Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder, Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Priscilla Dobler Dzul: Water Carries the Stories of Our Stars
Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA
Oct 18, 2025–April 19, 2026
The weekend following Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Priscilla Dobler Dzul exhibits her museum debut at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, with her show, Water Carries the Stories of Our Stars. For Dobler Dzul, the medium is the message. The show will feature a variety of mediums—namely sculpture, textile, and video work—to chart stories of environmental and cultural injustice through the use of regionally sourced materials from Washington and South America, as well as regional methods. She looks to both the faraway aesthetic resources and techniques of her Maya ancestors and Yucatec Maya elders, as well as to the nearby Washington landscape and its abundance. Combined, she creates something new, reflecting her rich multicultural heritage. Water connects us, from the mouth of the Puget Sound to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Priscilla Dobler Dzul urges us to see water as a living portal of cosmic and ancestral knowledge, and to allow it to inform our present, past, and future.
Reflection: What environmental forces have shaped who you are today or who you are becoming?
New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics, and Place
National Nordic Museum, Seattle, WA
Nov 15, 2025–Mar 8, 2026
I would consider myself a food lover. I have a personal policy that I’ll try anything once. But, over the years, I have found that I appreciate a meal much more when it has a story; when I learn the provenance of each ingredient and how they work together in harmony. At the National Nordic Museum in Ballard, Seattle, a new exhibit explores what it means to create identity through food.
Nordic flavors do not have the same global renown as cultures like Japan, Italy, France, and China. This is why, in 2004, a group of Nordic chefs wrote a manifesto detailing the New Nordic Food Movement, which aimed to create a cultural identity through local ingredients and regional processes. Naturally, this movement left the kitchen and entered the dining room, influencing interior design. Eventually, these ideas left the restaurant entirely, infiltrating different facets of Nordic cultural aesthetics from architecture to contemporary art. In New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics, and Place, the National Nordic Museum presents a broad array of aesthetic developments that emerged from the New Nordic Food Movement, and how, together, these elements formed a cultural identity informed by land and aesthetics.
Reflection: In your life, is there a meal you’ve had that has stood out to you? If so, what made it so pertinent?