of the museum’s main entrance and to engage the UW population and the many visitors who pass by the Henry every day.

Sanctum, which officially opens May 4th, seeks to investigate the narrative potential of social media while raising important and provocative questions about the conflicting imperatives emerging in our culture as we promote and embrace ever-more-intrusive electronic media, while still cherishing traditional notions of privacy.

From those who choose to participate in the project, Sanctum will actively gather information via sophisticated surveillance and profiling technology and match it with data drawn from social media sites to shape original plausible and implausible fictional narratives.

To learn more about the project and to contribute with narrative content, please enter here. You can also opt in by scanning the QR codes are posted on signage outside the museum.

Artist Lecture: Paul Laffoley

Paul Laffoley, founder of the Boston Visionary Cell and Henry exhibiting artist, offers an intense, deep, and mesmerizing conversation this Saturday from 1-4 pm at the Henry.

His discussion will traverse the conceptual overlap between art history, architecture, classical literature, natural and occult sciences, and science fiction in contemporary painting – and we are sure, more.

As the lecture is long, we invite attendees to get up and stretch as needed. There will be refreshments in the Education Studio.

If you are attending the Open House this Friday, you can gain early access to Paul Laffoley: Premonitions of the Bauharoque, his first solo exhibition on the West Coast.

Artist Lecture: Paul Laffoley
Saturday, April 6th
1:00 – 4:00 PM
Henry Auditorium

Deborah Willis – Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty

Curator Lecture: Deborah Willis
March 1st
7 pm
Henry Auditorium
$5 Students, Henry Members, & UW Faculty and Staff
$10 General Audience
TICKETS

Deborah Willis, the curator of the upcoming exhibition at the Henry, Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty, will be at the Henry on Friday, March 1st, for a discussion with Erika Dalya Massaquoi moderated and introduced by the Henry’s Director, Sylvia Wolf. The discussion will revolve around the topics of transformative experience of the photograph through the themes of idealized beauty, the unfashionable body, the gendered image, and photography as memory. This discussion will also explore Willis’ work on historical perceptions of beauty and desire and the role individual photographers play in constructing ways of seeing.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Willis has authored a new book, Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty. Through the themes of idealized beauty, the unfashionable body, the gendered image, and photography as memory, Willis challenges and makes problematic the “reading” of photographic images in the 21st century.

Pablo Helguera

 

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist who works with a wide variety of mediums including performance, sculpture, and photography that often engages social issues and also is the director of adult and academic programs at MoMA. Helguera is an exhibiting artist in the newly opened Now Here is also Nowhere: Part II which opened on Saturday. His classical cartoons are featured regularly on NPR’s Scherzo blog. He is also behind the newly launched series of artist-led participatory programs at MoMA called Artists Experiment.

This Friday musicians will perform Endingness here at the Henry Art Gallery in conjunction with Now Here is Also Nowhere: Part II.  Endingness is a composition for chamber orchestra designed to be performed together with the last movement of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Farewell symphony. This performance is but one component of Helguera’s three-part work, on view in the exhibition, and consists of three interrelated elements: a musical composition, a reconfigurable sculpture made of framed beeswax and an essay exploring themes of mortality, memory, art, and endings.

Friday, February 1st
7 pm
Get your tickets HERE.

Vis-à-Vis Society Poem-Survey Findings

At our Graduate Student Happy Hour on January 10th, we had the pleasure of hosting the Vis-à-Vis Society. During the event they conducted experimental poetry using write-in survey questions. Here are the composite poems from their findings!

Composite poem from the Vis-à-Vis Society. The Vis-à-Vis Society’s poem-survey asked people to choose an object in the Mitchell Exhibition “Like a Valentine,” listen closely, and then write down what the object said.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Happy New Year, dear Hankblog readers! We here at the Henry hope that you have had a most wonderful and rejuvenating holiday and New Year! We are really excited about 2013 and hope that you will be as well!

Here are some of the upcoming events and exhibitions in store for you at the Henry in early 2013:

Graduate Student Happy Hour on January 10th.
The Reconstruction of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring on January 11th and the rest of the Rite of Spring Series.
Now Here is Also Nowhere: Part I will be closing this Sunday, but Part II will be opening January 26th.
An Evening of Endingness on February 1st.
Henry Gala on February 9th.
Sean Scully: Passages/Impressions/Surfaces opens February 16th.
The Dowsing opens on February 23rd.

 

Recurring:
Student Led Tours every Saturday and Second Wednesdays at 12 noon.

Check out all of the other Henry Haps on our website or our facebook and watch out for our updated newsletter!

P.S. Stephen Sewell, who exhibited at the Henry’s University of Washington MFA Exhibition in 2012, has a new exhibition at 4Culture which opens tomorrow!