SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) presents Tariqa Waters: Venus is Missing (May 7, 2025–January 5, 2026), the solo exhibition for the winner of the 2023 Betty Bowen Award, which honors a Northwest artist for their original, exceptional, and compelling work. Born in Richmond, Virginia and based in Seattle for 14 years, Waters is a multimedia artist who uses pop aesthetics, humor, and spectacle to explore themes of femininity, vulnerability, and resilience. Her immersive installations, video works, large-scale sculptures, and photographs push the aesthetics of 1970s science fiction into surreal, otherworldly territory.
Venus is Missing creates an immersive environment that takes visitors on a science fiction- inspired journey. The exhibition encompasses a multimedia tableau animated by light components and a soundscape, an 8-foot-tall sculpture, and a photographic “portal.” Visitors enter the gallery into the “transporter”: a semi-circular enclosure beneath a beaming light column that activates with sparkling lights. An artist’s statement in the form of a “mission brief” invites visitors to join “Agent Tariqa Waters” on a “high-stakes mission,” immediately bringing them into the world she has created.
From there, visitors enter the scene, which is centered around Future to the Back ’85 (2024), an 8-foot-tall pink rocket ship flying through a constellation of jewel-like glass orbs. They are echoed by a gigantic sculpture of a pink ball-barrette in the center of the gallery. These everyday hair ties resonate with girlhood experiences of the artist; they are symbols of patience and armor. Leaning into the space through a “portal,” a young woman in sci-fi attire reminds visitors of new spaces and possibilities.
“Viewers will be entranced by this otherworldly environment,” says Catharina Manchanda, Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “Drawing on the aesthetics and shiny materials of the American space age in the 1970s, which dovetailed with an era of mass- produced goods suggesting comfort and security, Waters reveals the bubblegum-colored, sci-fi aesthetic as all but a veneer.”
“We often find ourselves constrained by external limitations, trapped in various influences without looking up. We overlook the extraordinary nature of our journey,” says Tariqa Waters. “Even when physically confined, we possess the capacity to imagine boundlessly, and harness that joy to soar to new heights. That's what I hope this immersive space invites people to remember. For me, the art of storytelling must always prevail.”
Born in Richmond, Virginia, Tariqa Waters is a Seattle-based multidisciplinary artist working in immersive installations, video works, large-scale sculptures, and photographs. Solo exhibitions of Waters’s work have been shown in Seattle at the Hedreen Gallery, the Northwest African American Museum, Museum of Museums (MoM), and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She has been awarded multiple prizes and grants, including the Conductive Garboil Grant, the Artist Trust Fellowship Award, the Neddy Artist Award, and the Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award.
Waters is a two-time finalist for the Betty Bowen Award, winning the Kayla Skinner Special Recognition Award in 2020 and the Gary Glant Special Recognition Award in 2021, and the winner of the 2023 Betty Bowen Award. She was named one of Seattle’s Most Influential People in 2023 by Seattle Magazine.
