The Stranger

Beneath the Mask

Amanda Manitach — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

Shapiro’s journey through the art world is a storied one. by Amanda Manitach

Somewhere in Manhattan, sometime in the mid 1980s: a friend invited Ann Leda Shapiro to a clandestine gathering of nameless, faceless women at an artist’s loft. “Come to this meeting,” she was told. “We’re pissed off. We’re going to do something.” It turned out to be the beginning of the Guerrilla Girls.

Shapiro kept the secret of her involvement for 40 years; she will still only say so much. But there is one story about the time The Washington Post was sending people up to conduct a photoshoot. This posed a problem, as one of the primary commitments of the group was anonymity. Shapiro, taking notes for their meeting, was scribbling down ideas as fast as they came, when she committed a misspelling that would make art history: instead of guerrilla, she wrote gorilla. It was an a-ha moment, and their solution—the now-iconic gorilla mask—was born.

Shapiro’s journey through the art world is a storied one, her intersection with the Guerilla Girls just one of many tantalizing threads that could be spun into a volume. As she (selectively) spills the lore, our conversation is lubricated by multiple cups of coffee served in the artist’s Vashon Island living room. It’s a well-loved and lived-in house just up the road from a rocky slip of beach. Sun glitters off the face of the water, flooding the space with dappled light that dances across the ceiling with each break in the clouds. An acupuncturist’s table—not an easel or drawing desk—takes primary place in the room.

She’s lived here for 30 years, tucked away from the limelight.

Like the majority of female artists who achieve renown, it’s only been later in life that she’s been getting her flowers. (Shapiro turns 80 this August, though age feels like a preposterous abstraction here; she moves and speaks with the vivacity of someone 80 going on 18.) Last spring her solo exhibit, Interconnected Worlds, debuted in Antwerp. Another solo, Body Is Landscape, is currently hanging in Hong Kong. This January, Shapiro received the Betty Bowen Award—one of the region’s most coveted—which comes with a hefty cash prize and an exhibition at Seattle Art Museum. (Hers is scheduled for 2027.)

Categorizing Shapiro’s work is no easy feat. Watercolor and gouache paintings with an energetic, illustrative quality that plumb the esoteric, autobiographical, cosmic cartographies of the body. The body is ever-present in her work. Bodies that serve as landscapes. Bodies that swim in celestial storms and electric seas. Bodies as fine as stardust. Bodies that turn into trees that turn into something much deeper and primal. Detail so minute it seems physically impossible. Humor that is by turns brash, vulnerable, and grotesque mingles with sacred rage throughout earlier work; later imagery unfolds labyrinthine (self)portraiture that could keep a psychoanalyst busy for years.

It’s the kind of work the world is hungry for now. But it wasn’t always like this.

Shapiro grew up a “red diaper baby,” the daughter of card-carrying, working-class Communist parents who lived in a housing project in Queens. They were “neglectful, but had fabulous values,” she notes. Shapiro’s mother encouraged her artistic tendencies (which included being allowed to paint on the walls). On Saturdays, they took the train into the city so Shapiro could take classes at the MoMA’s art school, where she learned to “paint with sponges and throw paint at paper.” When the family eventually relocated to Manhattan, they moved into an apartment directly across from the American Museum of Natural History—a proximity that contributed to the development of Shapiro’s approach to close observation of the natural world. There was never going to be any other way but art for Shapiro; in her free time after high school she haunted the museum across the street, filling sketchbooks with intricate drawings of its curiosities while inquisitive museum guards looked on.

After high school, Shapiro rented a walk-up on the Lower East Side—the kind with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet down the hall. She worked at a library, then an advertising agency (where, to assuage boredom, she typed out entire chapters of Moby Dick, one page at a time). She saved enough cash to catch a hippie bus to San Francisco, where she rented a room under a staircase and enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute. She modeled and painted murals for money. She marched with Allen Ginsberg and made low-tech, psychedelic oil-and-paint visuals for the first Kool-Aid Acid Test concert (Shapiro was perhaps the only person present not tripping on drugs).

She attended the University of California, Davis, for grad school, where the critiques were performed exclusively by mustached men. When they brought her to tears during her first review (her paintings were too “primitive,” they berated), Shapiro resolved to never let such a thing happen again. At the next review, she arrived with a rubber penis strapped to her face. She nearly asphyxiated (she forgot to poke holes in the tip), but the stunt was so off-putting it worked; from that day on, the mustaches kept mum and she earned an MFA without further incident.

After graduating, Shapiro traded oil paints for watercolors, scaling to a more intimate style that reflected the inspirations of her youth: Little Lulu comics and the delicate nature drawings of her museum sketchbooks. When a curator from the Whitney Museum of American Art paid Shapiro a studio visit, they offered her a solo show of works on paper—an honor for any artist, let alone a recent graduate. But when the exhibit opened in the fall of 1973, Shapiro was appalled to find they had pulled three of her best paintings at the last minute. “I was shocked,” she says. “I had no idea I was doing anything that was controversial.”

The censored works in question—three watercolors completed in 1971—seem disparate at first glance, but each is threaded with the same provocative humor as Shapiro’s rubber dick that doubled as a mask. One of the paintings, Two Sides of Self, depicts a pair of hermaphroditic mermaids whose bodies appear to conjoin at the breasts, lips, and (male) genitalia. The central figure in Woman Landing on Man in the Moon is a female astronaut in a NASA spacesuit; three American flag patches placed across the uniform reveal slits through which breasts and a penis protrude. Across the inky void in the background, a fleet of tiny airplanes skywrites: one needs a cock to get by.

“I was just asking questions innocently, like, what is male and what is female?” says Shapiro. “There was no multiplicity of pronouns then, or anything like that. I was asking, do you have to be male—or act like a male—to be able to move ahead in the world, to be visible?”

The Whitney wasn’t having it.

Happily, Two Sides of Self and Woman Landing on Man in the Moon were both eventually acquired by the Seattle Art Museum in 2015—part of the Deed of Gift spearheaded by artist Matthew Offenbacher and his partner Jennifer Nemhauser after he won the Neddy Artist Award. Offenbacher used around $20,000 of the award funds to purchase works by women and queer artists, which were then gifted to SAM as a gesture of solidarity to the community and an attempt to help rectify the dearth of work by minorities in the museum’s collection.

That would be far in the future, however.

Following the ’73 exhibit, Shapiro withdrew from the art world. She would continue to paint, but she would not be censored, nor self-censor. Going forward, she exhibited only in underground spaces and spent the next two decades as a self-described “academic vagabond woman.” She taught criticism and art at universities across the country. She spent a semester in a boat sailing the world. In her six years of undergrad and graduate school, Shapiro had never had a woman teacher, not once; while teaching, she found herself the sole woman in every department. The token female academic, with a strap-on cock for a nose.

Or a gorilla mask. It was around this time that Shapiro found herself amid a group of like-minded artists who were pissed. It was also around this time that a close friend was diagnosed with AIDS, an event that would indirectly shift the trajectory of her life. Shapiro took up volunteering at a clinic in Austin that treated people with the disease. The clinic happened to specialize in acupuncture.

“When I started reading about the theory and history and philosophy of Chinese medicine, it was like falling in love,” she says. The definition of qi is not merely energy, Shapiro explains: “It is matter on the verge of becoming. It’s that moment when you’re living and dying simultaneously. And that’s what I’m trying to paint about, the dichotomies—that things aren’t in opposition, but they’re in interconnectivity.”

Shapiro left her university job to study acupuncture in Seattle. Just for a year (she thought). She fell for the practice as much as the theory—and she was really good at it.

To say Shapiro’s work/life amounts to something approximating Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art, in which everything merges into a cohesive whole—is far from a stretch, as art and acupuncture melded on the island she made home. During this time she published multiple books, including a picture book about Vashon, My Island, and a graphic novel, Art Notes of an Acupuncturist. In the latter, she outlines a pictorial history of the synaesthetic cosmologies contained within the human body. With bursts of grotesque humor and poetic wit, Shapiro illustrates the interconnections at play in orifices and organs, tracing the invisible threads between elements and colors, emotions and smells. It reads like a legend to unlock the symbolism of her later work.

Because the demand for Shapiro’s art has increased, there’s less time for acupuncture lately; almost all her hours are committed to the studio, where she’s currently working on six pieces for her upcoming exhibit at SAM. As she leads the way into her workspace—a standalone building behind her house, where soft island light pours through skylights—she explains a piece she is working on, about the ginkgo trees she recently encountered in Japan. “They’re the oldest trees in existence, living fossils,” Shapiro muses. “They survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb.”

But, of course, it’s about more than just that. If you look closely, you can trace the nervous system of the universe in the wood and roots of those trees.

February Things to Do: Visual Art

Amanda Manitach — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

The best February visual art events in Seattle. by Amanda Manitach

Want more? Here's everything we recommend this month: Music, Visual Art, Literature, Performance, Film, Food, and This & That.

Timothy Siciliano: The Lunch Before the Détente

THROUGH FEB 28

It’s kinky, it’s neon, it’s fascism. Timothy Siciliano spent the past three years creating a suite of paintings that hold a mirror to our times—a campy hot take on corruption and carnival rendered in luscious hypercolor. His war generals and dominatrix figures populate a sadomasochistic fever dream with echoes of The Night Porter, while other moments harken to Weimer-era artists like Otto Dix, who painted the grotesqueries of their zeitgeist with unflinching color and a dash of gallows humor. You’ll want to linger with cacophonic compositions dripping bullet shells and blossoms, gender-ambiguous bulges, leather, chains, and ruby pearls of blood. But don’t fret: He doesn’t gild the fascist lily with all sugar and sex. There are plenty of flies swirling around literal shit. Siciliano proves that in trying times, clowning the bad guys can be a pleasure. (studio e) AMANDA MANITACH

Scent Lending Library

THROUGH MARCH

What does God’s sweat smell like? Or the anoxic cold of Eau De Space? Smell for yourself at the Scent Lending Library, an olfactory exhibition that arrived at Fogue after its five-month run at Olfactory Art Keller in New York. While determining the base note of divine perspiration may involve a smidge of poetic license, NASA did actually work with chemists in 2008 to recreate the smell of the void (as relayed by space-walking astronauts), and Australian-born documentary filmmaker turned olfactory artist Donna Lipowitz has bottled these distillations for your sniffing pleasure. There are over 100 scents to explore (70 of which are available to check out for two weeks at a time), including delightful nose poems like Old Luggage, Bermuda Triangle, and American Psycho, as well as more classic fare, including the oldest continuously produced perfume, Guerlain’s 1889 Jicky. The sensory excursion to the world right under our nose is the perfect antidote to algorithm purgatory. (Fogue Studios & Gallery) AMANDA MANITACH

Samantha Yun Wall: What We Leave Behind

FEB 5–OCT 4

Overlapping figures of female bodies emerge and dissolve in Samantha Yun Wall’s velvet monochrome worlds. The Portland-based artist (and winner of the 2024 Betty Bowen Award) is a master of rendering images in ink and conté, where layers of shadow intertwine with stark black silhouettes. Wall’s imagery reflects the artist’s multi-ethnic background, blending Korean folk stories with elements from Eurocentric mythology to create scenes that seem plucked from an untold fairy tale. Her solo at Seattle Art Museum features new works haunted by the iconography of the pasqueflower, a motif throughout Korean lore, which Wall has entwined with the memory of a lost grandmother. While there, pause for Song Cycle, a newly installed kinetic sculpture by Chris Kallmyer, which uses vintage train-station signage to generate ever-revolving cascades of poetic fragments—words clacking and flipping through a mechanical stream of consciousness. (Seattle Art Museum) AMANDA MANITACH

Once Removed 01: Art in Vacant Spaces

FEB 21

It’s the first installment of what is whispered to be a recurring event (yes, please) granting artists free rein in a transitional site slated for demolition—in this case, a house in Greenwood. The project was conceived by Sammy Skidmore and Zoë Hensley, two gallerists with day jobs at commercial galleries wanting to expand into unconventional spaces while showcasing work too large, too experimental, or too existential for the white cube. Artists for the inaugural edition (probing themes of sex, power, and the poetics of space) include Nadia Ahmed, Rachael Comer, Jenikka Cruz, Gaeun Kim, and Ali Meyer. The free, all-ages party starts at 6 p.m. and goes late, with music by DJ spicycherrypop and Friends of the Road Ensemble. (DM @once__removed for address) AMANDA MANITACH

More

Excellence in Fibers X Through Feb 14, Schack Art Center, free

Welldweller: New Works by KEMC Through Feb 14, Specialist Gallery, free

Dan Webb: Yespalier Through Feb 21, Greg Kucera Gallery, free

Aisha Harrison: Porous Body Through Feb 22, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, free

Black History Month Exhibition Through Feb 26, M. Rosetta Hunter Art Gallery, free

Austin Lewis Through Feb 28, James Harris Gallery, free

Crystalline Lens - Curated by Allyce Wood Through Feb 28, SOIL, free

Group Show: Landscapes Through Feb 28, Winston Wächter, free

Kandis Susol Through Feb 28, Winston Wächter, free

New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics, and Place Through Mar 8, National Nordic Museum

Susan Meiselas: Crossings Through Mar 22, Photographic Center Northwest, free

The One-Two Punch: 100 Years of Robert Colescott Through Mar 29, Tacoma Art Museum

Boren Banner Series: Camille Trautman Through Apr 12, Frye Art Museum, free

Priscilla Dobler Dzul: Water Carries the Stories of Our Stars Through Apr 19, Frye Art Museum, free

Jonathan Lasker: Drawings and Studies Through Sept 27, Frye Art Museum, free

A Room for Animal Intelligence Through Nov 1, Seattle Art Museum

Ten Thousand Things Through Spring 2027, Wing Luke Museum

Ash-Glazed Ceramics from Korea and Japan Through July 12, 2027, Seattle Art Museum

Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze) Through Oct 2027, Olympic Sculpture Park, free

Chris Kallmyer: Song Cycle Ongoing, Seattle Art Museum

Gossip: Between Us Ongoing, Tacoma Art Museum

Haunted Ongoing, Tacoma Art Museum

Qiu Zhijie: Map of the History of Science and Technology Ongoing, Olympic Sculpture Park, free

Indira Allegra: The Book of Zero Opens Feb 4, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, free

Susan Bennerstrom: The Light Is Never the Same Twice Opens Feb 5, Patricia Rovzar Gallery, free

Worlds Seen and Unseen: Paintings by Gary Faigin Opens Feb 5, Harris Harvey Gallery, free

Wallflowers Opens Feb 7, Frye Art Museum, free

Legacy: Highlights from the Permanent Collection Opens Feb 14, Tacoma Art Museum

Project NW: Ralph Pugay Opens Feb 14, Tacoma Art Museum

Early Warnings

Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest Opens Mar 5, Seattle Art Museum

Actualize AiR and SOIL Collaboration: Imprints and Echoes - Curated by Julia Anderson Opens Mar 5, SOIL, free

Aimee Lee: Tethered Opens Mar 6, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art

Crafting Futures: Emerging Artists Invitational Opens Mar 6, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art

George & David Lewis: Deeply Rooted Opens Mar 6, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art

Interwoven Narratives Opens Mar 9, M. Rosetta Hunter Art Gallery, free

Water Ways: Healing the Circle of Water and Life Opens Mar 26, Schack Art Center, free

Boren Banner Series: Chloe King Opens Apr 15, Frye Art Museum, free

Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan Opens May 13, Seattle Art Museum

Tom Lloyd Opens May 16, Frye Art Museum, free

Hacking the Met

Amanda Manitach — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:48:00 -0800

“Western art history is colonial propaganda.” by Amanda Manitach

“Did you see Washington Crossing the Delaware?” a security officer asked as I scrutinized the labyrinthine floor plan of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s the largest painting in the American Wing. Nearly 22 feet across!”

I had indeed seen it, in all its largeness. It dominated the gallery packed with a crowd that collectively craned its neck to take in the larger-than-life future president, his stony stoicism radiating bombastically amid turbulent waters. But that’s where my experience of the art diverged from the rest of the tourists in the room.

I held my phone up to the painting, and then, as though a hit of psilocybin had just kicked in, the details of the painting began to move. The floating ice atop the river currents jostled, oars churned, and the chests of men heaved. Words materialized: “Rights Of Nature” seared white against the overcast sky, only to dissipate just as quickly into a scattering flock of white birds. The image of Washington and his men soon melted, water giving way to effervescent vegetation that coalesced into shifting forest, which dissipated into a radiant night sky with the words “landback” stamped into the black. I’d never seen anything like this before—not in a museum, or anywhere.

Nearby visitors did a double take at the image dancing across my phone. This visual sorcery was happening on my screen, augmented reality unfolding in real time. Other people were witnessing a frozen moment painted by Emanuel Leutze in 1851. I was watching an artwork called LANDBACK by Flechas, an artist collective. Twenty-six artworks like this one are currently being activated at the Met, available to view through the end of the year.

Titled ENCODED, this guerrilla art exhibit is an attempt to address the erasure of Indigenous presence throughout American art history. The absence of Indigenous bodies—or Indigenous anything—is a glaring omission among the 20,000 artworks on view in the American Wing. Instead, galleries are filled with pristine, unpeopled landscapes, there for the (re)claiming. The romanticized paintings of Albert Bierstadt and his Hudson River School colleagues set the tone early on, and as colonizers decimated the lives, fortunes, and lands of some 1,000 Indigenous tribes across Turtle Island (also known as North America), the genre was cemented into art history. Paintings served as postcards for westward expansion, offering a thinly veiled (if veiled at all) gospel of manifest destiny.

To access ENCODED (on view through the end of the year), visitors at the Met can launch an AR viewer accessible via QR code on the exhibit’s website, encodedatthemet.com. The site also offers a gallery of videos that capture what the experience looks like firsthand, as well as a link to an Amplifier app that allows folks at home to activate the static target images through their phone.

While it features work made by 17 Indigenous artists from across the continent, ENCODED has tendrils deep through the Pacific Northwest. It is also, simply put, unprecedented, both for the technology it employs and because it is unsanctioned. Not illegal, per se, but executed without permission.

Hacking the Met was something Cleo Barnett had been thinking about for years. It was the kind of thing her nonprofit, Amplifier, was made for. Founded by Barnett and Aaron Huey nearly 10 years ago in Seattle, the media lab works with artists and technologists to create unforgettable multimedia campaigns focused on disrupting, educating, and amplifying voices. With under 10 employees, the team is small and limber—they can work fast in response to political and cultural events. “We have always been interested in how we can bring the voices of artists from our community into different public spaces, in order to tap into collective consciousness and shift it,” says Barnett. “The American Wing of the Met is the pulse point of the propaganda that we’ve all been told about the founding story of this country in its current form.”

Technology provided a way to address these omissions through AR interventions by Indigenous artists. But the timing and the funding (or lack thereof) was never quite right until this past summer, when Barnett pitched the idea to an anonymous Indigenous funder who agreed to take on the project immediately. With only a three-month runway to Indigenous Peoples’ Day (the second Monday of October), Barnett brought on Tracy Renée Rector to curate the group of artists. “I wanted to show the breadth of Indigenous technologies, ranging from millennium-old pottery to digital art—a span of Indigenous creativity,” says Rector, a filmmaker and curator who splits her time between Portland and Tacoma. For the past two decades, Rector has served as the executive director of 4th World Media (formerly Longhouse Media), which she founded and now co-directs, which provides artist services for Black, Indigenous, brown, trans, and queer creatives. “In the two months before the launch, the technology itself changed so much,” says Rector. “The tech is so incredibly new that even a week before the show, there were major adjustments.”

Many of the pieces in ENCODED push the limits of what AR can currently do, like rendering 3D images that are anchored to 3D objects. Katsitsionni Fox’s Gifts From the Ancestors appears tethered to neither earth nor air. The target artwork in the Met’s collection is Indian Vase, a marble amphora by Ames Van Wart, the well-to-do descendant of colonizers (his grandmother was Washington Irving’s sister) and European playboy. The ornate vase, which was created on the occasion of America’s centennial, features two Indigenous warriors perched on the rim, hunched in resignation. The scene of a buffalo hunt—a wistful memory—plays out in relief carved around the base. Seen through the lens of ENCODED, the marble is eclipsed by a huge clay Haudenosaunee vessel painted blue and decorated with meteor showers. As the viewer circles around the plinth, tails of shooting stars spiral through the air, raining down.

Nearby is Cass Gardiner’s transformation of Jerome B. Thompson’s The Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain. It’s a saccharine painting featuring a group of rosy-cheeked picnickers in gowns and ascots gathered on a mountaintop. One figure—a shabbier, less dandified iteration of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog—stands gazing into the expanse of the unfolding mountain range. Gardiner’s activation turns the bucolic landscape into a pixelated image displayed on an old Windows screen—a scene from the Oregon Trail computer game. Two 8-bit Indigenous figures pop up in frame, accompanied by a text block that says: “Look at these guys, acting like they discovered the place.”

Mexican Girl Dying is another piece in the Met’s collection—a woman wounded in battle, rendered in marble, recumbent on the floor of the bustling Charles Engelhard Court. The fortress-like neoclassical façade of the Branch Bank of the United States (originally located on Wall Street) serves as backdrop to the spectacle. Her back is arched as she clutches a naked breast in one hand, a rosary in the other. The sculptor, Thomas Crawford, carved the piece in Rome in 1848, inspired by William H. Prescott’s sensationalized History of the Conquest of Mexico, published just a few years earlier.

Priscilla Dobler Dzul’s augmentation of Mexican Girl Dying is a literal and figurative redressing. The nakedness has been covered with a heavily embroidered pelt of a puma—the digital rendering of a piece Dobler Dzul created for an exhibit at MadArt in Seattle in 2023. The original was made using the pelt of a cougar that died in captivity at a local zoo. The AR component proved one of the most ambitious in the exhibit; both the pelt and the marble sculpture were photographed thousands of times from every angle, in every type of light. (For each piece in ENCODED, the Amplifier team visited and photographed target objects at the Met continually throughout the full breadth of daylight hours in order to seamlessly recreate the image in AR.)

For Dobler Dzul, the intervention is a celebration of her Yucatán Maya ancestry, an attempt to undo the colonial flattening of the cultural identities of nearly 70 Indigenous tribes that populated the region currently known as Mexico. It is also an act of defiance: interrupting a gaze that is endemic to the colonial exploitation of bodies.

In another room in the wing, Jarrette Werk reimagines Seymour Joseph Guy’s Story of Golden Locks—a shadowy depiction of a little white girl regaling her siblings with the British fairy tale—into a portrait of his niece, Harmony. Werk is a journalist and photographer who works for Underscore Native News in Portland, an organization that covers Indigenous communities in the Northwest. For his piece, Werk interviewed and filmed his young niece Harmony (or Bííín íθeih in Aaniiih). In The Story of Bííín íθeih, what emerges from the shadows of Golden Locks is a portrait of exuberance. Trembling rainbows burst into fields of flowers as Harmony describes the joys of being Native.

”So much of the photography of our Native youth has served as propaganda,” Werk says. “Photographers came through Indian boarding schools with a mission to document children being ‘civilized.’ So many of those children look so sad. In the work I do, the youth I encounter are beautiful, vibrant little spirits. They’re having fun. There are many lasting impacts of colonization, but we’re beginning to see intergenerational healing. That’s what I wanted to showcase.”

Portland-based ENCODED artist, writer, and activist Demian DinéYazhi´, from the Navajo Nation (Diné), doesn’t mince words: “Western art history is colonial propaganda.” It’s one of many letterpress statements DinéYazhi´ created for the series Protect the Sacred Voice, made during a residency at Mullowney Printing.

DinéYazhi´ has never stepped foot in the Met. “When I first got the call from Tracy, I was nervous because the Met is one space that I refused to enter,” says DinéYazhi´. “I refused to allow my ancestral philosophies or symbols to be in conversation with the space through my own practice.”

DinéYazhi´s work is frequently rooted in language, text used directly and subversively to critique the institutional structures and powers at play in the art world—powers that dictate who gets to make work, who gets paid, who gets seen. The work of dismantling and rebuilding these structures goes hand in hand with decolonizing work. Violence, power, and genocide are all intertwined, encoded within art history.

Upon entering the American Wing, DinéYazhi´s piece is one of the first interventions activated through the exhibit’s AR filter, with text superimposed over a lavish mosaic fountain mural designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The augmented view reveals a neon sign that flashes across the iridescent Favrile glass swans. It says: we deserve dignity over solidarity / we desire survival over statements / we demand resources over acknowledgements.

ENCODED is not DinéYazhi´s first time hacking a museum. Their piece in the 2024 Whitney Biennial served as a Trojan horse of a poem; stanzas of red neon letters mounted to a steel framework made headlines because of a hidden message revealed only after the piece was installed at the museum. As the neon letters intermittently flickered, they spelled out the words “free Palestine.”

“At the end of the day it’s not a priority of mine to tell people to go to the Met to experience this exhibition,” DinéYazhi´ says. “I think the major takeaway is that we become aware of ways we maintain our power as artists and as individuals in this shared time in our history. As artists, we need to continue to dream new ways of strategizing in these spaces, of challenging these spaces, of maintaining our voice.”

Nicholas Galanin’s “NEVER FORGET,” superimposed over 1865 painting “The Valley of Wyoming” by Jasper Francis Cropsey. AMPLIFIER

Unlocking the art in ENCODED feels like a scavenger hunt after a while. Nicholas Galanin’s iconic Never Forget (featuring the words “INDIAN LAND” in the style of the old Hollywood sign, originally erected outside Palm Springs for the 2021 iteration of Desert X) appears nestled along the horizon of Jasper Francis Cropsey’s 1865 painting Valley of Wyoming. In other paintings still, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Midéegaadi figures dance across hollow landscapes, or emerge through the tangled flourishes of 19th-century wallpaper covering gallery walls—dances to summon the bison back to the land. At times the dancers’ toes balance on the precipitous edge of the painting’s gilt frame. In such moments the seamless integration of the augmented image is pure thrill.

As of now, the Met has yet to issue an official statement about ENCODED and its interventions (though it seems it would behoove the institution to acquire the exhibition works and offer them as a permanent extension of their collection).

Regardless, the strategy behind ENCODED is a success on many levels. It navigates defiance with delicacy: No art was harmed in the making of the exhibit. Perhaps most importantly, it feels like a breakthrough in the way art can be experienced on the most fundamental level. I won’t lie: Once you’ve begun to unlock the artworks in ENCODED, it’s hard to go back to viewing the static, one-dimensional relics. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. At a time in human history when technology seems to be threatening our collective intelligence and livelihoods, the breakthroughs produced by Amplifier and the artists of ENCODED prove that we are still only just beginning to discover the potential of the new tools at hand. And (as is often the case), it is artists who lead the way in dreaming that potential to life.

December Things to Do: Visual Art

Amanda Manitach — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 11:56:00 -0800

The best visual art events of the month. by Amanda Manitach

Want more? Here's everything we recommend this month: Music, Visual Art, Literature, Performance, Film, and Food.

Peter Ferguson + John Brophy + Jean Labourdette

Dec 12–Jan 10

Three solo shows under one roof at Roq La Rue offer paintings of the jaw-dropping ilk. Each artist wields the paintbrush like a Dutch master, and each delves headlong into the realm of dark fairy tale with their unique twist. Montreal-based Peter Ferguson (described as “Norman Rockwell meets H.P. Lovecraft”) offers luminous (yet somehow dim) visions of sepia-drunk cityscapes and other scenes frozen in time that send the mind spiraling in search of a story. Jean Labourdette’s hyperrealistic miniatures of birds, skulls, and other ephemera are often only two or three inches in size, encased in vintage hinged gilt wood casings or antique reliquaries. John Brophy’s oil paintings of characters seem to glow from within: The shimmer of gathered fabrics, reflecting pools of satin, gloss of grass, and threads of delicate pointelle lace will have you hopelessly, luxuriously lost in the details. (Roq La Rue) AMANDA MANITACH

Equinox Studios: 19th Annual Very Open House

Dec 13

For nearly two decades, Equinox Studios in Georgetown has been a hub for arts. Sited in a World War II-era factory, the complex oozes that Georgetown gearhead grit and realness and is home to over 150 artists, from dancers and ceramicists to blacksmiths and painters (such as the brilliant Beth Gehan and Mary Ann Peters). We know that Georgetown loves to throw a good party, and this December iteration of the Georgetown Art Attack will be one for the books, as it syncs up with the Equinox open house (the annual event usually draws 6-8k visitors). Festivities this year include a pop-up Native Art Market, a host of food trucks, and artist-made fire pits scattered through the block. Live music starts at 4 p.m. with nance!, Flesh Produce, the Noble Manes, Bandski, Sirens of Serpentine Bellydancers, Night Owl, Town Forest, and Lil Lebowsxi. And since it’s Georgetown, of course there will also be a renegade marching band on the premises. (Equinox Studios, 3 pm–late) AMANDA MANITACH

Dan Webb: Yespalier

Jan 8–Feb 21

Dan Webb is a woodcarver—the old fashioned kind who chips away slowly at a tree, through sap and heart and bark, to draw things out. His melting chairs and busts draped in luxurious fabric-y folds speak to a mastery of the medium, as well as a playful sensibility that coaxes unexpected meaning from a blank block. Despite the trompe l’oeil playfulness, the wood-ness of Webb’ s sculptures is always felt; the tree is present. Like Michelangelo’s non finito Prisoners emerging from their stone, Webb’s subjects feel as though they’ve willed themselves into being, emerging from the raw pith of the earth. In Yespalier (a portmanteau of yes and espalier—the ancient horticultural technique in which fruit trees are trained along a frame to direct their growth) Webb has created a body of work that is less planned, more improvisational and sketchy. How does one “sketch” with wood? By starting with a simple square frame and carving inward. The resulting sculptures are delightfully meandering, surreal, and all over the place in the best way. (Greg Kucera Gallery) AMANDA MANITACH

Merlantis, or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Opens Jan 30

What lies beneath the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? An underwater city loosely based on Seattle and built of fallen trash, of course. While “the damaging effects of commodification and rampant capitalism on our planet” sound like heavy themes for troubled times, this exhibition put on by the group True Misschiff promises to handle the subject with campy panache in an attempt to “normalize non-normative approaches to life and gender” through the adventures of characters like Brosiedon, the douchey ruler of the merpeople. Base Camp 2 has recently restructured its exhibition timeline to focus on four big shows a year, which is great news, as the massive old luggage store space lends itself to immersive worlds such as Merlantis promises to be. In addition to ticketed events and cabaret performances (sponsored by the fictional corporation Blissfish), there will be art for sale, a thematic gift shop, and more fishy shenanigans available through March. (Base Camp 2) AMANDA MANITACH

More

Face Time: Joey Brock, Gary Hill, and Mickalene Thomas Through Dec 19, James Harris Gallery, free

Hello Again: Fresh From the Back Room Through Dec 20, Greg Kucera Gallery, free

Jen Ament: Headtrip Through Dec 20, Spectrum Fine Art, free

Timea Tihanyi Through Dec 20, Greg Kucera Gallery, free

Emily Tanner-McLean: Let your karma be your dharma Through Jan 3, Shift Gallery, free

Scott Coffey: Going on a Walk at the End of the World Through Jan 3, Shift Gallery, free

Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form Through Jan 4, MoPOP

Tariqa Waters: Venus Is Missing Through Jan 4, Seattle Art Museum, Wed–Sun

Storytellers: A Group Exhibition Through Jan 6, Stonington Gallery, free

Thirty Years, A Thousand Stories Through Jan 17, ArtX Contemporary, free

Beau Dick: Insatiable Beings Through Jan 18, Frye Art Museum, free

Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism Through Jan 18, Seattle Art Museum

Cultured Commodities: Photographs from the Henry Collection Through Jan 28, Henry Art Gallery, free