Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Stephanie Syjuco: After/Images
June 1 to September 8, 2024
Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA
However the image enters
its force remains within
my eyes
—excerpt from Afterimages by Audre Lorde
While in the main gallery hall for After/Images, a new exhibition at the Frye Art Museum by Stephanie Syjuco, I overheard a museum guide ask a group of young children to describe one of the pieces. In the photograph, a gloved hand holds an archival slide with an image too blurry to see. Only the words “Better American Lecture Service” printed on the slide’s frame are legible. After a few responses I couldn’t quite make out, the guide explained that the image within the photograph was damaged and then asked the students to consider, what does it mean for something to be damaged?
Flawed and incomplete, archives are inherently biased, with singular perspectives, cavernous gaps, and deafening silences. Through After/Images, Syjuco focuses on and enlarges these imperfections by questioning the omissions and misrepresentations inherent within institutional archives. In a section of the exhibition called The Uncertainty of Images, Syjuco employs “visual disruptions” to draw attention to the “distorted lenses through which we experience history.” Across the works, Syjuco blurs, covers, and smudges images while also highlighting errors in documents used to perpetuate violent colonial narratives imposed on the Philippines. The video Block Out the Sun, shows Syjuco covering the faces of Filipino people photographed for tourist brochures in a staged village during the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. In a series of works titled “Afterimages,” the artist crumbles these brochure photographs distorting the images to conceal those photographed. By visibly “damaging” and obscuring harmful images Syjuco reminds us that the archive is a site of contestation. How we engage with and interpret the archive can be just as critical as the items that comprise it.
The exhibit also includes Tender, Sifter, Keeper, Center, a large scale collage newly commissioned by the Frye Art Museum. The piece, which takes up an entire gallery wall with images and a video installation, has local significance because of Syjuco’s research at the greater Seattle chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS). By foregrounding these important community records, Syjuco presents the FANHS archives as what she considers, “necessary antidotes” to institutional archives, inviting us to consider community perspectives and personal histories with care and attention.
Throughout After/Images, Syjuco challenges viewers to contemplate how we might disrupt harmful narratives instead of accepting “historical record” as fact. For some, the archive is simply a tool to access information. For Syjuco, the archive is a space that necessitates urgent intervention.
Reflection: What if anything can archives tell us? And how, in Stephanie Syjuco’s words, can we continue to “talk back” to them?
[re]Frame:Haub Family Collection of Western American Art
May 18, 2024 to September 5, 2027
Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA
Ah my intractable wound!
My homeland is not a suitcase
and I am not a traveler
I am the lover and the land is the beloved
—excerpt from Diary of a Palestinian Wound by Mahmoud Darwish
The legacy of United States expansion carries a deep wound characterized by settler-colonial violence, slavery, xenophobia, militarism, and racism. It is a wound that demands more than redress and reparation; it is a wound that festers under pernicious mythology. In [re]Frame, a series of new exhibitions responding to the Haub Family Collection of Western American Art at the Tacoma Art Museum, guest curators Lele Barnett, Nikesha Breeze, Maymanah Farhat, and Patricia Marroquin Norby confront that wound directly. Though the four exhibitions can and should be considered separately, when experienced side by side they invite the viewer to actively deconstruct narratives about the “American West.”
As you enter the Haub Family Galleries, curator Lele Barnett brings the conversation to the site of the museum itself. Finding Home: The Chinese American West contains works that map the legacy of migration and the creation of community. Two pieces by Zhi Lin use city records and traditional hand scrolls to highlight the presence of Chinese residents in Tacoma while acknowledging the exclusionary violence they experienced in the region, including mob violence that occurred just outside the museum window along Pacific Avenue.
All of the [re]Frame exhibits unpack deep historical and personal ties to landscape. Blackness Is…the refusal to be reduced, curated by Nikesha Breeze, unpacks the vast spatial dimensions of Blackness by unearthing deep connections to the land and the legacy of Black people in the west. In a dark room, brontë velez’s film, CAN I GET A WITNESS?, prompts viewers to reflect on settler-colonial mentality and consider how to move in synchronicity with the land. In the film, two Black figures surrounded by the traditional homelands of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian, use movement to embrace, protect, and grieve the complex relationship between the land and the Black and Indigenous body.
In Nepantla: The Land is the Beloved, curated by Maymanah Farhat, an excerpt of Diary of a Palestinian Wound by Mahmoud Darwish is printed on the gallery walls in English, Arabic, and Spanish. Here, Darwish’s powerful meditation inspires the exhibition title and emphasizes solidarity expressed through artworks that foreground the common experiences of displaced communities from pre-colonial United States to the Arab and Latin diaspora.
The Abiqueños and The Artist, with black and white photography by Russel Albert Daniels documents the communities of Abiquiú in New Mexico offering a glimpse into the everyday lives of the Genízaro people. Curator Patricia Marroquin Norby strategically contrasts the images with the Southwest landscape paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. Noticeably absent from O’Keeffe’s paintings are the very people who have lived in the region for generations. It’s apparent that Daniel’s photography and O’Keeffe’s landscapes are not paired to perpetuate romantic notions of Abiquiú but to interrupt invisibilizing narratives.
For visitors to the Tacoma Art Museum, [re]Frame calls for a necessary reevaluation of our relationship to the West, dispelling myths not with insufficient bandages but through careful consideration. Fortunately, all four exhibitions will be on view for the next few years but make sure to see them while they are all together in this formation.
Reflection: How might we continue to refuse fragmented fictions after we’ve left the walls of the museum?