Afro Butoh film & performances – Tacoma Armory

Kicking off the three-part series Butoh Art Attack Tacoma, a free screening was held on May 17 at the Tacoma Armory , showcasing three films by South African Butoh artist Tebby Ramasike.. Although he was unable to attend in person due to visa issues, the audience was treated to recordings of three of his powerful performances.

Following the films, the evening continued with two live performances. The first was by dancer Helen Thorsen, a founding member of Seattle’s Dappin Butoh and Yuni Hoffman Dance Theater. Thorsen is currently the managing director of Seattle’s DAIPANbutoh Collective. Viewing dance through a therapeutic lens, her background spans disciplines including Butoh, yoga, Tai Chi, and more. She also served as the evening’s emcee, introducing Ramasike’s work and contextualizing the recordings.

The second performance featured Lin Lucas an African-American dancer from Earthseed Rising in Tucson, AZ. Through Butoh, art and dream work he engages in ancestral lineage healing. He is also a comic book creator and writer of short stories, screenplays, and poetry.

Each of the live performances were accompanied by the Seattle-based, experimental violinist Jackie An, a neurodivergent, non-binary, Korean-American artist whose musical and empathic talents enhanced the improvisational collaborations. All three performers participated in a post-show discussion that was both invigorating and thought-provoking.

Reflections on Ramasike’s Films

The first work by Ramasike was a selection from “In the Shadow of Darkness”, filmed at the Sesalac Butoh Retreat in Serbia. The video can be viewed on YouTube here. Watching the performance, set against an experimental musical backdrop, I was reminded of Butoh’s origins—born in postwar Japan as an embodied expression of trauma, tension, and release. It’s a form that summons pain, processes it somatically, and purges it.

Hijikata Tatsumi’s original Butoh drew influence from German Expressionism and Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, as well as Japan’s subconscious—its folklore, spirits (Yokai), and native shamanic traditions.

The second video was incredibly moving – it was a selection from “The Wreakage of My Flesh”, performed at the Musee National de la Resistance Esch-Sur-Alzette, which preserves the memory of Luxembourg’s victors of the Nazi Occupation. The full recording can be found on YouTube here.

In this piece we see figures suspended in what resemble amniotic sacks. A dancer on the floor writhes in a similar sack and struggles to break free. The room has bars on one wall, like a prison. The African figure breaks free and still writhes in pain, attempting to reach out to the remaining, suspended figures. There are phrases on the wall: “I am alive and I am dead”…and “…never return from Auschwitz”. A European figure appears, gently placing a white cloth over him—perhaps an act of comfort, though the gesture is ambiguous: Is it care, or another form of entrapment?

The last one was “In Search of a Soul: a Blind man’s cry….the appeal” – which was performed at a Butoh festival at Espace Culturel Bertin Poiree de Tenri, in Paris. A copy can be viewed on YouTube here but the film is a bit grainy. In this work we see the dancer performing in what appear to be a pile of dried, golden leaves. He dances frantically, showering himself with the leaves. He thrashes and throws his body about, as if aggressively seeking stimulus from a world he cannot see.

The Live Performances

Helen Thorson’s performance was entitled “Kintsugi” – named after the Japanese art of taking broken pottery and mending it with gold as a meditative act of transformation. Her dance was inspired by the release of Lenord Pelitier after 40 years in prison. This piece was heavy, intense, unpredictable, and frightening. A figure slowly crawls out of a room, still dragging chains attached to their feet. The figure struggles to stand and move about, as if fighting to re-learn how to live in a world outside.

Lin Lucas’ piece was entitled “Blind at the Gates of Grief”, served as an exploration of loss and desire. He drew influence from Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata’s “Blind Girl” and Francis Wellers’ book From the Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief.

Each station, illuminated by a single candle, marked a passage—love, desire, grief. At each point he embodied the various struggles, before collapsing and snuffing out a flame. At one point, he dug dirt from a beach bag and covered himself with it. At another, he cradled a bouquet of roses, then tore them apart, sparing one, which he inhaled deeply before extinguishing that station’s light with the very rose. Each moment unfolded with raw beauty and sorrow—expressions of grief and longing beyond language.

Final Thoughts

During the closing discussion, two powerful themes emerged. First, that Butoh is a profoundly therapeutic practice—one that helps people access and process trauma held within the body. Second, much of Butoh operates on a pre-verbal, primal level—expression that comes before language, or even thought. One story recounted an artist bringing Butoh into a prison, where over time, participants found they could access deep-seated traumas—eventually finding the words to describe them, thanks to the embodied work that came first.

Helen Thorsen will offer a free Butoh workshop at the Tacoma Armory on May 24, from 1–3 PM.

Fresh Ground Butoh Dances will perform on May 31 at 8 PM, also at the Tacoma Armory. Tickets are $20, and the show will feature six dancers accompanied by three musicians.

World Goth Day 2025 at Real Art Tacoma

Once again, Real Art Tacoma & Layla from Gothic Curios & Licorice Chamber have brought goth bands, DJs, & vendors to help celebrate World Goth Day in Tacoma.

Saturday evening May 18th

Five bands and three DJs performed and played music Saturday evening, celebrating the diversity that is the broader Goth/Post-Punk/Darkwave scene.

Autumn is a Darkwave/Goth rock band from Minneapolis, MN. Their new single Venice is available now.

Licorice Chamber is a local Goth band with vocals reminiscent of Siouxsie, and guitar work that recalls the the Cure.

Tethys is a Death/Progressive Metal band from Denver, CO who used elements of Industrial in the form of amplified metal, similar to that of SPK or Einsturzende Neubauten.

Seaside Tryst a Seattle Synth/Indie band was a later replacement, in the wake of the tragic passing of Ralph from Seattle Post-Punk band the Glow.

Neurogeist is a local Industrial/Dark Synth group out of Tacoma.

Three DJs spun tunes before and in between the music sets: DJ Owen traveled up here from Oakland, CA, and DJ Kritical Virgo, and DJ Wrain Havoc hail from the greater Seattle area.

Sunday May 18th

The following day Real Art held a day-time Goth market of local witchy and spooky crafts. DJ Lucian Black Death provided dark tunes.

Gothic Curios features the art and other dark merchandise of Layla from Licorice Chamber. T-shirts, artwork, stickers, jewelry, and a variety of other gothy decor.

The Mystic Moon offers spells, candles, teas, oils, crystal bags, and an assortment of gothy jewelry. She also runs a local catering business, MsTreatology.

She helped recommend to me an enchanted tea blend for fortune and good luck.

RoxyFae Oddities makes beautiful jewelry out of bones and preserves amazing insects in little diorama bottles.

Kreep It Real makes beautiful little golden framed gothy art works that can be hung on the wall or fridge, jewelry and other art pieces made from natural things like bones or spooky plants.

Medically Macabre makes gothy designs, from stickers to jewelry, with the disabled community in mind. I was very impressed that they make jewelry that’s easier to fasten. I wish that accessibility was the standard.

Beth the Witch was selling a variety of witchy goodness including a variety of spell candles. I was having such a great talk with her I forgot to get a photo! She sells her products at Crescent Moon Gifts where she also does Tarot readings and teaches some classes.

Art by Puppy Knuckles is a queer, trans artist from Bellingham upcycles locally thrifted clothing with linocut prints, bleach painting, and patches. Puppy Knuckles also creates digital prints and punk patches.

The Abiqueños and The Artist at Tacoma Art Museum

This exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum reframes the American Southwest through Indigenous perspectives, challenging the colonial legacy of its collection. Juxtaposing Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic works with contemporary voices, “The Abiqueños and The Artist” re-centers untold stories and the people whose ancestral lands shaped, and still shape, the region’s art.

The Tacoma Art Museum is home to the historic Haub collection which focuses largely on colonial artworks of the American Southwest. Such a collection presents a unique challenge for an art museum in the Pacific Northwest. What the Tacoma Art Museum has done in response is both compelling and vital. It has treated the collection as an opportunity for in-house and guest curators to engage in critical dialogue with a complicated past—while also showcasing contemporary visual artists who offer underrepresented perspectives on the subject matter. These artists help tell untold stories and re-center marginalized subjects.

Examples of this curatorial approach include recent exhibitions such as:  Finding Home: The Chinese American West , Blackness is…the Refusal to be Reduced, and Nepantla: The Land is the Beloved. The final show in this current series addresses the peoples and lands among whom the renowned artist Georgia O’Keeffe lived for many years. The Abiqueños and The Artist juxtaposes O’Keeffe’s work from Abiquiú, New Mexico with narratives of the Genízaro peoples, Indigenous to that land.

Art scholars have long referred to this area as “O’Keeffe Country”—a term that alarmingly erases the sacred, ancestral significance of the land to its original inhabitants.

Russel Albert Daniels – Maurice and Dried Cholla near Plaza Blanca – 2019

Photographer Russel Albert Daniels captures Maurice Archuleta a descendant of the Genízaro community, posed in the shadow of a dried cholla plant. Archuleta is a local dancer and artist who engages with these landscapes not merely as aesthetic forms, but as connective tissue, linking him to his ancestors.

Georgia O’Keeffe – Pinions with Cedar – 1956

O’Keeffe’s art is undeniably beautiful. The shapes and colors she introduced to the Western art world were striking and often unfamiliar, capturing the natural beauty of the American Southwest. Yet her modernist approach is also marked by a certain coolness, a detachment. A solitary figure, she abstracted the land, mountains, and flowers around her—rendering them in a reverent but analytical manner.

Guest curator Patricia Norby provides crucial context. The exhibit reminds us: people lived here—and still do. They hold festivals, dance, and raise families on this land. These landscapes do not belong to O’Keeffe alone. Our understanding is richer when we engage with the full, layered histories they represent.

Nepantla: The Land is the Beloved – Tacoma Art Museum

From the Nahuatl word for the space between two places, comes an exhibit of art by the Arab diaspora addressing colonialism in the Indigenous American West.

Curators at the Tacoma Art Museum continue to engage in a thoughtful reexamination of the Haub collection – a historic body of work focused largely on the American Southwest – by juxtaposing it with contemporary art that speaks for communities whose histories have long been marginalized or silenced.

Following in the footsteps of previous exhibitions such as Finding Home: The Chinese American West , Blackness is…the Refusal to be Reduced, and On Native Land, this one – Nepantla: The Land is the Beloved, deepens the practice. Guest curator Maymanah Farhat invites artists of the Arab diaspora—many of whom have firsthand or inherited experience with colonial trauma—to reflect on the contested landscapes of the Southwest alongside their own histories of dispossession and resilience.

The artists reflect on the internal effects of living along borders—both physical and psychological. Cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldua explores this terrain in her writings, describing borders as “a locus of resistance, of rupture, and of putting pieces back together.” She speaks of “multi-subjectivity and split-subjectivity,” concepts that are central to the perspectives artists of the Arab diaspora bring to these vital conversations.

One of the artists, Sama Alshaibi, born in Iraq in the early 70’s, depicts the divided Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem as a landscape literally divided as a diptych, emphasizing how arbitrary and unnatural it is to sever these landscapes.

Sama Alshaibi – Contested Land series 2007. left Mount of Olives, East Jerusalem & right Divided Mount of Olives, East Jerusalem.

The same artist in her Borderland series shows a triptych of locations along the Mexican/American border in Nogales, interspersed with her body in the middle. The photographs themselves, composed on multiple borders, lines, roofs, roads, are all linear boundaries, separating spaces. The photograph of the artist appears to be floating in a green, natural background, unincumbered by these human constructions.

Sama Alshaibi, Borderland series, 2007. left: Nogales/Mexico; center: No-man’s Land II (along the Mexican/American Border); right: Nogales/USA. 

Another Iraqi artist, one who works in multimedia, Lahib Jaddo, has constructed sculptural forms based upon her memories of figures in her childhood. has constructed sculptural forms based upon her memories of figures in her childhood. Each are made up of textiles from her country, blurring the boundaries and borders between the subjects. Human or animal, grandmother or chicken, each form communicates a strong, beloved presence.

Lahib Jaddo – Anna (Grandmother) 2021.
Lahib Jaddo – Chicken, 2021.

Ultimately the exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum is a poignant, emotionally resonant show that interrogates concepts of homeland, memory, dispersal, and loss. Curator Farhat has skillfully created space for artists to ask urgent and complex questions: What are borders? And where do we locate ourselves amid the ruptures they impose—externally or internally?

Nepantla: The Land is the Beloved runs through Sept. 6th, 2026 at the Tacoma Art Museum.

Finding Home: The Chinese American West at Tacoma Art Museum

An evocative exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum explores the lives, labors, and erasures of Chinese immigrants in the American West, on view through September 5, 2027

Running through the end of summer 2027 at the Tacoma Art Museum, guest curator Lele Barnett has brought together a series of contemporary works that honor the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries – immigrants who contributed deeply to the American West, often at great personal cost. The exhibit highlights the intersection of migration, labor, violence, and resilience, urging visitors to reckon with histories that are still unfolding today.

In the 1850s, political instability, economic hardship, and famine – particularly in Guangdong province – drove many Chinese people to seek opportunity abroad. Lured by the promise of gold, work on the transcontinental railroad, and jobs in the mines, thousands made the arduous journey across the Pacific.

One featured artist, Monyee Chau explores the spiritual dimension of this migration, illustrating the prayers offered to goddesses during the long voyage, and the backbreaking labor that followed.

Monyee Chau – Of Salt and Altars Mural, 2024

A fine art painter originally from Southern China, Mian Situ draws inspiration from historic photographs and impressionist depictions of the era. His work centers on forgotten or overlooked narratives, giving voice to Chinese immigrants whose stories were rarely recorded. In one striking painting, a Chinese cook prepares a meal for cowboys – highlighting a lesser-known aspect of Chinese immigrant labor in the American West. Outside of working on the railroad, or in mines, Chinese laborers were often associated with service work like laundries and restaurants, especially in urban areas. However, their presence in more “mythic” Western settings, like cattle drives and cowboy culture, is less widely recognized.

Mian Situ – Beef, Beans, and Biscuits, 2004.

Violence and discrimination against Chinese immigrants intensified throughout the 19th century, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. One of the most haunting sections of the exhibit features two works by Zhi Lin that document the November 3, 1885, expulsion of Chinese residents from Tacoma by an armed mob.

In one piece, Lin uses a reproduction of the 1885 Sanborn Fire Insurance map, overlaying it with pink post-it notes to mark Chinese-owned businesses listed in the Tacoma city directory. This mapping of economic presence onto city space makes the targeted nature of the violence unmistakable.

Zhi Lin – Reproduction of the 1885 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 2023.
Pink post-it notes identify Chinese-owned businesses from the 1885 Tacoma city directory.

In a second, more narrative piece, Lin creates a traditional Chinese paper scroll that traces the forced march of Chinese residents through the city blocks along Pacific Avenue. The scroll is richly illustrated with drawings of fleeing families, violent mobs, and tense encounters – each moment rooted in meticulous historical research and survivor testimony.

Zhi Lin – On November 3rd along Pacific Ave, 2023.
Zhi Lin – detail from On November 3rd along Pacific Ave, 2023.

Together, these works reclaim both geographic and human dimensions of a history that too often goes unremembered.

To view this history now – at a moment when our current administration engages in large-scale, unconstitutional deportations, without due process – is both difficult and essential. It raises uncomfortable questions: Who will tell today’s stories years from now? Who will document the lives of those forcibly removed – families taken while walking children home from school, or arrested at the hospitals where they work after a visa is quietly revoked? Will these moments be mapped, as history was here, traced across neighborhoods and cities, with names and stories attached? Will we remember them, as we should – not only for how they were wronged, but for the legitimacy of the lives they lived?

Blackness is…the Refusal to be Reduced – at Tacoma Art Museum

At a time when Blackness is being removed from from federal systems, school curriculums, and public archives, museums hold space for artists and curators to challenge that erasure with presence, memory, and vision. Running through March 14, 2027 at the Tacoma Art Museum is curator and artist Nikesha Breeze’s exhibit “Blackness is…the Refusal to be Reduced.”

Breeze has brought together the work of half a dozen contemporary artists, spanning film, sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation. These are artists who engage deeply with the complexity of trauma and memory, who center the marginal, and, most importantly, who create encounters that compel audiences to confront what has been hidden: threads and bones, stories and silences. Breeze writes that the exhibition explores the “complex texture of resistance that is embedded in Black history.”

One of the works, by Nate Young, takes the form of a drawing centered on bones – used here not simply as anatomical elements, but as repositories of memory and embodied experience. The piece reflects on how trauma and narrative are stored within the body, particularly within the bones of both the living and the ancestral. In the composition, the bones appear suspended, hovering above their own shadows—an articulation of how memory and trauma often persist in ghostly, fragmented ways: intangible, difficult to grasp, yet ever-present.

Nate Young – Casting 5 (2017)

One of the concepts that Breeze puts forth is the need to re-center the margin. To bring the experiences of those that have been pushed aside instead to the forefront. One of her pieces is an installation featuring a couple stacks of indigo dyed denim jeans. They are situated like an altar, resting upon what resemble stones and cotton, with a pair of disembodied Black feet on top of one and Black arms reaching out on top of the other. Black bodies were left out of the history of American denim, despite the fact that this icon of Americana was built upon the toil of stolen African bodies.

Nikesha Breeze – “Red, White, Black, and Blue – an homage to African American Indigo” 2021.

One of Breeze’s oil paintings is particularly arresting. It presents a life-sized portrait of an older man, perhaps a grandfather, dressed in dignified attire, seated beside his young grandson. The man’s face, marked by pain and loss, carries a quiet stoicism, a pride that doesn’t demand attention but nevertheless holds it. He does not meet your gaze directly, yet his presence is commanding. Beside him stands his grandson, who does look out – his gaze weary but unwavering, a look that suggests innocence already challenged, if not lost.

Together, their presence is undeniable. They confront the viewer, not with aggression, but with insistence, asking to be seen, remembered, and honored. They embody a personhood rooted in the past yet very much present, carrying stories that cannot be dismissed. You cannot easily turn away from these life-sized portraits, which I would argue are the centerpiece of Breeze’s exhibition.

Nikesha Breeze – “Anonymous African American man and child” – (2020)

Another oil painting by Breeze, positioned nearby, depicts two young sisters. They, too, meet your gaze. Their expressions are steady, perhaps even searching. Their eyes function almost as a mirror, or a portal, prompting self-reflection. What you see in their faces may reveal more about yourself than about them. It’s as if they are asking a question meant for you alone.

These are American faces, theirs is an American tale. When people express shock at contemporary injustices, claiming “Oh, that’s not the America I know,” they ignore a fundamental truth: this has always been America’s story. It is crucial that our art and museums offer us the lens to see what cannot be denied—and what cannot be reduced.

Come see these artists and others, like Lisa Jarrett and Willie Bonner, whose paintings and installation works prompt reflection and provoke thought. “Blackness is…the Refusal to be Reduced” will be on exhibition through March 14th, 2027 at the Tacoma Art Museum.

Japanese Prints – Echoes of the Floating World at Tacoma Art Museum

Now through January 2026 at the Tacoma Art Museum, experience a unique fusion of history and modernity. Explore dozens of historic Japanese prints displayed alongside contemporary Pacific Northwest artworks inspired by the timeless ukiyo-e tradition.

Affordable and portable, Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) allowed everyday people in Edo-period Japan (18th-19th century) to collect art. When Japan opened up to the West in the late 1800s, Europeans brought many of these prints back where they inspired artists like Van Gogh, Manet, and Degas.

Utagawa Hiroshige b. Edo, Japan. Plum Garden Kamata 1857.

These works’ striking beauty and captivating subject matter drew global attention for decades. The visual style bled into Japanese tattoo art (irezumi) and influenced Japanese comics (manga), both of which have gained popularity in the West from the late 20th century onward.

Kenji Stoll, a Tacoma-based muralist and tattooist, practices traditional Japanese and American ink styles. Drawing from the TAM’s extensive ukiyo-e collection, thanks to donations from Constance Lyon and Al and Betsy Buck, Stoll, as guest curator, selected Japanese ukiyo-e prints alongside works by contemporary Pacific Northwest artists. Some artists are Japanese-American, others are Asian-American or Latin-American, or have lived in Japan.

As you enter the gallery, a large ukiyo-e mural by Stoll greets you, alongside sculptures and paintings by local artists inspired by Japanese styles.

Kenji Stoll b. in Tacoma, WA – Nikkei Butterfly, 2025, site specific mural.

VANVAN a local artist influenced by 20th-century pop culture, creates paintings that evoke manga and Japanese toys. Other artists, like Lauren Lida explore personal topics through the lens of Japanese print traditions, such as Lida’s investigation into intergenerational trauma from Japanese internment. Hanako O’Leary reinterprets Japanese aesthetics in contemporary sculptures.

VANVAN, b. in Bremerton WA – Panko – 2025

As you move through the exhibit, you’ll encounter original Japanese prints depicting dramatic Kabuki actors, heroic warriors, and serene landscapes.

This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view these works up close. Admire their delicate lines, textures, and dynamic compositions. Utagawa Kuniyoshi known for his prints of warriors (samurai) and supernatural creatures (yokai), also created works featuring dancers and anthropomorphic animals in motion.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi b. Edo, Japan – Celebration of springtime in the year of the Monkey: Turtle and Crane under the pine tree. 1847-1848.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi a student of Kuniyoshi, is also famous for samurai and yokai. A selection from his One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is featured here, showcasing layers of patterns and textures. The delicate lines and expressive calligraphy stand out.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi b. Edo, Japan, 1839 – I wish I had gone to bed immediately, but now the night has passed and I watch the moon descend. After 1887.

Across from these works are pieces by Yoshiko Yamamoto, a Tokyo-born artist who lived in the Pacific Northwest for 30 years before returning to Japan. Some of her works feature Tacoma-area subjects, influenced by Japanese ink-block style. Her work blends late 20th-century freshness with a bridge between contemporary and Western styles.

Yoshiko Yamamoto, b. Tokyo Japan, 1967 – Mt. Ranier, Summer Lake, 2024

My personal favorite is a triptych by Kawanabe Kyosai, a student of Kuniyoshi and later a follower of the Kano school. His work is more painterly, reflecting the transition from the Edo to the Meiji period. Kyosai is considered one of Japan’s first modernist artists.

Kawanabe Kyosai b. Japan – Top and bottom – sections from Kyosai’s Illustrated Account of a Hundred Demons, 1889.

His art shows a clear influence on modern manga, particularly in the playful and macabre expressions that would later shape Japanese cartooning.

Back to the local artists, inspired by both history and manga, we see works by Tacoma artist and tattooist Troy Long.

Troy Long b. Tacoma, WA Title pending – 2025

Echoes of the Floating World runs through Jan. 4, 2026 at the Tacoma Art Museum. The exhibition actually contains 60 works, but that they will not all be shown at once due to the damage that light can cause to these prints. There will be three rotations of 20-25 pieces between now and the exhibit’s January 2026 wrap-up. Please visit and visit again to see this full collection that Tacoma is honored with!

Charles Peterson’s Nirvana – Photography & Performance at Tacoma Art Museum

In collaboration with Seattle based Minor Matters Books and curated by Michelle Dunn Marsh comes a selection of gelatin silver and pigment prints by photographer Charles Peterson, on view at the Tacoma Art Museum until May 25, 2025.

Born in 1964 Peterson watched his uncle develop film in his grandparent’s basement, sparking an early fascination with photography. He went on to contribute photos to his high school yearbook and newspaper, and later study photography in college.

Peterson became the unofficial photographer for SubPop Records and was embedded in the Seattle music scene. His closeness to the scene is evident in many of the photographs, revealing an intimacy in his capture of emotion and expression. His work can be found in the following books: Screaming Life – 1996, Pearl Jam: Place Date – 1998; Touch me I’m sick – 2003; Charles Peterson’s Nirvana – 2024.

As you enter the exhibit there is a warning to not take photos or video. You’ll find inside an installation recreating Peterson’s photo lab to your left complete with inspiring rock and punk photos on the wall. Accompanying this experience is a mixed tape of Nirvana music, including many noisy experimental b-sides which can be heard broadcast across the exhibit.

A stage diver captured by Charles Peterson at a Nirvana show at the University of Washington in 1990. (Photo courtesy of Charles Peterson)

It’s worth reflecting on his work by way of previous punk photographers like the Bay Area’s Murray Bowles who photographed punk bands Operation Ivy, Green Day, Crimpshrine, Dead Kennedys and others at places like the all ages club the Gilman Street Project.

A show at the On Broadway, San Francisco, 1983. (Murray Bowles)

Like Peterson with the Seattle music scene, Murray Bowles was deeply embedded in the Bay Area punk scene for decades. He was a deep fan of many bands and knew many closely. His technique was one of a documentarian, holding his camera above a mosh pit, without looking through the view finder. There was element of chance, of capturing a chaotic moment. Bowles wasn’t just taking shots of bands, but the whole crowd. Peterson also wanted to photograph the audience, “I didn’t want to just get a head shot of the lead singer. I wanted to get the experience, make you actually feel like you’re there.”

These techniques are similar to that of street photographer Garry Winogrand who would walk down the street holding his camera ajar, taking random, uncomposed shots of humanity. He would take hundreds of photos at a time, and later identifying which ones he wanted.

Los Angeles, California, 1969 © Garry Winogrand. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Winogrand was influenced by earlier photographers like Walker Evans who captured depression-era America, often called the father of documentary photography.

A Miner’s Home, vicinity Morgantown, West Virginia. 1935

Winogrand was also inspired by Robert Frank who captured post-war America with an intense, expressive, penetrative style.

“Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955.Credit…Robert Frank, via Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

In contrast, the Bay Area’s Murray Bowles chose not to dwell on deeper, darker moments of the punk scene, although he could well have. Bowles work was full of movement, anarchic but upbeat. Bowles was a computer programmer with a deep love of the Bay Area punk scene. While not being especially introspective, his work was embraced as exemplifying the ‘freedom and joy’ of the punk scene.

A stagediver at a GBH show in the early 1980s, from ‘If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, Why am I in the Pit?’. (Murray Bowles)

Peterson was undoubtedly inspired by earlier punk photographers like Bowles whose photos often made their way to album covers, press releases, and Maximum Rock and Roll issues back in the 80s. But in contrast, Charles Peterson was able to combine this energetic, spontaneous quality with artistic training and a level of intimacy built up from working closely with the band over the years. Peterson was able to go deeper, especially with bands like Nirvana, making his work more emotionally poignant.

Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain at Rebar in Seattle in a 1991 photograph by Charles Peterson. 
Kurt Cobain Reading Festival 08 30 1992 Photo by Charles Peterson

Peterson’s art school training allowed him to meet the emerging music moment of Grunge with unique photographic techniques, like using a handheld flash and long exposures to show trails, communicating a new degree of intensity and dynamism. These visual approaches inspired a whole new generation of rock photographers in the 90’s.

Krist Novoselic and Kurt Cobain in Seattle on September 16, 1991. Photo: Charles Peterson

Curator Michelle Dunn Marsh sets up the multimedia selection of prints, photos, and photo lab installation in dialogue with photos, sculptures, and videos by 6 other artists including Sylvia Plachy, Nicholas Galanin, Jeffrey Michell, and Peterson’s professor Paul Berger. She tracks his work amid a soundscape of textured Nirvana noise and examples of other photographers to build a narrative journey.

No photos were allowed – you will have to visit to experience her curation first hand!

Visit the Tacoma Art Museum on Wednesdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (free admission 5-8 p.m.); Fridays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Sundays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (closed Mondays and Tuesdays). Admission is $18 adults, $15 seniors (65+), $15 military (active duty or retired with ID), $10 youth 6-18, and free for TAM members. For more information, call (253) 272-4258 or visit www.tacomaartmuseum.org. 

Shop for gothy gifts at Full Moon Flea Market

Edit: Their brick and mortar location unfortunately closed June 2023 – but you can still support their vendors listed through their website – Full Moon Flea Market.

Nestled in Antique row is shopping for the goth-inclined: Full Moon Flea Market – a self-proclaimed purveyor of “Grim Gifts and Goods: Dark Arts and Antiques from the Pacific Northwest.”

After a few years of being housed within the Sanford and Son building they moved to a storefront last year. They feature over the work of over 65 local artists – of spooky, macabre, horror, punk, LGBT, and witchy works. You can also everything from jewelry to pins and buttons, stickers, patches, books and zines, cards, art prints, and so much more.

Due to some health issues the physical storefront will be taking a hiatus for some months but they will be returning soon after. Their last in-store day will be May 28th, after which they will be doing all their business through their website – Please visit! Follow them on Instagram and Facebook. They will be doing a product refresh with new works from a variety of their awesome artists! Fullmoonfleamarket.com