Search results for ""tacoma art museum""

Photographer and curator Terry Toedtemeier (1947–2008) began his career in the 1970s with extensive photographic experiments to capture his close circle of friends and colleagues. Largely self-taught, he began to attract wider critical attention with his landscape images, initially snapshots from his moving car and later exquisite compositions influenced by his deep understanding of both historical and contemporary photography traditions of the American West. His haunting photographs often focused on the Oregon desert and coastline, and magnificent basalt formations of the Pacific Northwest. Sun, Shadows, Stone is the first scholarly monograph of the photography of Terry Toedtemeier. His photographs were featured in the nationally traveling exhibition Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan and are in the collections of many museums including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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What Is a Trade? Donald Fels and Signboard Painters of South India presents sixteen large-scale paintings that explore trade and globalization in India. Fels' conceptual starting point for this exhibition was Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's 1498 voyage to Malabar, India, in search of a direct sea route for the spice trade. What is a Trade? explores the historic and modern-day legacy of that expedition more than 500 years later. In 2004 and 2005, Fels traveled to Kerala (formerly Malabar), India, as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, to work with local commercial signboard painters on a body of work that examines globalization in India and traces its roots to Vasco's voyage. Most of the signboard painters had formerly worked as billboard painters -- until recently, all billboards in India were hand-painted, but cheaper and more efficient inkjet printers are making the painters obsolete. In light of this trend, Fels and his collaborators created work in the style of traditional hand-painted billboards and Bollywood advertising. The bright colors and strong graphic narratives make visually arresting statements about the historic and contemporary effects of trade and globalization.

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For more than three decades, Northwest artist Nancy Worden has explored the cultural dynamics that shape contemporary social and political agendas, emphasizing the female experience in the United States. Working from her vast knowledge of jewelry’s venerable traditions and forms, she demonstrates a high level of intellectual rigor and simultaneously cultivates a complex engagement with aesthetics and pleasure. Reflecting her passion and personal convictions, her jewelry is forceful, unapologetic, demanding, and gripping. Her jewelry is often humorous and sometimes painful, but her voice is never timid. Loud Bones is the first scholarly examination of Worden’s career. Her work is held in private and museum collections in the United States and Europe.

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Internationally acclaimed fine-art photographer Ella McBride (1862–1965) played an important role in the Northwest’s photography community and was a key figure in the national and international pictorialist photography movements. Despite her many accomplishments, which included managing the photography studio of Edward S. Curtis for many years and being an early member of the Seattle Camera Club, McBride is little known today. Captive Light: The Life and Photography of Ella E. McBride reconsiders her career and the larger pictorialist movement in the Northwest.The book accompanies an exhibition that is co-curated by David F. Martin, a Seattle gallerist and leading art historian on Northwest artists of the early twentieth century, and Margaret E. Bullock, curator of collections and special exhibitions at Tacoma Art Museum. Captive Light is part of the Tacoma Art Museum’s Northwest Perspective Series on significant Northwest artists.

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For more than three decades, Northwest artist Nancy Worden has explored the cultural dynamics that shape contemporary social and political agendas, emphasizing the female experience in the United States. Working from her vast knowledge of jewelry’s venerable traditions and forms, she demonstrates a high level of intellectual rigor and simultaneously cultivates a complex engagement with aesthetics and pleasure. Reflecting her passion and personal convictions, her jewelry is forceful, unapologetic, demanding, and gripping. Her jewelry is often humorous and sometimes painful, but her voice is never timid. Loud Bones is the first scholarly examination of Worden’s career. Her work is held in private and museum collections in the United States and Europe.

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Throughout her six-decade career, Camille Patha’s painting has oscillated between the figurative and the abstract. Patha began painting gestural abstraction in the 1960s then deliberately explored various painting styles, including hard-edged abstraction and surrealist-infused photorealism and, finally, a return to abstraction. During each era of her career, Patha demonstrated a full mastery of painting, presenting canvases that wholly embody her imagery and vocabulary with an unwavering voice and shocking vigor. Patha asserts her power as a painter by creating imagery of a complete universe that enables the viewer to be fully absorbed within a boundless volume. In her paintings, she shares a sense of wonder about the existential conundrums confronting every person and with the exuberance of her elastic symbolism. A Punch of Color is the first retrospective of her work since 1979.

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One of the most innovative Northwest artists of her time, Virna Haffer was an internationally recognized and respected Tacoma photographer who has slipped from both regional and national art history books. In a career spanning more than six decades, Haffer found success as a photographer, printmaker, painter, musician, sculptor, and published writer, though she is primarily known as a photographer. Self-taught, she began her ambitious career in the early 1920s, both running a successful portrait studio and also exhibiting her unique artistic images around the world. Margaret E. Bullock, curator of collections and special exhibitions at Tacoma Art Museum, art historian Christina S. Henderson, and independent curator and gallery owner David F. Martin examined more than 30,000 of Virna Haffer's photographic negatives, prints, and woodblocks at the Washington State Historical Society and Tacoma Public Library's Special Collections were examined to create this book.

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Northwest landscape painter Victoria Adams is equally committed to the landscape tradition and the creation of exquisite scenes that address the contemporary desire for the sublime. Adams depicts idealized landscapes that evoke virgin terrain, untouched by human intervention and devoid of degradation. Through her reworking of landscape traditions and conventions, her paintings reveal the inextricable connections between beauty and the sublime and melancholia. Her paintings evoke the deep desire for the perfect moment and heighten awareness of the psychological impact of the idealized landscape. Adams presents the landscape as a solitary experience with the immense and infinite sublime--a magnificent solitude. Where Earth Meets Sky is the first museum survey exhibition of Victoria Adam's work and is part of the Tacoma Art Museum's Northwest Perspective Series. Adams' work is held in private and museum collections throughout the United States.

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This slipcased boxed set contains the two volumes: Art AIDS America, published in 2015 to coincide with the original exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum, and the new book Art AIDS America Chicago. Art AIDS America included work by Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, among many others. Taken together, these two volumes are a stunning overview of the artistic response over the last thirty years to the AIDS epidemic in America, with voices from every community impacted by the crisis.

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Even ardent fans of Andy Warhol (1928–1987) may be surprised to learn that the artist created a significant body of western work. In fact, Warhol was drawn to the lore and lure of the American West throughout his life. He was heavily influenced by the mythology and iconography of the American West, conveyed primarily through film and television, and revealed at various points in his life by toys, clothing, and travel. His lifelong fascination with the West culminated with his 1986 series Cowboys and Indians, a print portfolio that represents an important milestone in the artist’s late career and a shift in the conception of contemporary western American art. One of the last major projects Warhol completed prior to his death, Cowboys and Indians received very little critical or public attention at the time of its release and remains one of the most understudied aspects of the artist’s career. Warhol and the West explores for the first time the range of western imagery Warhol produced. New scholarship examines how Warhol’s western work merges the artist’s ubiquitous portrayal of celebrities with his interest in cowboys, American Indians, and other western motifs. His work in the western genre is immediately recognizable, impressive, daring, inspirational, and sometimes confrontational. This body of work furthers our understanding of how the American West infiltrates the public’s imagination through contemporary art and popular culture. The major traveling exhibition includes more than 100 objects and works of art including source materials revealing Warhol’s process. The accompanying catalogue will feature essays by heather ahtone of the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum (AICCM) in Oklahoma City, Faith Brower of the Tacoma Art Museum, and Seth Hopkins of the Booth Western American Art Museum, as well as 12 additional contributors: Tony Abeyta, Sonny Assu, Gregg Deal, Lara M. Evans, Michael R. Grauer, Frank Buffalo Hyde, Thomas S. Kalin, Gloria Lomahaftewa, Daryn A. Melvin, Andrew Patrick Nelson, Chelsea Weathers, and Rebecca West. Published in association with Tacoma Art Museum. Exhibition dates: Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA: August 25–December 31, 2019 National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK: January 31–May 10, 2020 Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA: Summer 2020

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For three decades, nationally renowned ceramist Anne Hirondelle has pushed the boundaries of traditional pottery, producing beautiful works that appear warmly alive and visually engaging. From her early majestic urns to her architectural impulse for sedate forms to her bright ropes of clay coiling to the sky, she keeps exploring new possibilities without rejecting the traditions of her chosen material.Hirondelle's Port Townsend, Washington, studio is the nexus of her creative and imaginative life. The works she has produced in that space have been exhibited in numerous one-person shows throughout the United States. Among the many museums whose collections include her work are the Crocker Art Museum; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Tacoma Art Museum; and the White House Collection housed at the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas.A Thomas T. Wilson Book

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For more than four decades, jewellery artist and educator Laurie Hall has been making stories the subject of her work. Her playful, often whimsical jewellery made with found objects is about the places she lives, the landscapes that fill her imagination, her family history, and her ideas of what it is to be an American. As a jeweller, Hall never plays it safe, preferring to fly by the seat of her pants and push her skills and technical knowledge. Her work is part of numerous private and public collections including The Museum of Art and Design in NYC, The Tacoma Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is a product of the jewellery histories that make the Pacific Northwest unique within the larger story of American contemporary jewellery. Featuring 58 images of Hall’s jewellery spanning the period from 1974 to 2019, this book explores why she is an important maker whose practice deserves to be more widely known.

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Mel Katz is a highly regarded Portland sculptor and teacher whose work is firmly rooted in the principles of geometric abstraction. He moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1964 to teach at Portland State University, where he taught for the next thirty-two years. He helped found the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in 1971, one of the first alternative artist spaces in the country. Originally trained as a painter, Katz has produced a remarkable body of work over the past fifty years that reflects his unique journey from painter to sculptor, working in many different media, including polyurethane, fiberglass, wood, formica, steel, and aluminum. Katz has been featured in numerous one-person and group exhibitions throughout the United States, including the First Western States Biennial. He was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in 1988 and was included in the traveling exhibition, Still Working, in 1994. His work is included in the collections of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Oregon Arts Commission, the City of Seattle, and many national corporations.

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"The book offers not only gorgeous studies of Kundig's signature details and integration with natural landscapes, but also a record of his refreshingly straightforward voice."—Archinect "The book is beautifully designed and produced: a match for its content, and a joy to browse."—Form Tom Kundig: Works presents nineteen recent projects from award-winning architect Tom Kundig, from his celebrated modern home designs to commercial projects. Tom Kundig is known for his striking and innovative house design that is rugged, yet elegant and welcoming in style. Tom Kundig: Works illuminates the design process behind his work with lush photography, drawings, and sketches that will inspire any creative home owner. A wide range of projects showcase architectural design from a large scale to small details: Tom Kundig: Works details buildings as complicated as multistory complexes and the Tacoma Art Museum, and also homes in on intimate aspects of interior design such as his line of hardware handles, door pulls, hinges, and more. Architects and design enthusiasts will appreciate the incredible thought and care that goes into each project. As much memoir as monograph: In firsthand accounts, Kundig describes his design process for each project, interspersed with personal anecdotes. The book includes an introduction by design editor Pilar Viladas and in-depth conversations with Kundig's frequent collaborators, including "gizmologist" Phil Turner and contractor Jim Dow (Schuchart/ Dow), and his clients, including Bigwood Residence and Studhorse. Tom Kundig: Works is another stunning addition to Tom Kundig's growing portfolio of architectural masterpieces.

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Never Late for Heaven chronicles an odyssey in American art and social events beginning with the often-romanticized Harlem Renaissance and traveling through the Great Depression and beyond. Gwen Knight’s story reveals the life and the passion for painting of a young woman who was surrounded and supported by her community. Her formal education cut short by the Depression, Knight left Howard University and returned to Harlem, where her real art education began. For several years she participated in WPA apprenticeships and workshops, guided by her own independent mind and spirit. She and her fellow painters, including Jacob Lawrence (whom she later married), immersed themselves in a world that was creating its own narrative in history, literature, music, and theater. As New York was a mecca for artists of all stripes, Harlem was a singular world within that mecca. Knight recalls that everything was alive; that she lived so rigorously in the present that there was no thought about the future. Knight and Lawrence moved to Seattle in 1971, when Jacob accepted a teaching post in the art school at the University of Washington. Knight’s paintings, spanning more than sixty years in New York and Seattle, demonstrate one artist’s determination to make art. There was no career path or external motivation to drive her, only a belief that making art was a way of life. The skillful, intellectual, and emotionally sensitive works in this book pull the viewer into a world that is both controlled and fluid. Never Late for Heaven shows a painter whose long life and good fortune have delivered her to us, with her art work, right on time. Never Late for Heaven accompanied a 2003 exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum featuring paintings from the Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle.

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Many patrons of the arts in nineteenth-century America built collections of paintings and sculpture imported primarily from England or Italy. Collectors in Baltimore—William Walters, George Lucas, the famous Cone sisters, among others—stand out in this milieu for having developed a strikingly different aesthetic for their homes and newly founded public institutions. These collectors looked to France for models of culture and, acting upon a remarkable understanding of the educational needs and working methods of artists, assembled extensive collections of drawings by French masters, from David to Daumier, Degas, and Cézanne.The Essence of Line offers the first comprehensive discussion of the formation of these collections and their significance for the history of French art. The book begins with essays by Jay M. Fisher, William R. Johnston, and Cheryl K. Snay that trace the history of collecting in Baltimore and afford new insights into the acquisition, display, and interpretation of drawings. In her essay, conservator Kimberly Schenck bridges the worlds of the collector and of the artist by examining the production and the use of drawing materials in an epoch of radical changes as much in technique as style. This book also provides a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue for one hundred of the most important of the nineteenth-century French drawings now held by The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Walters Art Museum, and the Peabody Art Collection.Published on the occasion of an exhibition jointly organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and The Walters Art Museum, this book presents a brilliant panorama of sketches, watercolors, and presentation drawings, many of them little known outside a small circle of experts. It is correlated with an online archive of the entire corpus of nineteenth-century French drawings in the holdings of these Baltimore museums.This volume has been published in conjunction with the exhibition The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas, organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walter Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, and held at: The Baltimore Museum of Art, 19 June–11 September 2005The Walters Art Museum 19 June–4 September 2005Birmingham Museum of Art, 19 February–14 May 2006Tacoma Art Museum, 9 June–17 September 2006.

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