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.

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.

On Native Land – Landscapes at the Tacoma Art Museum

How one curates an exhibit, whose voices, whose identities one decides to center can be an opportunity to heal wounds, hold conversations, and work toward justice. The curator of the Tacoma Art Museum took this opportunity when she developed the signage for how to show the Haub collection of American landscapes. Each painting featured a landscape of what was originally Native Land. Rather than paring each painting with a biographical card about the typically white artist from the 1800s, the curator Faith Brown consulted with local members of the Puyallup tribe to instead center the Native community that had inhabited that land. By describing each work of art as being part of an ancestral homeland of different Native peoples, providing the names of the fields, lakes, rivers, mountains in the languages of those that lived there, they were in a sense giving these landscapes back to the Native communties, giving them the voice and platform within the museum. It was a very powerful act to see, a decision that was moving, important and necessary. The names of the artist were still on the painting itself, but it no longer became necessary to center these names when there others voices needed uplifting.

A video of the virtual opening gives broader context to this exhibit and its aims to cultivate a compassionate and inclusive future.

I encourage everyone local to attend this in person, the exhibit presents a visceral space where one hears the voices of Indigenous people speaking their native languages while you view the landscapes and their accompanying description of who originally lived there and what these mountains and rivers were called. This juxtaposition when you are accostomed to otherwise seeing cards with artist and art historical notes is poignant and welcome.

Tacoma Art Museum provides also a link to additional resources for more information on Native Land and artists, filmmakers and writers working conceptually and strategically toward Land Back efforts and Tribal Sovereignty.

“Golden Time (Grand Tetons)”
This painting is of Tee-win-at (or Teewinot), meaning the Many Pinnacles, also known as the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.

Nina Katchadourian’s Curiouser at Blanton Museum of Art

Multimedia artist Nina Katchadourian’s exhibit Curiouser will be at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin until June 11, 2017

A child of transatlantic flights, raised by Armenian and Finnish parents, Nina Katchadourian is a conceptual artist steeped in mapping and translation. Her parents and brother figure into her pieces, appearing in video and audio works. They provide active and supportive participants for her rituals and mythologies which create unique order out of seemingly mundane, disparate items. For the viewer her multimedia pieces are playful, evocative and break down the molds imposed by popular culture and homogeneity.

Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #4

Studies have shown that the mind when subjected to chronic stress and conventional demands over a period of time, with no space for reflection or creative re-organization, can begin to suffer loss of memory. Parts of the brain, through both overuse and atrophy can see a shrinking of connections and activity. The visual arts can be valuable in that they force a separation from the rational world, providing a controlled space in which one can engage with playful exercises in fragmentation or contradiction. Whether through surrealistic juxtaposition, the absurd, or an exploration of childhood play revisited after 30 years, Katchadourian’s art is perfect for this. Her work engages in a natural disengagement from inherited conceptual categories. In one piece she takes apart all the countries on a Rand McNally map of the world and then pieces them back together, re-imagining geography. Her entire show resembles this process and is a welcome relief for our imagination. I saw groups of both children and adults delighting in the serendipity behind her creations. I can say with certainty that their minds grew and stretched happily in the process.

Geographic Art

In some of her pieces, such as the Genealogy of the Supermarket, Katchadourian locates absurd links between unrelated images, building enormous webs of relationships between them that could exist, if the world followed different rules. In another she has observed a torn and abandoned spider web and she attempts to rebuild it with red thread.

The humor in her artworks is not a cynical humor, from a secure, knowing vantage point, ironically disrupting or challenging preconceptions in some cruel manner. Instead it is the humor of an outsider, traveler, or child who builds her own meaning and order, organizes and arranges collections that communicate relationships or patterns.

Katchadourian sees a world of languages and cultural objects and arranges them, repairing gaps like a broken spider web so they can communicate new stories. For the viewer, we are grateful for these changes to have our own static categories interrupted, challenged, and rebuilt. And for the modern mind, bogged down by repetition and tired structures, these new mythologies allow us to breathe and build new connections, maybe even with red thread.

New photograph acquisitions at the Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center is world renowned for its photography archives and their holdings are continuing to grow. From Feb. 9 until May 29, 2016 they will be celebrating almost 200 new acquisitions. Look Inside: New Photography Acquisitions traces progressions in the art from the post-war period through to the contemporary era.

Enjoy their time-lapse installation video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcQFo2iENdw&feature=youtu.be

Strange Pilgrims – Environment & Place

The Contemporary Austin is offering til January 24th of next year, a surreal, experimental journey hosted in three parts, at the Jones Center, Laguna Gloria and the Visual Arts Center at UT. Inspired in part by the title of the collection of short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, these three showings feature “vignettes offering dark and surreal meditations on memory, mortality and the passage of time.” The following artists’ work is present in the exhibition: Charles Atlas, Trisha Baga, Millie Chen, Phil Collins, Andy Coolquitt, Ayse Erkmen, Roger Hiorns, Nancy Holt, collective Lakes Were Rivers, Angelbert Metayer, Bruce Newman, Yoko Ono, Paul Sharits, and Sofia Taboas. UT Press has published a 250 page catalogue of the exhibit.

The Jones Center is offering the first installment of the three-part exhibition, Environment and Place showcasing installation, video, architectural and landscape oriented works. 1960s-1970s conceptual and minimalist art by Bruce Nauman and Nancy Holt share space with contemporary artists Millie Chen, Andy Coolquitt, Roger Hiorns and Angelbert Metayer.

Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970) is about changing perspectives by inviting the viewing to walk through a narrow corridor lit by green neon lights. It’s presented within the large upper space of the downtown Jones Center, with its historical stone, wood and industrial walls. The juxtaposition of this piece with its neon to the cool, calm of the natural elements in the building is jarring. I did not see many viewers volunteer to walk inside the corridor, perhaps because we are so often surrounded by neon and artificial light. It would be interesting to compare audience perceptions from its original debut and environment 45 years ago.

Millie Chen’s Tour (2014) invites us to return to a different kind of temporal site. In hers she presents four historical killing fields viewed while walking through tall grasses or meadows that have reclaimed the land. As we walk away from and through these sites of trauma we hear lullabies and gentle folk music from the Lakota, Khmer, from Rwanda and from Yiddish artists. Each site blends meditatively into the next allowing us to take this tour and reflect.