For Immediate Release Press Contact:
Sarah Usher
SU PR, Inc.
[email protected]

Seattle Art Fair, presented by AIG, returns to the Lumen Field Event Center this July 21-24 for the fair’s celebrated weekend, bringing 85 top local, national, and international galleries together with the region’s strong collector base.

Seattle Art Fair’s anticipated sixth edition will feature an array of innovative installations, events, talks, and performances and will also highlight the region’s museums and institutions. Curated by Artistic Director Nato Thompson, Seattle Art Fair’s public projects program will speak to the many layers and facets of creativity that inspire and define the Seattle arts community.

Programming highlights at this year’s fair will include the following, and a full list of exhibitors can be found here.

Event Schedule:

Thursday, July 21 from 7:00-8:00 pm – Book Signing with Patti Warsashina
Location: Booth F09, John Natsoulas Gallery
-Patti Warashina is an American artist best known for her imaginative ceramic sculptures. She was instrumental in bringing the Seattle ceramic scene to prominence, heading up the department at the University of Washington, Seattle, and has had works featured in collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Friday, July 22nd from 2:00-3:00 pm – Current Trends in the Art Market: Health or Hype Cycle
Location: Christie’s Theater
-Presented by Perkins Coie, Christies & AIG, this expert panel of professionals will discuss what affects primary and secondary contemporary art markets and how diversifying trends shift the collecting landscape.

Friday, July 22nd from 5:00-6:00 pm – Book Signing with Tip Toland
Location: Booth F09, John Natsoulas Gallery
-Tip Toland is a ceramic artist whose work is subtly autobiographical: within a frozen moment, teeming with humanity, exists a vessel for her thoughts and feelings. She is a full-time studio artist and a part-time instructor in the Seattle area, and her work is represented in both private and public collections, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Kohler Art Center, and a promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Saturday, July 23rd from 12:00-1:00 pm – Managing Art Collections with Today’s Technology
Location: Christie’s Theater
-Presented by AIG and moderated by Kyle McGrath, Head of Collections at AIG Private Client Group, this interactive panel discussion will strengthen one’s knowledge about art and best practices in maintaining and growing a collection. Panelists will share their expertise on the nuances of minimizing risks when owning art today utilizing advanced new technologies including AI.

Saturday, July 23rd from 2:00-3:00 pm – The Future of Storytelling
Location: Christie’s Theater
-Presented by AMPLIFIER.ORG and moderated by their founder Aaron Huey, this thought provoking, intimate conversation will center around tactics for storytelling and dissemination in a multitude of mediums. It will provide an essential dialogue to show the importance of reclaiming the narrative in order to drive connection and action in times of fear, misinformation and an oversaturated media landscape.

 Saturday, July 23rd from 4:00-5:00 pm – Artist Talk with Carrie Mae Weems
Location: Christie’s Theater
-Distinguished artist Carrie Mae Weems, considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists for her work that investigates family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power, will present an engaging lecture on her extensive body of work, including photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.

Sunday, July 24th from 12:00-1:00 pm – Bridging the Digital and Physical: The Case for a Physical Space for NFT Art
Location: Christie’s Theater
-Presented by the Seattle NFT Museum, this panel of experts, moderated by the museum’s co-founder Jennifer Wong will discuss the importance of NFT’s existing in the physical world.

Sunday, July 24 from 3:00-4:00 pm – Romare Bearden and the Politics of Abstraction
Location: Christie’s Theater
-Presented by Wa Na Wari andThe Frye Museum, Inye Wokoma (artist and co-founder of Wa Na Wari) and Georgia Erger (Associate Curator, Frye Art Museum) will discuss artist Romare Bearden’s engagement with the aesthetics and politics of abstraction. Between 1952 and 1964 Bearden created an extraordinary, yet little known body of abstract works, which is represented in the Frye Art Museum’s current exhibition Romare Bearden: Abstraction.

Installations:

-Entitled Atlakim, 2020, the installation by Alan Hunt, Cole Speck, Aubrey Johnston Jr. (presented by Fazakas Gallery) features 15 carved masks created to represent The Atłak’ima (Atłak’im), known also as the Dance of the Forest Spirits, which is one of the four main dances performed during Kwakwaka’wakw Winter Ceremonials. It tells the story of a boy who gets lost in the woods and is visited by many guiding spirits who teach him virtues.

–Motel 6, a sculpture by contemporary Mexican artist Miguel Calderón (presented by Kurimanzutto), examines the game of correspondence between real spatial dimensions and our notion of them, specifically the paradox of the size of hotel billboards seeming much bigger than the actual size of the rooms themselves, by generating “a room” with the very same billboard advertising the motel.

–Wide Awakes Pop Ups, presented by Amplifier, one of the fourteen founding organizations of the new Wide Awakes movement, one of the largest collaborations of cultural leaders in U.S. history with nationwide civic actions before and after the 2020 election. This network of thousands of artists, cultural workers, and activists driven by the most urgent social and political issues of our time, will showcase a series of powerful visuals aimed to shift culture and change the national narrative.

–As the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined, 2022 by Clyde Petersen (presented by J. Rinehart Gallery) is a personal timeline of the transgender Northwest artist’s life as seen through the rings of a tree. Created with recycled cardboard, driftwood and lumber, this piece is a personal investigation and culmination of lived experiences, personal choices, life-altering moments and lingering traumas.

-Preston Singletary’s KILLER WHALE TOTEM (presented by Traver Gallery) will feature Singletary’s distinct artistic style which has become synonymous with the relationship between European glass blowing traditions and Northwest Native art. This full-sized totem pole shows Singletary’s clan crest, the killer whale, surrounded by detailed depictions of his moiety, the eagle, as well as a thunderbird and a wolf.

-Artist, filmmaker, journalist, Inye Wokoma, who co-founded Wa Na Wari, a Black-centered arts organization and community space, will present Separation Census, 2022, a body of work that employs collage and digital storytelling to explore the complicated intersection between personal narratives and our political economy and a critique of the ways we have conversations about development policy and the housing market.

-The installation THIS WORLD IS BEAUTIFUL, AND DANGEROUS TOO, 2022, created by Seattle-based, Pakistan-born artist Humaira Abid (presented by Greg Kucera Gallery) will feature Abid’s bold, symbolically rich, and meticulously realized wood sculptures and miniature paintings, this time in the form of a swing adorned with paintings of young children representing multiple lifetimes of violence, instability, peril, and statelessness.

-Peter Gronquist’s communion, 2022 (Presented by Winston Wächter Fine Art) will bring in a natural element into the unnatural environment. The large pool of water, created using rocks, steel, water, driftwood, silicone and led draws on inspirations he’s found from the pastoral sensibility and rural backdrop of the Pacific Northwest, which he uses to create work inflected by a sense of rough poetry and impermanence.

-Orly Anan’s installation, LAS BALEBOSTE, 2022 (Presented by Museum of Museums) is a constellation of 18 masks where Orly Anan explores the idealizations of female stereotypes with imagined characters full of strong personalities. Anan invites the viewer to explore the notion that who you are is how you pose, and how you pose is who you are.

-In the AIG Select VIP lounge, the Pilchuck Glass School will present a neon installation by a selection of artists including Jen Elek and Jeremy Bert, Julia Chamberlain, Bri Chesler, Minhi England, KT Hancock, Megan Stelljes, and Sarah Elizabeth Terry, each showcasing works that traverse the range of creative possibilities posed by glowing tubes.

–The Seattle Art Museum, and The Seattle NFT Museum will also be presenting special installations in their respective booths as well.

HOURS, LOCATION & TICKETING

Learn more about the 2022 Seattle Art Fair at: http://seattleartfair.com/
Tickets are available at: http://seattleartfair.com/About/tickets.aspx.html

Lumen Field Event Center 800 Occidental Ave S Seattle, WA 98134

Seattle Art Fair Opening Preview: Thursday, July 21st 6:00pm — 9:00pm

Public Fair Hours:
Friday, July 22nd | 12:00 pm — 8:00pm
Saturday, July 23rd | 11:00am — 7:00pm
Sunday, July 24th | 11:00pm — 6:00pm

AMP is a creative events firm that designs, builds, promotes and produces important cultural experiences worldwide. Since 2011, AMP has produced art fairs that focus on a high quality and engaging fair experience by connecting collectors with galleries in the most optimal settings. AMP’s current portfolio contains four major art fairs. AMP is a division of A21.

For more information about Seattle Art Fair and AMP, please visit http://seattleartfair.com/.