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)

The Week Ahead @ the Henry

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

Wednesday, May 15th
12-12:30 - Faculty Focus Tour with UW Painting + Drawing Associate Professor Helen O’Toole.  O’Toole was born in the west of Ireland and moved to Chicago in 1987 to pursue an MFA in painting at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. She has had solo exhibitions in Ireland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Provincetown, and Seattle. She will guide visitors through Sean Scully: Passages/Impressions/Surfaces. 

Check out this blog post from Jeremy Buben’s le Dandysme about our May 1st Staff Spotlight Tour with Feney Perez.

All day — Give Big! How can you support the Henry and be part of a dynamic community event? Participate in The Seattle Foundation’s third annual GiveBIG community day of giving this Wednesday. We would greatly appreciate your gift to help us to continue to inspire audiences of all ages with the discovery, wonder, and surprise that contemporary art provides.

Thursday, May 16th
7-8 pm - Music of Today with Cuong Vu. Cuong Vu and his guest(s) will perform and discuss the avant-garde, free improvisation, and the experimentation/innovation he uses to create his forward-looking music.This performance is part of the UW’s ongoing centennial celebration of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Friday, May 17th
10 am – 4 pm – Symposium: The Mechanics of Beauty.  UW’s History of Art Department will host a one-day symposium at the Henry that will explore the means, techniques, tools and strategies behind the production of art objects. The symposium will be held in conjunction with the Henry’s exhibition Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty.

6 -9 pm – The Brink Bash. Meet the six Brink Award finalists, enjoy a Hilliard’s beer, and take away an exclusive Brink Finalists publication. Tickets are available online for a suggested donation of $15 or at the door.

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

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!

Bear Hug

This Sunday, the Henry is hosting an afternoon of camaraderie as we gather to celebrate Seattle’s BFF, Jeffry Mitchell, on the occasion of the exhibition, Like a Valentine. The afternoon will feature tours led by friends of Jeffry at 2pm followed by an afternoon reception and chainsaw bear sale. Choose from a selection of handcrafted chainsaw bears selected by Jeffry and Claude Zervas from locations around the Olympic Peninsula.

Sunday, December 9
1:00 – 3:00 PM
Molly’s Cafe & Sculpture Court
FREE for Henry Members, Students, and UW Staff & Faculty
$10 General Audience

In conjunction with Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell,  Favorite Art Projects has created a Popup Shop in the Henry with art from Northwest artists inspired by Jeffry Mitchell.

The physical shop is open Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday: 12 to 4
Thursday and Fri: 12 to 8
The virtual shop is always open.

Spontaneous Haiku inspired by Bear Hug:

animal inside
the articulate chainsaw
bear hug, bear hug. YES!

And a little diddy, sung to the tone of “Reading Rainbow”:

Bear Hug,
All of the hugs,
Bear hug.

Faculty Focus: Claire Cowie

Come to the Henry tomorrow for this month’s Focus Tour! The 30 minute tour will be led by UW School of Art faculty and artist Claire Cowie who will guide visitors through Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell. The tour starts at 12 and will leave you with enough time to grab a sammy at Molly’s all within your lunch hour!

From painting to sculpture to photogravure, the work produced by Seattle-based artist Claire Cowie conjures up a bizarre menagerie, replete with composite creatures and exotic locales. Haunting disembodied figures populate her landscapes; they appear at once otherworldly and familiar as they beckon the eye and the imagination. Her collages, watercolors, and prints recall Chinese and Japanese landscape painting traditions. Using a minimum of strokes she achieves deep spaces, producing dreamlike landscapes that recede into the distance. Claire received her BFA in Drawing and Printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis in 1997, and her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Washington in 1999. She is locally represented by James Harris Gallery.

In summary:
Claire Cowie Faculty Tour of Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell
wednesday (november 21) at 12:00 – 12:30
Henry Art Gallery

See you there!

The Rest is Just Noise: John Cage Programming at the Henry

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As many of you know, this year is the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth. Many arts and cultural institutions across the country are celebrating with John Cage programming, and the Henry is partaking in our own unique way. Within the past week we have staged a performance of Cage’s 33 1/3 Performed by the Audience on Friday. Read more about the performance HERE.

Earlier today we held a sold out workshop on mushroom cultivation at home, Fungus Among Us. You might be wondering “how this is a John Cage related program?” John Cage was an amateur mycologist during his 80 years. Don’t let the adjective “amateur” fool you though, Cage founded the New York Mycological Society with a small group of other mycologially-inclined people over 40 years ago. He also amassed a mycology collection during his lifetime which includes “correspondence, journals, newsletters, pamphlets, ephemera and realia related to mushrooms.” Cage gifted this collection to Special Collections at the University of Santa Cruz, where it can be researched and perused at the McHenry Library. Honoring the music John Cage composed during his lifetime is obviously necessary in a celebration of his life, but so is mycology. You can thank our Public Programs Coordinator, Whitney Ford-Terry, for such inspired programming honoring John Cage as the multidimensional man that he was.

Fungus Among Us was a workshop held at the Henry which was an introduction in cultivating your own edible mushrooms at home. We provided shiitake Grow-At-Home kits from Sno-Valley Mushrooms for the participants and helped them with their first step, rehousing the logs. Then Pacita Roberts with Hildegard Hendrickson from the Puget Sound Mycological Society gave a fantastic presentation on foraging for mushrooms. See pictures above.

If you are sad that you missed out on these two events, you have another chance to celebrate Cage’s multifaceted legacy in a unique way at the end of this month. On November 30th, the Henry is celebrating Cage’s vast and tremendously diverse output by hosting a performance by Stacey Mastrian and Stephen F. Lilly who will present selections that employ the voice in its many facets. These range from the simple, ethereal “Experiences No. 2” for solo voice with text by e e cummings, to readings from Cage’s prolific body of written work, such as Lecture on Nothing and Indeterminacy. Add the Henry to your calendar for November 30th, 7-9 pm, and buy your tickets here.

 

JOHN CAGE’S 33 1/3 at the Henry

Today, in celebration of what would have been John Cage’s 100th birthday year, we are staging his score, 33 1/3. participatory score, which features a room full of interactive turntables and vinyl records, was conceived of by John Cage during a residency at the University of California at Davis in 1969. For this work museum visitors are encouraged to take on the role of DJ and create a musical composition by freely playing records to perform the work.

We have records generously on loan from UW Libraries Special Collections and records that were part of the B-Side. The performance will continue on throughout the day until right before the museum closes at 9 this evening.

Check out some pictures of what you are missing by not being here now!

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Exhibition Guide program, featuring Chelsea Nagayama

The Henry wins things, like the Golden Apple Award in 2011. The Golden Apple Award is given to educators, programs and schools who make a positive difference in Washington. The Exhibition Guide Program at the Henry provides invaluable experiences for both visitors and students, connecting student’ to art community.

What does the Exhibition Guide Program do? Well, the program connects both and high school and university level students to lead unique exhibition driven tours of the Henry. We provide the training that allows them to gain valuable public speaking skills, research opportunities and critical thinking skills. That’s why it won the Golden Apple. What it really does is bring students 16 – 22 into the museum, giving them a really good excuse to learn and discourse about contemporary art. The 10 week course has about 12 students, allowing them to learn how to teach art, engage visitors and develop publicly speaking skills. The best part about it is the interdisciplinary nature of the guides; some are art students, some educators and others science center people who also love art. If you want more information about the guide program email contact-education@henryart.org.

Last year there were 12 graduates from the Exhibition Guide Program and Chelsea Nagayama is a recent graduate that continues to intern at the Henry Art Gallery. As a senior at the University of Washington she is majoring in Painting and Drawing and also taking her Pre-Medicine requirements.  She originally got interested in the program because of the creative environment an art museum provides and being able to teaching kids about art. She has wanted to be a doctor since she was very young, but also feels art is a very important part of her life. She thinks who needs to choose when you can just be Leonardo DaVinci! She also likes to sing in an operatic voice to her tour groups in the Skyspace, which is a permanent installation by James Turrell that has great acoustics. So don’t miss out on an opportunity to see that and come in for a Public Tour!

Catch her on her next tour at the Henry at our Open House on October 26, 2012.

UW School of Art Design Lecture: Karen Cheng

Thursday, October 18, 2012, 7:00 – 8:00 PM
Henry Auditorium
FREE with Museum Admission

Join us this Thursday at 7 pm in the Henry’s Auditorium for a lecture by Associate Professor Karen Cheng. Professor Cheng will discuss her professional design practice, her design research and her teaching philosophy.

This lecture is held in conjunction with our friends, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, who are currently exhibiting a show by UW faculty.

Karen Cheng received her Master’s Degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Washington in 1997, she worked in Brand Management at the Procter and Gamble Company and studied engineering at Penn State University. Her work has been published by Communication Arts, the American Center for Design, Critique, the Society for Publication Designers, the University + College Designers Association, HOW Magazine and PIE Tokyo. She is active in the Seattle chapter of the AIGA, where she has been a board member and chair of the education committee. Her book, Designing Type, was published by Yale University Press in Spring 2006. She is currently Chair of the UW Division of Design.