Current Issue: Sep - Oct 2026
Preview Art Magazine
The trusted guide to galleries and museums throughout the Pacific Northwest.
“Every Picture Somewhat of an Experiment”: Helen Frankenthaler Prints
Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA - To April 24, 2027
The bequest of 26 prints and proofs by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation to the Henry Art Gallery provides students and visitors with an ideal chance to learn more about the trailblazing Color Field painter as well as her experimental approaches to perfecting the art of printmaking through size and painterly effects. Frankenthaler (1928–2011) is a major figure in the history of postwar American art. Daughter of a New York State Supreme Court judge and wife of New York School painter Robert Motherwell, she was eyewitness to the rise (and fall) of Abstract Expressionism and a central participant in its successor style, Color Field. During the Second World War, she and Motherwell were the only New York School artists fluent in French, so their home became...
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Handmade Revolution: Craft in the Pacific Northwest
Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR - To March 13, 2027
Handmade Revolution traces how regional artists pushed utilitarian craft traditions into contemporary art. The exhibition draws on the roughly 1,300-object collection once held by Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft, which landed at Hallie Ford after the Pacific Northwest College of Art merged with Willamette University in 2021. “This show is about craft and how artists have taken craft methods and applied them to what we think of as contemporary art,” curator Jonathan Bucci told Preview. “Less of making practical objects and more making art of objects.” The exhibition opens with a history of West Coast ceramics, anchored by Peter Voulkos’ untitled 1960 sculpture—a rough-edged, cross-shaped form on a wood pedestal that Bucci says helped fracture ceramics’ “purist approach.” Nearby, Ken Shores’ Little Red Eye takes...
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Takao Tanabe 100: Inside Passage
Audain Art Museum, Whistler, BC - To Oct 19
Those unfamiliar with Vancouver Island artist Takao Tanabe could be excused for wondering what “100” has to do with the title of his exhibition. Does it refer to the number of works on display? An introductory-level university course on the artist and his practice? Though Tanabe is prolific, there are not quite 100 works in Inside Passage; but of the more than 50 paintings, you could say that they constitute a career survey. The definitive answer, however, lies in the artist’s age: he turns 100 on September 16. Tanabe was born in Prince Rupert’s Seal Cove, the son of a commercial fisher. At 16, he and his family were interned in the Kootenays following Canada’s declaration of war on Imperial Japan. After the war, he...
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Elaine Cameron-Weir, Bookends
Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary, AB - Sep 18 – Nov 21
Curated by Tak Pham, Bookends celebrates the Alberta University of the Arts’ centennial with alumna Elaine Cameron-Weir, who is recognized internationally for her industrial and conceptually driven sculptures. Cameron-Weir was raised in Central Alberta before moving to New York, and her upbringing laid the foundation for her fascination with the intersections of nature, machinery and systems of human survival. As Colby Chamberlain so eloquently pointed out in Artforum in December 2019, Cameron-Weir’s practice resists categorization or easy alignment with any single tradition or ideology. Her work is an intriguing synthesis of pop culture, doomsday aesthetics, Silicon Valley nomenclature and warfare signifiers that conflates religion, eroticism and scientific experimentation into exquisitely rendered reliquaries. Wrote Chamberlain: “A BDSM dungeon for alchemist Bitcoin investors. A druid hideaway in...
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