SEATTLE, WA.- The Frye Art Museum presents Wallflowers, a group exhibition that reconsiders one of art history’s most enduring yet underestimated genres: the floral still life. Bringing together nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings from the Frye’s collection with newly commissioned wallpaper designs by contemporary artists, Wallflowers explores how artists across centuries have turned to floral imagery as fertile ground for experimentation and reinvention.

Although still lifes are among the least represented genres in the Frye’s holdings (outnumbered by portraits and landscapes), they have long offered artists a rich site for technical challenge and symbolic play. From the loosened brushwork of modernist painters to the digital collages of contemporary makers, the genre has proven remarkably durable, capable of holding centuries’ worth of ideas about beauty, impermanence, social class, and the shifting relationship between art and craft.

The exhibition unfolds like a cultivated landscape, with special-built trellised walls guiding visitors through moments of focused reflection and immersive pattern. Still lifes offer up a range of approaches, from the shimmering ephemerality of American Impressionists John Marshall Gamble and Soren Emil Carlsen, to the eclectic energy of Grigory Gluckmann and Nicolai Fechin’s textured brushstrokes, to the flattened forms of mid-century modernists Jae Carmichael and Margie H. Griffin. These discrete junctures are countered by a diverse array of richly printed wallpaper designs, including Azadeh Gholizadeh’s angular digital blossoms, Greg Ito's gridded garden of personal symbolism, and the vibrant bursts of Polly Apfelbaum’s design that pays homage to the underrecognized British color theorist Mary Gartside. The exhibition culminates in a stunning presentation from Nick Cave, in which a work from the artist’s ongoing Grapht series of wall hangings—crafted from vintage metal serving trays which explode into tangles of cut-tin flowers—is displayed alongside the mural-like Wallwork, developed with artist and designer Bob Faust.

The invited artists were not asked to respond directly to the Frye’s historical works; rather, each extends a recurring motif from their own practice into a bespoke wallpaper design.

Installed in conversation with paintings from the collection, these large-scale interventions transform the galleries into a shifting, rhythmic space that perhaps coalesces into a garden of its own.

Wallflowers situates these selected works within a broader story of industrialization, design, and modernism’s ongoing flirtation with the decorative. The rise of mass printing and floral wallpaper—from the Arts and Crafts revolution to exuberant mid-century interiors—blurred the boundaries between fine art and domestic ornament. Today, contemporary artists continue that dialogue, redeploying the floral as both image and symbol: neither quaint nor static, full of cultural memory, and a site for subversive social critique.

In reexamining the floral still life and its decorative offshoots, Wallflowers asks: what does it mean to inherit a visual tradition? How do artists negotiate the space between homage and critique? Harnessing the unique resources of the Frye's collection, the exhibition celebrates these oscillations between past and present, contemplation and critique, and the ability of artists to invest familiar forms with fresh meaning.