MAC Calendar of Events
Updated July 1, 2009
Call (509) 456-3931 for additional information or e-mail pr@northwestmuseum.org. Events are subject to change or cancellation. Please confirm activities. All events are on the Museum campus at 2316 W. First Avenue, Spokane, Washington unless otherwise noted.
For information about all visual and performing arts events in the greater Spokane area, link onto the Spokane Arts Commission website at http://www.spokanearts.org/.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Gabriel Brown
Great Tasting Goodness!
In Focus Series of Contemporary Regional Art
Opening Reception First Friday, July 3, 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Gabriel Brown in one of our region's most engaged and wonderfully provocative young artists. Combining performance, sculpture, video, and installation, he asks important, even fundamental questions: What is a healthy relationship with the environment? What comprises a vital, sustainable and vital community? What is the nature of civic responsibility? He says, I spend a great deal of time exploring this city, walking, driving, collecting objects, taking photographs, and dumpster diving. Indeed he does, and with marvelous and compelling results.
Summer Camp at the MAC: The Art of Science Fiction
August 10-14
9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday
This art and science fiction camp is based on the MAC’s summer blockbuster exhibit, “Out of This World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television”. Campers will enjoy a blend of art and science as they explore superheroes and villains as depicted in movies and TV shows. Appropriate for boys and girls 8-12 years old. Space is limted to 20 campers. Cost is $120 per child, $110 for MAC members. For registration information, contact the MAC at 509-456-3931 or themac@northwestmuseum.org.
Sponsored in part by the Spokane Art School Endowment.
Visual Thinking Strategies
Professional Development Institute: Session 1 of 3
August 18 - 21
Join us for this national workshop hosted by the MAC, August 18 - 21. The goal of the Professional Development Institute 1 is to deepen VTS skills and prepare to help others use VTS. Participants develop practical expertise in facilitating VTS, research data, assessment of learning, teaching practice, and theoretical writing. Participants also get a solid grounding in the theory and research on which VTS is based, including understanding the learning VTS nurtures, its transfer, and its effect on test scores.
Workshop hours: Aug 18, 1-5; Aug 19, 10-5; Aug 20, 10-5; Aug 21, 10-2.
For more information, please see the Special Programs for Teachers page.
UPCOMING EXHIBITS
Gabriel Brown
Great Tasting Goodness!
In Focus Series of Contemporary Regional Art
July 3 - August 29, 2009
Opening Reception First Friday, July 3, 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Gabriel Brown in one of our region's most engaged and wonderfully provocative young artists. Combining performance, sculpture, video, and installation, he asks important, even fundamental questions: What is a healthy relationship with the environment? What comprises a vital, sustainable and vital community? What is the nature of civic responsibility? He says, I spend a great deal of time exploring this city, walking, driving, collecting objects, taking photographs, and dumpster diving. Indeed he does, and with marvelous and compelling results.
CURRENT EXHIBITS
Out of this World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television
Through September 5, 2009
The MAC will host the traveling exhibit Out of This World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television from June 6 through September 5, 2009. Out of This World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television will feature more than 30 costumes and related objects from science fiction films and television programs such as, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Terminator, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Batman. The exhibition will allow visitors to examine how costume design incorporates color, style, scale, materials, historical traditions and cultural cues to help performers and audiences engage, in new or accepted ways, with the characters being portrayed. Organized by the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, Seattle: emplive.org
Marie Watt: Forget-Me-Not
Through October 26, 2009
Marie Watt’s (Seneca) installation Forget Me Not (Mothers and Sons) explores themes of remembrance, relations, and storytelling. In this project Watt is particularly interested in heirlooms and the notion of things— built, natural, spiritual—passed down from one generation to another. For Forget-me-not: Mothers and Sons, Watt has sewn woolen cameos of each member of the US military, "sons," from Oregon who have died in the Iraq war (107 to date). For the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture exhibition, she has added cameos of all those servicemen and women from Eastern Washington and Panhandle Idaho who have lose their lives in the war. She is also creating an equal number of cameos of women who have passed; these "mothers" have been nominated by men (also sons), friends and acquaintances of the artist. In this way she represents both mothers and sons, as well as both the strict and more metaphorical relationship of parent/child, giving/receiving, and loss/remembrance.
The companion work, Forget Me Not: Blossoms, consists of a central core of multiple pieces of columnar basalt surrounded by seven risers. The risers reference the idea of the seven generations—an ideology shared by many indigenous people—that considers how our choices will affect people seven generations to come, as well as recognizes that the lives we are living now are due, in part, to the choices made by those seven generations back. The risers will be covered in a ground of army blankets and then blanketed with wool blossoms. Watt has set a goal of creating 80,000-90,000 flowers to represent the number of civilian lives lost in the Iraq war to date. Flowers are used here as a symbol of remembrance, a vehicle for storytelling, and as a metaphor for the life cycle itself. They also provide an avenue into the process of creating that will allow our stories to become an integral piece of the artwork. The flowers will become not only a representation of the lives lost in Iraq, but of those we remember, our own loved ones, our own stories.Marie Watt and her family will be in residence at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture throughout the week of April 20, 2009 supervising the installation of Mothers and Sons and Blossoms, as well as leading public discussions and visiting area schools to give workshops. During the installation week here will also be a Teachers Workshop on the site of the installation hosted by the MAC’s Art Education Department for area high school art teachers.
Lead sponsor: Sterling Savings Bank.
Stories from Within: Selections from the Permanent Collection
Through November 29, 2009
Whether beaded bag or lithograph, Pueblo painting or Jacob Lawrence print, these narrative works depict people in settings where stories unfold. Representing diverse cultures, various media, and multiple time periods, these works encourage long and active looking and inspire viewers to make meaning based on their own life experiences. The exhibition draws inspiration from the work of Harvard-trained psychologist Abigail Housen and from Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), the method based on her research. This exhibit is also the learning laboratory for a pilot VTS program created by the MAC and Garfield Elementary.
Sponsored by AmericanWest Bank.
Vigilance: Paintings by Rick Garcia
May 1 through June 28, 2009, The Kress Gallery of Art, River Park Square's Third Level
Opening Reception May 1, 5 to 8 p.m. in conjunction with First Friday
The Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture’s Art @ Work Program in collaboration with River Park Square’s Kress Gallery of Art is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring new paintings by Spokane artist Rick Garcia. The Kress Gallery is committed to providing an exhibit venue for outstanding regional art, fostering awareness and enjoyment of our community’s working artists.
Rick’s approach to painting is very intuitive, “a self generative and self taught process that pulls me along.” His compositions contain a personal vocabulary of marks and forms, shapes drift, pull apart and converge. Surfaces are built up then torn down with aggressive layers of color, shape and texture that ascend and descend. A resultant polyphony of color, shape and texture arises through this systematic layering process. The subject matter of his work for this show has grown from this complicated harmony and is about identity, “understanding my place in the world right now”. Rick’s artwork represents space and images that fuse fact and fiction, past with present and the ordinary with the unusual. “Creating pieces with meaning that might give inspiration to others is the ultimate purpose of my work.”
Living Legacy: The American Indian Collection
Through July 18, 2010
View the entire Manning American Indian Collection acquired in 1916 as the founding collection of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture. This exhibition explores the legacy of “Victorian” collecting and the period during which Native Americans saw their cultural objects institutionalized in glass cases. The exhibit also offers an alternative and culturally appropriate viewpoint that honors indigenous Plateau life-ways by contextualizing the Manning collection with objects drawn from the now vast and nationally important American Indian collection.
Lead Sponsors: Bonneville Power Administration, Itron, Teck Cominco, Well Fargo Bank, Ballys, DEX.
Spokane Timeline: Personal Voices
Newly refurbished long-term exhibit
Over a century of Spokane history translated into a three-dimensional tapestry of personal stories. Collection treasures tell of family, community and business adventures from fur trade and fire, through aviation and ticker tape. The new centerpiece of the exhibit features BIG TIMBER which explores the history of logging in the Inland Northwest. From lumber camps and “lady loggers” to “river pigs” and railroads, this new Spokane Timeline feature explores multiple facets of a key Inland Northwest industry. Union pins, log brands, caulk boots, mess tent dishes, crosscut saws, and plenty of stories make a lively introduction to an important topic.
Presented By: Moss-Adams LLP. Sponsors: Joel E. Ferris Foundation, DEX.
ONGOING PROGRAMS
Art @ Work Program
The Art @ Work Program features contemporary works by more than 80 leading regional artists. All work is available for purchase or rent, for your home or for your office. Located in the Helen South Alexander Gallery in Cheney Cowles Center, which is open free to the public during regular Museum hours. For more information contact Tammy at (509) 363-5317 or tammyg@northwestmuseum.org.
Joel E. Ferris Research Library and Archives
The MAC’s Joel E. Ferris Research Library and Archives is open four days per week. The Research Library and Archives, located in Cheney Cowles Center, is a great place to research historical information and find historic photos. Scanned images and prints of collection items are available for purchase (they make a unique gift for that someone special!). Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday.
Calendar
