I love museums. Well, really, I have a love/hate relationship with museums; I love going to them, but often get upset with how things are curated or exhibited. In classes, I often get students to consider the fundamental core of museum studies by asking a simple question. I tell them every museum has much more in storage than on the floor. There was a conscious decision in what is exhibited and how. I tell them to go to museums, but to ask themselves why are we being asked to look at this, and how is it being presented to convince us of a “correct answer.”

That being said, I still love going to museums and thinking about that question. But, I must admit I have not been to the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) since before COVID (that does not count the Seattle Asian Art Museum or the Olympic Sculpture Park). My sister, my goddaughter and her brother are visiting and we have been making the tourist rounds. We went to the SAM (I figured, well, I can see the Calder exhibit).

Much of the museum has been reimagined in a delightful way. Old masters are lumped together with more contemporary artists to show how each approached a theme or an idea. Indigenous artifacts are presented next to contemporary Native American artists’ creations that reference these traditions and materials. All of this was a welcome surprise.

But for a radio station, the highlight was the current exhibit “Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture.” This temporary exhibit is only here until September 2nd, so listeners do not have a lot of time to go become viewers. As the SAM website says:

This exhibition celebrates an alternative and oft-overlooked story in art history: the aesthetic practices that emerged in the West Coast in the 1960s and ‘70s as counter to the New York-centric avant-garde (https://www.seattleartmuseum.org/whats-on/exhibitions/poke-in-the-eye)

Sure, but front and center is Funk. There is lots of whimsy, like Patti Warashina’s “Airstream Turkey” and whimsy with a message, like Robert Colescott’s “Les Demoiselles d’Alabama: Vestidas,” but stay a bit longer with the Funk. Stand in the middle of Xenobia Bailey’s on-going textile and clothing installation and imagine that the soundtrack is Parliament and Sun Ra, that the Black Barbies might be at home as the playthings for little girls or boys in an Afro-futurist reality or on the set of the Black Panther (also an Afro-futurist reality). It comes as no surprise that the artist behind this “funktional design” studied ethnomusicology at the University of Washington.

Take my word for it, go see the exhibit before it is gone. Skip their audio-guide and bring your own headphones and listen to an archived show of World Beat Adventure, Multi-Cultural Mindsets, Soul Shakedown or History as Music/Music as History – see and hear Funk at the same time!

 

Photo Credit:
Roy De Forest’s “Life of a Sportsman” is featured in Seattle Art Museum’s “Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture” exhibition. (Nick Wagner / The Seattle Times)