Tacoma Art Museum – förlag

What Is a Trade? Donald Fels and Signboard Painters of South India presents sixteen large-scale paintings that explore trade and globalization in India. Fels' conceptual starting point for this exhibition was Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's 1498 voyage to Malabar, India, in search of a direct sea route for the spice trade. What is a Trade? explores the historic and modern-day legacy of that expedition more than 500 years later.In 2004 and 2005, Fels traveled to Kerala (formerly Malabar), India, as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, to work with local commercial signboard painters on a body of work that examines globalization in India and traces its roots to Vasco's voyage. Most of the signboard painters had formerly worked as billboard painters -- until recently, all billboards in India were hand-painted, but cheaper and more efficient inkjet printers are making the painters obsolete. In light of this trend, Fels and his collaborators created work in the style of traditional hand-painted billboards and Bollywood advertising. The bright colors and strong graphic narratives make visually arresting statements about the historic and contemporary effects of trade and globalization.

For more than three decades, Northwest artist Nancy Worden has explored the cultural dynamics that shape contemporary social and political agendas, emphasizing the female experience in the United States. Working from her vast knowledge of jewelry’s venerable traditions and forms, she demonstrates a high level of intellectual rigor and simultaneously cultivates a complex engagement with aesthetics and pleasure. Reflecting her passion and personal convictions, her jewelry is forceful, unapologetic, demanding, and gripping. Her jewelry is often humorous and sometimes painful, but her voice is never timid.Loud Bones is the first scholarly examination of Worden’s career. Her work is held in private and museum collections in the United States and Europe.

For more than three decades, Northwest artist Nancy Worden has explored the cultural dynamics that shape contemporary social and political agendas, emphasizing the female experience in the United States. Working from her vast knowledge of jewelry’s venerable traditions and forms, she demonstrates a high level of intellectual rigor and simultaneously cultivates a complex engagement with aesthetics and pleasure. Reflecting her passion and personal convictions, her jewelry is forceful, unapologetic, demanding, and gripping. Her jewelry is often humorous and sometimes painful, but her voice is never timid.Loud Bones is the first scholarly examination of Worden’s career. Her work is held in private and museum collections in the United States and Europe.

Northwest landscape painter Victoria Adams is equally committed to the landscape tradition and the creation of exquisite scenes that address the contemporary desire for the sublime. Adams depicts idealized landscapes that evoke virgin terrain, untouched by human intervention and devoid of degradation. Through her reworking of landscape traditions and conventions, her paintings reveal the inextricable connections between beauty and the sublime and melancholia. Her paintings evoke the deep desire for the perfect moment and heighten awareness of the psychological impact of the idealized landscape. Adams presents the landscape as a solitary experience with the immense and infinite sublime--a magnificent solitude.Where Earth Meets Sky is the first museum survey exhibition of Victoria Adam's work and is part of the Tacoma Art Museum's Northwest Perspective Series. Adams' work is held in private and museum collections throughout the United States.

One of the most innovative Northwest artists of her time, Virna Haffer was an internationally recognized and respected Tacoma photographer who has slipped from both regional and national art history books. In a career spanning more than six decades, Haffer found success as a photographer, printmaker, painter, musician, sculptor, and published writer, though she is primarily known as a photographer. Self-taught, she began her ambitious career in the early 1920s, both running a successful portrait studio and also exhibiting her unique artistic images around the world. Margaret E. Bullock, curator of collections and special exhibitions at Tacoma Art Museum, art historian Christina S. Henderson, and independent curator and gallery owner David F. Martin examined more than 30,000 of Virna Haffer's photographic negatives, prints, and woodblocks at the Washington State Historical Society and Tacoma Public Library's Special Collections were examined to create this book.

Throughout her six-decade career, Camille Patha’s painting has oscillated between the figurative and the abstract. Patha began painting gestural abstraction in the 1960s then deliberately explored various painting styles, including hard-edged abstraction and surrealist-infused photorealism and, finally, a return to abstraction. During each era of her career, Patha demonstrated a full mastery of painting, presenting canvases that wholly embody her imagery and vocabulary with an unwavering voice and shocking vigor. Patha asserts her power as a painter by creating imagery of a complete universe that enables the viewer to be fully absorbed within a boundless volume. In her paintings, she shares a sense of wonder about the existential conundrums confronting every person and with the exuberance of her elastic symbolism. A Punch of Color is the first retrospective of her work since 1979.

In this pointed and resonant project, internationally acclaimed artist Zhi Lin refocuses on the forgotten Chinese laborers in America from an iconic moment in US history. In the nineteenth century, thousands of men migrated from China to seek fortunes in the gold mines of California; instead they found work building the transcontinental railroads. The contributions of these workers are largely overlooked in the history books, their names and stories lost. Zhi Lin's works address this absence and are inspired by his own experiences as an immigrant.Zhi Lin began exploring the history of Chinese laborers in 2005 by following the route of the first transcontinental railroad and making watercolor sketches of the landscapes and landmarks along the way. His work later focused on the Golden Spike Ceremony, an annual reenactment of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. This book will include approximately thirty illustrated works, an interview with the artist, and two scholarly essays.