Current Issue: Feb - Mar 2026
Preview Art Magazine
The trusted guide to galleries and museums throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Remembering Gathie Falk, 1928–2025
Gathie Falk, who was born in rural Manitoba in 1928 and died in her longtime Vancouver home this past December, was one of Canada’s most original and beloved artists. She was late coming to her true vocation, her early life scored by poverty, displacement and discouraging setbacks, but also sustained by deep wells of hard work, resourcefulness and Mennonite faith. It wasn’t until she was into her 30s that she was able to undertake serious art studies and to define her creative identity, shaping a body of work that was once described as “the veneration of the ordinary.” With her imaginative weaving together of funk ceramics, mixed-media installations and groundbreaking performance works, Falk emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a distinctive member...
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Yongzhen Li: Structures of the unsaid
Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery, Vancouver, BC - March 4 – April 13
Yongzhen Li’s delicate paintings stand in contrast to the psychological and symbolic violence inherent in their subject matter. For Li, this violence is baked into an age-old Chinese patriarchal culture that continues to shape notions of identity, gender and emotional conformity. In response, Li produces paintings that would be counter-narratives if they weren’t so open-ended, existing in that liminal space between resistance and confrontation. Stylistically, Li’s work begins within the traditions of Chinese painting, which employs ink, brush, xuan paper and mugwort dye as its material base. Those familiar with xuan paper will know there is no erasure, a constraint that parallels the social conditioning Li is at odds with. But with every constraint there is a liberty, and Li finds this in the brush...
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D.E. May: Postcards from Islandsalem
Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR - To March 21
Mixed-media artist D.E. May (1952–2019) is commemorated in a large retrospective in the city synonymous with his work, Salem. His forms included collages, drawings, paintings, sculptures, templates, testbeds and mail art, among others. Independent curator Linda Tesner told Preview she knew May well and was amazed at his almost uncategorizable body of work. “He’s really sui generis,” said Tesner. “Some people compare him to Joseph Cornell because he was a collage artist, and he legendarily loved Marcel Duchamp, but he was hardly a Dadaist. He admired Le Corbusier’s drawings, but he does not give you a toehold into art history.” The museum will host a free open house at May’s downtown Salem workshop (never “studio”; he did not think his art making was different from...
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Pudlo Pudlat: Art Is Life
Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre, Medicine Hat, AB - To March 7
In Pudlo Pudlat: Art Is Life, brightly coloured airplanes soar above spear-wielding hunters moving across frozen tundra. With the planes’ noses pointed skyward, their curvaceous forms bulge at the cockpit and taper at the tail, suggesting the bending, leaping motion of fish. Such imaginative juxtapositions are featured in a touring retrospective that celebrates the remarkable contribution of Pudlo Pudlat (1916–1992) to the development of Inuit art while foregrounding his distinctive storytelling and illustrative practice. Across the exhibition, traditional practices of hunting and fishing coexist with helicopters, power lines and satellite dishes, forming visual narratives that reflect adaptation as much as disruption. His white surfaces evoke arctic ice, snow and sky, holding both real and imagined space while revealing Pudlat’s attentiveness to the world around him....
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The One-Two Punch: 100 Years of Robert Colescott
Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA - To March 29
The celebrated African American artist Robert Colescott (1925–2009) spent substantial amounts of time in the Pacific Northwest before settling permanently in Tucson, Arizona. He grew up in Oakland, California, son of musician parents who had moved west at the start of the Great Migration. After serving in World War II, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and, prior to his 1952 MFA, with French Cubist master Fernand Léger in Paris. The emerging artist then spent time in Seattle, where he befriended artist Norman Lundin and taught at Queen Anne High School. As we see in the centennial exhibition at Tacoma Art Museum, from the mid-1970s, Colescott examined in depth African and African American history with great humor, bitterness and satire in extravagantly colored...
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