SEATTLE, WA.- In spring 2027, the museum continues its seventy-fifth anniversary program with five exhibitions that exemplify the Frye's unique viewpoint, connecting Seattle with the art and artists of our time. The season pairs self-taught artist Esther Hamerman's lively midcentury depictions of migration, family, and city life with work by her great-granddaughter, the internationally renowned contemporary artist Nicole Eisenman; introduces many recent additions to the Frye's collection; and places a monumental cedar sculpture by Ursula von Rydingsvard in an evolving dialogue with the museum's holdings. New projects by Seattle artists Stefan Gonzales and Serrah Russell reconsider the archive and the Frye's own history, while Under the Sky brings Founding Collection landscape paintings together for the first time with contemporaneous photographs. Across the season, familiar materials and stories gain new depth as the exhibitions become a site for experimenting with tradition and placing the present in touch with the past.
Nicole Eisenman | Esther Hamerman: Life After Life
March 13–June 6, 2027
Nicole Eisenman | Esther Hamerman: Life After Life presents the first comprehensive survey of work by self-taught artist Esther Hamerman (1881–1977) in an intergenerational dialogue with her great-granddaughter, acclaimed contemporary artist Nicole Eisenman (born 1965). Bringing together approximately fifty paintings and drawings by Hamerman with paintings and works on paper by Eisenman, the exhibition explores how two distinct artists use personal history and narrative to picture community, belonging, and social change.
Hamerman began painting in her sixties while living in New York after a life marked by displacement and upheaval. Born in a rural salt-mining village in Austria-controlled Poland, she later lived in Vienna, Trinidad, New York, and San Francisco. During the Holocaust, Hamerman and her family fled Nazi persecution, eventually reaching Trinidad, where British authorities interned Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria as enemy aliens. After the war, painting became a way to revisit the places she had lived and the people she loved. Her dense, brightly patterned scenes move between rural memories, domestic interiors, gatherings of worship and community, and the modern city, where bridges, trains, cars, ships, and airplanes signal a world in motion.
Eisenman grew up surrounded by Hamerman's paintings, but her distinct visual language is shaped by the culture wars of the 1990s, queer life, art history, and the absurdities of contemporary experience. Her figurative works can be tender, unruly, and satirical, or all three at once. Seeing the artists' works together reveals surprising formal and emotional connections. Both favor crowded compositions and abruptly cropped figures and picture planes, and feature everyday gathering places—city sidewalks, homes, tables, and public spaces—as stages where social structures and private lives meet.
Life After Life brings dozens of Hamerman's works into public view for the first time in fifty years and establishes a fuller account of her contribution to midcentury American art. Eisenman serves as co-curator, bringing both an artistic and familial perspective to the interpretive process. Spanning three of the museum’s special exhibition galleries, the show moves through autobiography, domestic space, social gatherings, urban life, and the aesthetics of self-taught and postmodern painting. Across generations, Hamerman and Eisenman conjure a world where people can find refuge, recognition, and room to belong.
Stefan Gonzales: Field Research
March 6–October 3, 2027
Seattle artist Stefan Gonzales (born 1994) turns sustained attention toward materials that most pass without a second look. Working across performance, photography, sculpture, and film, Gonzales traces the lives of industrial resources like stones, dirt, and minerals: where they come from, how they are moved, and the histories of land and labor that travel with them. Field Research, the artist's first solo museum exhibition, extends a practice first introduced at the Frye through their 2022 Boren Banner Series presentation.
For the exhibition, Gonzales focuses on rock salt, a material used to deice roads. The project stems from a lengthy and careful observation of the material’s transformation as it dissolves and crystallizes in water. This research is catalogued via specially constructed floor-based sculptures and accompanying photographic documentation. The photographs, comprising hundreds of sequential images, will be bound into books visitors can handle and displayed on the wall as framed serial compositions. These quiet, methodical works borrow the visual language of Minimalism and Conceptual art while making visible the human effort and land impact of the extraction and transport embedded in an ordinary substance.
A new film documents Gonzales cataloguing stones in archival filing cabinets. Tight framing and jumps in time collapse the archive's apparent order, revealing it as something shaped by the hands and perspectives of those who care for it. Six cabinets presented in a grid become modest monuments, countering the heroic scale often associated with Land art. Gonzales approaches that history with nuanced critique, questioning ideas of supposedly empty land and the rugged individualism attached to some of the movement's best-known works. In its place, they propose a practice grounded in care and attentiveness to natural materials.
Field Research creates a focused study of material lifecycles, seriality, and the vulnerability of archives. Presented alongside historical landscapes from the museum’s collection in Under the Sky, on view in the adjacent gallery, the exhibition also opens a conversation about how artists across generations have continued to rethink picturing the land.
Stefan Gonzales: Field Research is organized by Georgia Erger, Curator.
Recent Acquisitions
March 6–September 26, 2027
The Frye Art Museum's collection has grown considerably in recent years, with 2025–26 marking one of the most significant periods of expansion since the museum was founded. Recent Acquisitions offers a first look at many of these additions and a snapshot of the collection's emerging shape. The focused presentation brings together a dynamic range of paintings, works on paper, and sculptures representing over one hundred years of artistic production. Expanding narratives of both twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, the exhibition reinforces the Frye’s commitment to serve as a home for modern and contemporary art alike.
The exhibition favors visual affinities and unexpected conversations rather than following a strict chronology. A large-scale work on paper by Vik Muniz (American, born Brazil, 1961) appears alongside prints by Diane Simpson (American, born 1935), LaKela Brown (American, born 1982), and Seattle artist Clyde Petersen (American, born 1980), revealing distinct approaches to printmaking and narrative. Modern and contemporary works move between abstraction and figuration, demonstrating how artists at different moments in time have used symbol, pattern, image, and scale to render personal and cultural histories visible.
Recent Acquisitions also advances the Frye's commitment to platforming Indigenous artists and the breadth and depth of their practices. Two sculptural baskets by Washington artists Joe Feddersen (born 1953, Omak, WA, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation) and Carly Feddersen (born 1982, Wenatchee, WA, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation) and a jingle-cloud sculpture by Seattle-born, Portland-based artist Marie Watt (born 1967, Seattle, Seneca Nation of Indians)—all acquired through the inaugural Assembly Art Fair in summer 2026—are presented in dialogue with James Washington Jr.'s (American, 1908–2000) intimately scaled bird sculptures from the 1960s.
Rather than attempting a comprehensive account of all new acquisitions, the exhibition reflects the museum’s priorities for future collection growth: fostering a more expansive understanding of art making in the Pacific Northwest, informed by national and international perspectives and made possible by the generosity of artists, collectors, and supporters.
A dedicated section of the exhibition places a monumental sculpture by Ursula von Rydingsvard (American, born Germany, 1942) in dialogue with select recent acquisitions. On loan from the Akron Art Museum for two years, rześki (2014) will continue to serve as the anchor to a rotating presentation around which the works on view will change over the course of the loan.
Standing nearly nine feet tall, rześki is constructed from red cedar and rubbed with powdered graphite, creating forceful abstract forms with rugged, textured surfaces. Its title is a Polish word that conveys the feeling of a breeze or the gentle movement of branches bending and swaying in the wind, qualities echoed in the sculpture’s form.
Von Rydingsvard is known for her large-scale sculptures that transform cedar and other timbers through cutting, stacking, carving, and assembling. Born to Polish and Ukrainian parents during World War II, she spent her early childhood in displacement camps for Polish refugees before immigrating with her family to the United States in 1950. While her abstract sculptures are not directly autobiographical, von Rydingsvard’s work often creates connections between individual experience and the broader world. Their materiality, form, and labor-intensive production process suggest the ways memory, bodily labor, and personal and collective histories can become embedded in her work.
In the first iteration of the extended loan’s presentation, the sculpture is installed alongside recent acquisitions to the Frye collection, including works by Guy Anderson (American, 1906–1998), Paul Horiuchi (American, born Japan, 1906–1999), Hugh Hayden (American, born 1983), Koak (American, born 1981), and Robyn O'Neil (American, born 1977). Through shared materials, process, and evocations of the natural world, their works establish points of connection with rześki. These pairings invite reflection on nature, spirituality, transformation, and the emotional dimensions of human experience, creating a rich setting for close observation.
Future rotations will generate new conversations around rześki, allowing different artistic themes and lines of inquiry to come to the foreground over the course of the loan. Von Rydingsvard’s sculpture serves as a catalyst for revisiting the Frye's collection with fresh eyes and for bringing artists from different generations and disciplines into contact.
Recent Acquisitions is organized by Rangsook Yoon, PhD, Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs.
Boren Banner Series: Serrah Russell
April 28–October 3, 2027
For the spring 2027 Boren Banner, Seattle artist Serrah Russell turns to the Frye's archive, looking to the museum's history to make something new. Russell will create a hand-cut collage on paper using reproductions of historical photographs from the archive, which will then be presented at monumental scale on the museum's east facade. The commission marks both the first Boren Banner developed through sustained research in the Frye archive and Russell's first public artwork.
Russell (born 1986) works across photography and collage to explore the tension between inner lives and external environments. She cuts apart found advertisements, magazine pages, and editorial photographs, loosening them from their original commercial purpose and rearranging them into spare, poetic compositions. The resulting works can feel affectionate, unsettled, or quietly defiant, with memory, grief, political change, and personal association often guiding how one fragment meets another.
For this commission, Russell focuses on a group of archival materials from museum benefactors Charles and Emma Frye and their business enterprises as well as the original construction of the museum and subsequent expansions. Prominent Seattleites of the early twentieth century, the Fryes were children of German immigrants whose successful meatpacking operation provided the means to assemble an art collection of over two hundred paintings. Upon their deaths, they gifted their collection, along with the funds to establish the city's first free art museum, to the citizens of Seattle. Via Russell’s process, intimate archival fragments will become a highly visible public artwork, inviting viewers to encounter the museum's origins through the perspective of a contemporary Seattle artist.
Conceived to commemorate the Frye's seventy-fifth anniversary year, the project treats the archive as mutable material rather than a fixed record. In doing so, the work connects the museum's past to its ongoing engagement with the art and artists of our time.
