Three New Exhibitions at Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington

Recently, the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington opened three new exhibitions: “Murmuration,” “Hard Edge/Soft Ground,” and “Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press.” These three exhibitions are distinct in content, style, and material, but they are unified in the focus on each artist’s unique vision. What is so striking to this writer is the emphasis on process and collaboration in these three exhibits. For example, “Murmuration” features the work of woodcarver Andrew Vallee who transforms his carvings into bronze and glass, while “Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press” similarly celebrates the collaborative nature of printmaking. In all, these three exhibits offer a wide range of styles that are sure to delight curious viewers.

“Hard Edge/Soft Ground” is the first of a series of exhibitions titled “From the Vault” that features artwork from the museum’s permanent collection. The premise of the exhibition is simple: it is a survey of abstract art from the 1950s to 2017. But providing an overview of modern and contemporary abstraction is no easy task. The exhibition includes many forms of abstraction and non-representational art, from Kenneth Callahan to Mary Henry. Exhibiting Northwest School artists alongside Hard-edge abstraction may initially feel jarring, but this is precisely where thoughtful curation and exhibit design matter most. Not everyone experiences the exhibition in the exact same way, but my journey through the exhibition began with the soft edge of Mark Tobey’s monotype and ended with Mary Henry’s precise painting, “Linear Series #5,” an excellent example of the Op Art movement. In between these two experiences were the familiar sights of an Alden Mason Burpee series painting titled “Yellow Bingo,” two screenprints by Doris Totten Chase, and a large painting by Michael Dailey. In summary, the exhibition offers a concise survey of abstract art from the museum’s collection. It pairs nicely with the neighboring exhibit, “Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press.”

If you are unfamiliar with the process of a press or print studio, here is a very concise summary. Print studios consist of a team of expert printmakers who work with invited artists, who often focus on other art mediums, to create a series of limited-edition prints at the studio. The resulting works are then printed in limited quantities for purchase. Paulson Fontaine Press produces intaglio prints and has worked with over fifty artists since their first collaboration and publication in 1997. I visited Paulson Fontaine Press in 2022 and was able to observe their process in person. It was technical, precise, and encourages the artist to express their artistic vision through the medium. The results of facilitating this process successfully are on display in “Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press.”

Working with underrepresented artists is central to the work of Pam Paulson and Rhea Fontaine. The incredible work of this focus can be seen in this national traveling exhibition. At the Whatcom Museum, the curatorial team decided to include original works by the artists to illustrate how the prints fit in with the artist’s large body of work. One beautiful example is a quilt by the Gee’s Bend quilters alongside prints created at Paulson Fontaine Press. The detail accomplished in these prints is incredible and hard to describe in words. I was drawn to “Passing By” by Mary Lee Bendolph, a red and white color soft-ground etching with aquatint, spit bite aquatint, and chine collé. The print looks like a translucent quilt laid on a white background, almost as if the quilt has become thin through years of use. The exhibition is filled with highlights, but I was also drawn to Lonnie Holley’s unique artwork example on loan from the artist and prints created at Paulson Fontaine Press. “Steppin Through the Night” by Woody De Othello was also exceptional with the raking light shining across the scene of household objects.

On your way to and from these exhibitions, viewers also encounter work by local woodcarver Andrew Vallee installed in the foyer outside the gallery. The exhibition includes a wall installation of a murmuration of birds and two large sculptures of birds on the floor. These works act as a guide to lead visitors into the gallery spaces and encourage you to pause for longer observations. It was particularly delightful to watch children encounter these creatures with their combination of smooth and wood-grain textures. 

Chloé Dye Sherpe

Chloé Dye Sherpe is an art professional and curator based in Washington State.

Whatcom Museum, located at 121 Prospect Street in Bellingham, Washington is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. “Murmuration” is on view through January 27, 2027; “Hard Edge/Soft Ground” is up through September 26; and “Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press” is on display through June 28. For more information, visit www.whatcommuseum.org. 

The Spaces We Inhabit: 11 Years of Activating Memory

Alfredo Romero was born in Barcelona, Spain. His father owned a construction company and Romero worked there during his youth, learning about materials and building techniques first-hand. He also studied Art History, Fine Arts, and Architecture at various schools in Barcelona, including the School of Arts Applications and Offices of Rubi, the School of Design EDRA, and the Technical School of Architecture. These intersecting studies formed his understanding of relationships between space, memory, and aesthetics. Moreover, Barcelona is the city of Antoni Gaudí. Mosaics by Gaudí are everywhere. How could an artist like Romero not have been affected by them?

After Romero moved to Mérida on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, he began going to small towns in the region, finding empty shops and wall after wall covered with dated graffiti, political slogans, and advertisements. He found history and memory on those walls. The humble marks, layered with many fading messages, are the raw material of his art. 

In the current exhibition, the painting “Instantes Pasados: Iconos de Una Era Reciente” (Past Moments: Icons of a Recent Era), is an example of activating memory. Romero removes the surface from the wall through a process called strappo, which covers the painted wall with a white cloth coated in glue, and then attaches that captured surface to a canvas where he then adds to the composition. (The strappo technique was developed primarily by art conservators and restorers.)

“Instantes Pasados: Iconos de Una Era Reciente,” with its Coca Cola bottle fading into the background along with the familiar script used by Coca Cola, was sinking into oblivion. But it was recovered by Romero for us to nostalgically remember.

Romero frequently meets people in small towns and listens to their stories. Dona Petra in Aguilera single-handedly developed an active produce business and store. After Romero learned her story it became part of the emotional content of the layered graffiti on the wall near her store. As he removes the graffiti and displays it as an artwork, he brings together the small town and the art world.

He has three different approaches to this process. Selections from all three are on view at the Patricia Rovzar Gallery: 

Despiel (“to strip away, detach, reorganize”)

Romero sees the surfaces as layers of time that have histories and contain stories of the life of a given place. He merely observes these “skins,” then attaches them to a canvas and backs them with fiberglass. In addition to the “Instantes Pasados,” the exhibition also includes “Blue Rush” as an example of the graffiti left intact as it was transferred. The bright blue sloping rectangle dominates the image, as though someone had arranged it.

Strattos

“Strattos Love” has several layers apparent on the surface. It almost appears as an intact discovered composition, but the sections create a unified image with wide slashes of yellow and more dispersed pinkish areas. We can see that the artist has added his own “interventions” as he calls them.

Topographic Memories

Romero’s “maps” are filled with emotion, and in them we see forgotten moments rearranged. His idea is that if we move beyond the loss in the present, we can move forward, but the future also contains the past.

“Memorias Topográficas: Belleza Robada” (Topographic Memories: Stolen Beauties) is a striking example of this technique.

The original has been cut into small squares and reassembled, with a few remaining graffiti strokes at the center. The artist enjoys disrupting the original with new ideas. Indeed, as we look at this “topography,” we can construct our own story. It is open to interpretation. Romero embraces constant change even when it comes to looking at his compositions.

Each of the artworks have a powerful physical presence, but I found the Topographic Memories series especially intense. The work ripples on the wall, it is physically present with its combination of graffiti and the artist’s arrangements of small cut-up pieces; its hard surface, mounted on plexiglass, is contradicted by the sense of movement in the whole work. I could feel it as an offering to me to embrace both the source and the artist, as well as my own activated emotions. While these works might be seen as abstract, their emotional generosity suggests a deep investment in the past, in the present, and in a future that we cannot know.

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Susan Noyes Platt

Susan Noyes Platt writes for local, national, and international publications and her website www.artandpoliticsnow.com.

Alfredo Romero’s exhibit, “The Spaces We Inhabit: 11 Years of Activating Memory,” is on view from April 2-25, Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Patricia Rovzar Gallery, located at 1111 First Avenue in Seattle, Washington. A reception with artist is to be held on Saturday, April 4, from 3 to 5 p.m. For more information, visit www.rovzargallery.com.

Alibaba Awrang: Didar

Language is at the core of a universal human desire for shared understanding, and the handwritten word can create a profound connection. Beautiful script carries additional weight in Islam, where carefully rendered transcriptions form a tangible connection between the visual and spiritual worlds. 

Calligraphy means “beautiful writing,” and for over 1,400 years has been central to both Arabic religious and secular texts. Unique variations emerged out of different periods and regions; in mid-14th-century Iran, a style specific to Persian verse evolved. Nasta'līq calligraphy is distinguished by its sweeping, gestural curves paired with short, staccato vertical elements—visual forms that pair well with the rhythms of the spoken language.

Alibaba Awrang’s exhibition at Gallery Mack, March 28 to May 9, reveals entanglements with and expansions beyond these formal and functional foundations. Born in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan in 1972, Awrang studied and taught classical Islamic calligraphy for many years. In 2021, he and his family were evacuated by the U.S. State Department from Taliban-occupied Afghanistan. The works emerging after this relocation to Connecticut are physical manifestations of these complex existential layers.

In “Glory” and “Didar,” we see evidence of Awrang’s method, a collaged layering of gold and silver leaf, acrylic paint, and Japanese ink on canvas. The distinction between script and form is blurred, and lines that reveal characters (both Persian and Roman) simultaneously dissolve into pattern. Contemporary artist and calligrapher Pam Galvani observes that some of these letters appear embossed or applied to the surface, and come into the space. She notes that this kind of curiosity and exploration beyond the conventions of traditional calligraphy is also partly due to the rigorous training Awrang underwent: he knows what he is doing.

“Fall” further communicates Awrang’s intuitive fusion of the underpinnings of calligraphy with strong elements of color and form. The central gold circular focus conveys a concentrated energy that unfurls via the ribbon-like curves of the text that spin outward, suggesting a space beyond the edges of the canvas. Roman letters and numbers coexist in this plane, inviting additional interpretations, and possible conflicts. How does an artist who is freeing themselves from the literal constraints of text communicate through abstraction of letters when there’s a literal meaning embedded in these forms?

This question of sense-making is not a new one. What were the artists who left their marks in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave in France some 32,000 years ago communicating through their gestural lines? The way that some images seem to have been layered on top of each other has sparked wonder: were these seen as animated forms in the flickering light of the fat lamps illuminating these underground galleries? Awrang’s intersecting lines and forms conjure a similar illusion of movement and unresolved wonderings.

Awrang’s works also invite comparisonto Western artists who are exploring works that outside the limitations of text, such as Massimo Polello. Polello says of his own work, “…Letters become a means to exist outside myself…going beyond the letters, captured by the sole need to see. They become signs, images, evocations, urgent needs, emotions.” The connection to a world verging on the spiritual is apparent here too, in a redirection of the work from thinking to feeling.

As I am typing, a law has just been enacted that mandates cursive writing instruction for all elementary school students in Pennsylvania; this legislation acknowledges the cognitive benefits of writing by hand, cursive’s connection to cultural history, and its potential to develop critical thinking. It’s a contemporary example of the meaning and impact of handwritten script evolving over time. In a similar vein to linguist John McWhorter’s description of language as a parade, beautiful writing is another kind of moving, changing pageant that celebrates creativity. 

In spite of this expansive perspective, it’s a very human condition to want to reach for clarity of meaning when we are challenged by the gray area of questions and conflicts. There seems to be an urgency these days to be certain, one way or another, and to act quickly. But there are skills to be developed that can help navigate unknowns, to make the parade enjoyable rather than rigid. 

Looking slowly is one approach, and Awrang’s works are intriguing subjects for this exercise. Mimicking his process of layering and incising, observe the many elements at play: let your eyes encounter the color, the line, and the forms. His shifting poetry of words and visual culture both arise from and exceed the limits of human understanding.

Kristin L. Tollefson

Kristin L. Tollefson is an artist and educator based in Tacoma, Washington.

Alibaba Awrang’s exhibit, “Didar,” is on view March 28-May 9 at Gallery Mack, located at 2100 Western Avenue in Seattle, Washington, from Tuesday through Saturday,11 a.m. to 5 p.m. An Opening Reception is held on Saturday, March 28, at 1 p.m. For more information, visit www.GalleryMack.com.

Do Little

As a child, I thoroughly enjoyed the imaginary world created by the English author Hugh Lofting in his 1920 book, The Story of Docter Dolittle. The rudimentary illustrations and the stilted text brought the good doctor and his coterie of animal friends to life in a rather odd way. And thenthere was Stuart Little, Mickey Mouse, Paddington Bear, the crew from Watership Down and on and on. The whole talking animal thing has been with us forever so it seems only logical, and I use that word loosely, that Seattle Art Museum would feature the voices of animals – “one hundred representatives,” according to SAM - to narrate their current collections exhibition, A Room for Animal Intelligence.

In a welcome refresh to the gallery/wide hallway/landing at the top of the escalator, the SAM curators have selected a menagerie of sculptural animal objects from their vaults. The notable exception is the loaned large cedar She Wolf, Companion Species (Underbelly), by Portland artist Marie Watt. The piece sets the tone for the room with its materiality and stacked timber construction being very DYI Northwest but referencing both early Roman history and Native cultures. It is this mix of periods and peoples that makes this show so engaging.

As a nod to the Year of the Horse, the stately terracotta Chinese celestial horse is joined by a rather ho-hum, ubiquitous welded steel horse by Deborah Butterfield (she has made better ones). As I moved through the installation, I was intrigued by the colors and style of the display furniture. The teal and yellow surfaces combined with a noticeable wood grain were of a distinct period, but I could not define it, but it felt boutique-y, for better or for worse. For instance, the compact stone Ganesha figure was in a yellow cubby whilst the Spirit Elephant mask was perched on stick with a teal wall beyond. I almost looked for price tags.

Not unlike the pairing of the elephants, which does work to make us compare and contrast, the coupling of the headless dog-like vases, Chinoiserie, #3, by Seattle artist Claudia Fitch, and the sleek Greyhounds Playing, by William Hunt Diederich, is similarly brilliant. Note how the tenor of the text changes with each animal, here with Fitch’s creatures bemoaning their lumpiness being located next to the agile greyhounds. Another ying/yang or Mutt/Jeff pair is the meet up of the Deep Plate made by a Portuguese factory in the 1860s, which mimics the work by the early 1500s French artist Bernard Palissy, with the snake and lizard in the grass and odd frog, next to Osiris, a cookie jar and cookies by West Coast artist David Gilhooly, who made so many frogs in so many ways.

I was pleased to see two beaded pieces by Seattle artist Sherry Markovitz. Sea Bear talks about a vision the artist had when she was at the ocean soon after the birth of her son. The sculpture is from a very successful series where the artist applied thousands of tiny glass beads (and other small objects) to either pre-made taxidermy forms or handmade papier-mâché heads. There is a nice selection of animals by the underappreciated Philip McCracken, who lived on Guemes Island in Puget Sound, making stylized Modernist work from traditional carving materials. Look closely for the tiny netsuke pieces tucked in for smaller, younger viewers to discover, or the mid-century Modern blue cat by noted ceramicist Howard Kottler. And who doesn’t like a bird with hat on it, The God Horus as a Falcon, as shown in the case with other works from an earlier era. To show that Big Name Artists can do animals too, there is the small version of Geometric Mickey – Scale C, by Claes Oldenburg (and his wife Coosje van Bruggen) and the exceptional Mann und Maus, by Katherina Fritsch (which used to be in the collector’s living room).

There are so many good pieces in this show that I am glad that it is on view for a while so that visitors can see things on repeat and read the many long-ish text panels. But my favorite piece is of my least favorite creature. The Mosquito Mask, by Dr. Francis Horne Sr./Khut Whee Mul Uhk, carved from cedar and adorned with horsehair and feathers, is resplendent in its ickiness. The probing slender proboscis, about as long as my arm, gave me chills.

I truly appreciate this change of pace from overthought, dreary Impressionist food shows. Sometimes, less is more. The exhibition is topical without being preachy, approachable without being cloying, and gives voice to the Animal Kingdom, who, along with Stephen Sondheim, reminds us that “the history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.”

Milton Freewater

Milton Freewater is an arts writer living in Seattle, Washington.

A Room for Animal Intelligence is on view through January 31, 2027 at the Seattle Art Museum, located at 1300 First Avenue in Seattle, Washington. Museum hours are Wednesday from 10 a.m.to 5 p.m., Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday & Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/ 

Bruce Morrow and Buffy Cribbs have been on a “continuous, collaborative, and creative adventure,” together onWhidbey Island for nearly 40 years. They have worked as carpenters and furniture makers, finally reaching a time in their lives where they can be full-time artists. 

Now, to their list of adventures, add writing.

Morrow has published his first book, Nine Bean-Rows. It is a fictionalized biography inspired by his wife’s growing-up story of moving with her mother and siblings from California to Ireland in 1966. Cribbs has described her formative years as haphazard—“life so strewn with seemingly unconnected experience which, nevertheless, seemed to add up to some kind of whole.” 

Nine Bean-Rows is illustrated by Morrow with a series of drypoint-on-Plexiglass prints, which are included in an April two-person show at Rob Schouten Gallery in Langley, Washington. Printmaking is a prominent medium for Morrow as the couple also run Flicker Feather Press, a studio on their property where visiting printmakers have access to a Takach 30-by-60-inch printing press, a rosin box, a downdraft exhaust table, a ferric chloride dip tank, an industrial hot plate, and glass-top inking stations. 

Morrow’s preferred medium is oil paint because he likes the quality of the colors, yet his watercolors are stunning in their simplicity and gentle machismo. He began painting watercolors after finding a killer deal on a stack of watercolorpaper at a garage sale. 

Cribbs’ medium is reverse painting on acrylic or plexiglass, a method wherein details are painted before the background colors after which the sheets are flipped for the final view. Although she suffered a stroke five years ago, Cribbs still arrives in the studio to paint her often whimsical paintings. 

Morrow once spent time in the U.S. Southwest, an experience that has crept into his imagery. “So, this figure,” he explained, “this dude emerged and he seemed to represent to me the ennui of the displaced American male, the maverick, the cowboy without a range.” Much like the “dudes” in works by Pacific Northwest artist Gaylen Hansen (now 104 years old!) and the late James Martin, Morrow’s alter-ego cowboy rides horseback through the landscape, passing through while being superbly present. 

Nine Bean-Rows is available at www.cribbs-morrow.com in both ebook and paperback formats. Having enjoyed the writing experience, Morrow is already working on a few new projects. “I am writing a memoir thing,” he says, “plus a suspense thing that takes place in Mexico.” 

Stay tuned. 

Edie Everette

Edie Everette is a local artist and writer.  To view her art, visit www.edieeverette.com.

View Bruce Morrow’s art, April 1-27, Monday, Thursday, Friday, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday & Sunday from 11 a.m.  to 5 p.m. at Rob Schouten Gallery, located at 101 Anthes Avenue in Langley, Washington. For more information, visit www.robschoutengallery.com.

Imagine the artist as the only body on the shoreline of Lake Michigan

whose horizon is irrefutable before fallible eyes. Water and land and sky.

Inflow the Fox and Grand and Muskegon rivers. Every body has a mission.

How to paint a lake as live as root and rock and blood? Does it take a god

to create pliancy of shore grass, coarse of beach sand? Clouds defuse light,

and the trained eye forgives the mind its faults, like how into each carpet,

the weaver produces a deliberate flaw as an act of humility. Solvent water

plus insolvent rock, as in Kono’s black lava rock absorbing sunlight on the day

Captain Cook was deemed no god, so he was slaughtered dead. Where blue

buoys soft and green weaves green, she renders a small boat quiet on the lake.

Later, she knife-scratches the boat out. The landscape, where water and wet

cleave, remains unmoored by its own image. Hear the seagulls insouciant

about the artist’s sky. Chartreuse and silver and cyan, pastels greening illuminate

the climb. No, the painter can’t forget periwinkle as vulnerary while she maps

her own body in the making. Looking and painting plot not what is, but what

can be. Lake waves slam land, and, windless miles out, water as flat as a book.

Across six types of vegetation and four types of trespasses and further up, above

lake water blue, June sky cools. Artists pair the small and the vast, for each work

is emotionally echt and not one body is needed to complete it.

Janée J. Baugher

Janée J. Baugher, MFA (writer, editor, lecturer) is the author of  The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020) and The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles (Tupelo Press, 2026). For more information, visit www.JaneeBaugher.com

Bainbridge Island Art Museum: Dreaming of the River Passage #3

You painted or rather futzed and finished this the year
we were married, 2003, but you began it, 1979 the year
after I finished college. I guess it took you 24 years
to finalize that wow of color or maybe that pink paint

dribble. A sailboat leaves a small white wake as the rush
of blue propels this little craft almost off your
nearly six foot canvas. In another corner, a funny
little animal, duck beaked with overweight torso

resembling a perfect small show dog stack, except
it has cat ears, like those of tabby Sophie; she must
have crept into the imagination of your studio mind.
A couple about my age, stops to study...

she giggles. I look up. She covers her mouth like
a schoolgirl — says hi with a slight blush. They
wander off to another painting holding hands
as fresh as if they were sophomores at a dance.

Your blue paint dances, especially at the bottom.
You left an undercoat uncovered, maybe while you
were dancing to Miles and maybe he just changed key.
I am with you here, today imagining your hand

on this canvas. Signs say do not touch the art work.
What if, the art work touches you?


Josie Emmons Turner

Josie Emmons Turner is a poet living in Gig Harbor, Washington and was Tacoma’s Poet Laureate 2011-2013. Her book, “More Blue” was published by Cave Moon Press earlier this year.

The painting, “Dreaming of the River Passage #3,” is by Northwest artist William Turner (1940-2021) and it is on view along with a few more of his paintings through February 15, 2026, in the “Reflecting on Collecting” exhibit highlighting artworks from Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection. 

In his fifth exhibition at Greg Kucera Gallery, Dan Webb decided to create something different. After completing several large-scale public projects, including an installation for Sound Transit, Webb wanted to retreat inward and focus on smaller-scale and more personal pieces. Each piece starts as a drawing, which the artist describes as very rough, but the outcome is an examination of material, depth, and juxtapositions. 

The exhibit shows the result of an artistic exercise that allowed Webb to follow multiple thought experiments. Those familiar and unfamiliar with Webb’s sculptures are sure to delight in this new body of work, which is literally bursting at the seams. The artwork contains Webb’s signature juxtaposition and contrasts, such as rough vs smooth, but this new work reflects his desire to take a step back and challenge his process. 

As Webb developed new pieces for this exhibition, he was also wrapping up a series of public art projects. These projects required a incredible amount of effort executed over several years. Artists like Webb dedicate hours and hours to a single vision that must be coordinated with engineers, fabricators, and installation crews. After finishing these projects, his interest turned to reversing this process and focusing on artwork that felt more free, more loose, compared to prior projects. If the process of creating public art involved a series of questions to be answered, Webb now wanted to create a series of pieces that leaves questions unanswered. The artwork still touches on the artist’s recurring themes—like the alphabet, humor, and the horrible—but Webb challenged himself to follow a thought to see where it leads.  

Webb describes his process for these works in his statement for the show. He started each artwork conceptually, and in his drawings, with a box or frame as a structural device to hold the carving. This concept is referenced in the title of the show, “Yespalier,” a word derived from the French “espalier,” or using a lattice to train trees to grow against a flat wall in a variety of shapes and patterns. One piece, “New Shoot,” is an excellent example to illustrate his thought process and method. In the work, a new plant shoot grows and curves inside a frame of carved fir. Most of the plant is contained within the frame, but it is starting to test the limits of the box. In the piece called “Yespalier” (carved madrone and Alaskan yellow cedar), the curly letters and forms are drooping over the carved lattice, similar to fruit trees grown with the espalier technique. 

When I first saw that Webb’s newest carvings start within a frame or border, I immediately thought of illustrated manuscripts. When creating an illustrated manuscript, a grid would first be drawn to organize the page and to separate the area for writing from the borders for the illustrations. We see fascinating examples of the illustrations and miniatures growing, becoming more elaborate, and taking attention away from the text itself. An additional connection is Webb’s “&,” composed of stained glass, LED lights, and fir artwork framing the ampersand character. It echoes the elaborate initials included in illuminated manuscripts. I discussed the connection that I saw in the work with the artist, and he shared his admiration for the Limbourg Brothers, the artists who created the beautiful decorations throughout “Les Très Riches Heures,” a defining masterpiece of early 15th-century manuscript illumination. 

The inclusion of stained glass in the show is intriguing since Webb is well-known for his wood carvings. Glass provides a stunning contrast with wood. The artist describes wood as making shadows, while glass reflects the light. Stained glass in particular has been used to magnify light and inspire spiritual experiences. For Webb, stained glass provides another reversal of his wood carving process. Just as returning to hand-held work after creating large-scale commissions creates renewal, incorporating stained glass allows Webb to play with light and themes in ways that wood carvings make challenging. 

When asked what people should know or take away from his exhibition, Webb responded that it is his job to invite the viewer to encounter the work and then let them accept or understand it on their own terms. He asks a series of questions in the show and then leaves it to the viewer to either answer those questions or explore the possibilities on their own. You can experience the work yourself from January 8 to February 21, 2026, at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, Washington.

Chloé Dye Sherpe

Chloé Dye Sherpe is an art professional and curator based in Washington State.

“Yespalier” is on view from Tuesday through Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Greg Kucera Gallery, located at 212 Third Avenue South in Seattle, Washington. An Artist Talk is being held on Saturday, January 10 at noon. First Thursday Receptions are January 8 and February 5, from 6 to 8 p.m. For more information visit www.gregkucera.com.  

As we enter this captivating exhibition  by Aisha Harrison, we are first confronted by a large tree branch bending over us and spiraling to the floor. The bigleaf maple branch invites you under it to get to the rest of the exhibition. But as we look more closely we see the entire branch has been fabricated from natural materials. The artist calls the work “Love Letter and Splash Portal.” Fortunately, there is a step-by-step explanation of how the maple was created in the corner of the exhibition. Collaborating with her mother, Lucia Harrison, a noted Northwest artist, they began the maple by gathering dried leaves, cutting them into pieces, and boiling them to create a pulp. Other stages of the process included making the trunk with foam and covering it with tape, then sculpting it with pipe insulation and painting it. And that’s just the trunk. The tree’s six hundred leaves are made of paper, and each has veins of red wire. The very realistic moss is dyed wool. Harrison conceived of the tree four years ago, and has been working on it with her mother and volunteers for the past two years. 

The other works in the exhibition seem protected by the bigleaf maple. Facing the front door is “Rooted.” Harrison is mixed-race, so the face is her African-American father, ancestors, herself, and her grandmother. From the shoulders two trees rise up, while from those same shoulders two braids of hair hang down to join the trees’ long root systems which in turn raise the art off the floor.

 “take You apart to build something new” gives us a young woman with branches of hair rising up from her head, and roots hanging down. In between are a pelvis and neck vertebrae. As the artist describes it: “The pelvic bone is our center and is the structure in which we grew our first nine months of life. As a mother I greatly respect the pelvic bones and their mysteries. The spinal column holds us together and has so much importance for disseminating information to all our systems.” In other words, each part of this sculpture has deeper meaning. The branches/hair reach to the sky, and down to the dark and the unknown. The young woman is metamorphosing into the earth and sky right in front of us.

The “Pelvis” really spoke to me, with its large pelvis bone carefully made of clay so we can see all the parts. Rising up from the pelvis is a forest of red “veins” made of aluminum covered with red wool. The “veins” felt like blood rising up from the pelvis, a relief for the burden that these bones carry.
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Another intriguing work is the “Boat of Hands,” a vessel formed from hands that were cast from the artist’s own family members, with moss, lichen, and sticks. Here again we get a sense of reaching beyond the object as those hands stretch out.

Harrison calls her show “Porous Body,” an evocative name that feels appropriate for these artworks. We can feel the separate artworks, rather than take them in rationally. Although their material presence is strong, all of them are imaginary and take us to a place inside and outside our bodies to nature, to the planet. Calling the works porous bodies gives space for both the idea of decay and the idea of rebirth. Harrison feels joy, not despair, in the ever-changing cycle of life and death on earth.
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Susan Noyes Platt
Susan Noyes Platt writes for local, national, and international publications and her website, www.artandpoliticsnow.com.

“Porous Body” is on view through February 22 at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, located at 550 Winslow Way E. on Bainbridge Island, Washington, and open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit www.biartmuseum.org.

Ka-POW! BAM!!! Comic books in the 1950s and ’60s really did a number on young artists-to-be. They inspired important artists in all disciplines—Roy Lichtenstein and Takashi Murakami in visual arts, Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro in film, David Bowie in music, and Art Spiegelman in literary arts to name just the more obvious ones.

Comic books were printed on the cheapest newsprint, making them easy to produce and distribute. They were considered more like junk mail than valued cultural artifacts. By the ’60s they were reaching even the remote archipelago of Haida Gwaii, where a boy named Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas avidly consumed them.

Yahgulanaas came from a distinguished lineage of Haida artists, such as Delores Churchill, Isabella Edenshaw, and Charles Edenshaw. He was introduced to Haida iconography and traditional formline designs by his older cousin, carver Robert Davidson, a central figure in the modern revival of Haida art. In 1969, Davidson’s first totem pole was raised in a public ceremony that reasserted Haida cultural continuity after decades of suppression. Yahgulanaas apprenticed with his cousin before striking off on his own path.

Yahgulanaas first made his mark with activism rather than art. He helped to lead and organize protests against industrial logging operations in the southern part of Haida Gwaii. The famously successful blockade became a model in the larger struggle to protect old-growth forests throughout coastal British Columbia.

That ability to assert Haida sovereignty and stewardship over ancestral lands ties directly to his artistic practices. When he stepped back from political organizing, he turned to the art-form of comics, but comics that were in harmony with the traditional Haida visual vocabulary.

“I’m trying to take a complex, ancient iconic art form — which is totem poles, which is my cultural birthright, I guess — and translate that in a way that becomes accessible to regular people…” 
(Reddit AMA, 2014)

In exploring the fertile ground between contemporary comic book arts and traditional Haida storytelling, Yahgulanaas knew comics could register with a wider public beyond the rarified spaces in which Indigenous art is typically displayed. By this time comics were no longer classed as junk; they had become recognized as a culturally legitimate form. And he knew the Haida nation was resurgent. (In 2010, the Queen Charlotte Islands were officially renamed Haida Gwaii — the result of a long process of Indigenous political advocacy.)

Things clicked into higher gear when his Japanese students referred to his work as Manga, a traditional Japanese form that he had not yet encountered. This was in the ’90s when it was still niche, though that was about to change.

Yahgulanaas studied the roots of the Manga form — learning from the masters yet again. He eventually coined the term “Haida Manga” for the hybrid graphic novels he was forging. The most successful example of Haida Manga is Red: A Haida Manga, which has been widely exhibited, taught, and discussed internationally.

In works like Red, classic Haida formlines define the panels within which Yahgulanaas depicts discrete scenes in his narrative. In comics, the space between panels are known as “gutters,” and they are typically white (the color of the paper). In Haida Manga, the black formline gutters are lifted up, they are positive marks with a meaning, a history, and a presence of their own. In fact the formlines tell a story even as they define the negative spaces or panels in which the “main” narrative unfolds. They flow across each two-page spread and then continue on the following page or spread, another level of design. Even further: the pages can be assembled into one continuous mural, allowing the story to be read either sequentially in time or viewed spatially all at once.

The strategy is a sort of conceptual intervention: Western comics privilege linear reading, while Northwest Coast Indigenous art traditions often emphasize continuous form, non-linear narrative, and the integration of image, story, and space.

All this can seem complicated, and in recent works, Yahgulanaas delights in disorienting the reader/viewer even further. He doesn’t feel that this conflicts with his goal of making the work accessible to readers of all ages and backgrounds.

“What I am trying to do is force the observer to become an active participant. I am trying to undermine my OWN authority and privilege as an artist. I am trying to say ‘You become engaged. Claim your own sovereign authority.’” 
(Reddit AMA, 2014)

Yahgulanaas’s work is on view through February 3 at Stonington Gallery. This provides a golden opportunity to get acquainted with a celebrated figure and a dynamic hybrid artform. The show’s emphasis is on work produced prior to Red, but Red and individual pages and sheets from Red and other works are available in 
different formats.

To see Yahgulanaas’s most recent work, consider a trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery’s group exhibition, “We who have known tides: Indigenous Art from the Collection.” Within this exhibit, the Gallery unveils a major multi-year commission from Yahgulanaas called “Clan Hat,” and it marks the beginning of an expansive story cycle and a new narrative world. 

Tom McDonald
Tom McDonald is a writer and musician living on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

“Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: Drawing the World Anew” is on view Tuesday through Friday, from January 8 through February 3 at Stonington Gallery, located at 125 South Jackson Street in Seattle, Washington. For more information, visit www.stoningtongallery.com.