SEATTLE, WA.- The Frye Art Museum announced the opening of three new exhibitions, Srijon Chowdhury: Same Old Song, THE THIRD, MEANING: ESTAR(SER) Installs the Frye Collection, and Door to the Atmosphere, as well as the newest iteration of our Boren Banner series by Molly Jae Vaughan.

Srijon Chowdhury: Same Old Song
October 8, 2022–January 15, 2023

Portland-based artist Srijon Chowdhury creates dreamlike oil paintings that consider the present moment as part of a larger mythology. Moving between a highly stylized approach and startling realism, he brings an uncanny contemporary twist to genres like family portraiture, biblical scenes, and vanitas still lifes. The artist’s first museum solo exhibition, Same Old Song stages a dramatic climax of Chowdhury’s practice to date. At the exhibition’s core is an installation of six enormous new paintings, each centered on one sensory organ of the human head, including eyes, ears, nose, and a mouth that is thirty feet long. The central facial feature in each piece frames or incorporates smaller images, which are sampled from Chowdhury’s previous paintings to create what the artist describes as an “alternative retrospective” of his work. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by art historian Mónica Belevan, philosopher SJ Cowan, and Frye Chief Curator Amanda Donnan.

Door to the Atmosphere
October 29, 2022–January 22, 2023




Group exhibition Door to the Atmosphere—co-curated by artist Srijon Chowdury and Frye Chief Curator Amanda Donnan—is an outgrowth of the ideas set forth in Same Old Song, the interlocking projects together marking a tendency toward spirituality, myth, and the supernatural among artists working today in the United States. Reflecting the wonder and the dread of living in the present as well as specters of unsettled pasts, Door to the Atmosphere includes artworks in a range of mediums by Sedrick Chisom, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Mimi Lauter, Jill Mulleady, Naudline Pierre, Eden Seifu, and TARWUK. 

THE THIRD, MEANING: ESTAR(SER) Installs the Frye Collection
October 15, 2022–October 15, 2023 

Part of an ongoing series of thematic presentations of the Frye Art Museum’s collection, THE THIRD, MEANING is an artist-curated installation featuring an eclectic range of works: some much-beloved paintings from the Founding Collection, some rarely seen pieces, and some peculiar objects that may or may not be what they seem. The exhibition is organized by ESTAR(SER), a collective that has a long-standing interest in the problem of attention—how and when we pay attention, to what, and to what ends. Installed in a dreamscape of history, myth, and imagination, THE THIRD, MEANING poses fundamental questions about museums and the works of art they hold. Organized in groups of three, each triad of artworks sets up a small conversation (about form, about ideas, about history) that spans geographical regions, mediums, and eras. The exhibition is guest curated by ESTAR(SER), with D. Graham Burnett, Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University, and Joanna Fiduccia, Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, serving as project leads.

Inspired by THE THIRD, MEANING, the Frye invites visitors of all ages to create their own triads using magnetic reproductions of collection artworks in a dynamic interactive space in the museum's Education Wing.

Boren Banner Series: Molly Jae Vaughan
October 22, 2022–April 16, 2023 

Seattle-based artist Molly Jae Vaughan’s work addresses representations of transgender people, including the erasure and violence they experience. For her iteration of the Boren Banner Series, Vaughan has created a new work from her ongoing project After Boucher, in which she reimagines drawings by the French artist François Boucher (1703–70). The project creates a new visual history of transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming individuals within the context and imagery of the romantic and luxurious environments of the Rococo period. The monumental scale of the Boren Banner, a public artwork that occupies the eastern facade of the Frye Art Museum, asserts the visibility and agency of transgender people, not just within Boucher’s compositions but also into the institutional space of the museum and the collections housed within.