Current Exhibitions

Through September 1

Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It

Through her films, objects, and installations, Los Angeles-based artist Cauleen Smith envisions a world that is black, feminist, spiritual, and unabashedly alive. With Give It or Leave It Smith proposes a new rule for a better world: creating something, offering it, and gifting it—regardless if the gesture is accepted or rejected.

Through September 1

Jane Wong: After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly

Jane Wong’s poems and essays unearth silenced histories, immigrant narratives, and intergenerational trauma. For her first museum solo exhibition, Wong draws inspiration from her upbringing in a Chinese American restaurant as well as her family’s experience of hunger and poverty in rural China to consider the ways we reconcile the gaps in our lives and histories.

Through September 29

End of Day: American Oil Painting Around 1900

End of Day presents a selection of portrait and landscape paintings by American artists from the Frye Art Museum’s permanent collection. Spanning the period between the Civil War and First World War, the images oscillate between an embrace of progress and a sense of nostalgia for what was perceived to be a simpler American era.

Through December 8

Recent Acquisitions: Toyin Ojih Odutola

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings, paintings, and prints question physical and sociopolitical identities as they pertain to skin color. This suite of three lithographs, recently acquired for the Frye Art Museum’s collection, demonstrates Odutola’s signature approach to portraiture, in which the sitter is seen obliquely or from multiple, unusual angles within one composition.

Through September 22

Frye Salon

Frye Salon features nearly one hundred fifty paintings from the Founding Collection with selected works acquired since the Museum opened in 1952. The installation approximates the dramatic viewing experience enjoyed by visitors to the art gallery in Charles and Emma Frye’s Seattle home in the first decades of the twentieth century.