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We went to the Bellevue art museum yesterday, because I wanted to see the exhibit "The Art of Gaman." It's a collection of art made from scrap and found materials by prisoners in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II; I saw an article in The Stranger and decided it sounded interesting.
Almost everything on display is small; it ranges from practical things like scissors and teapots made from scrap metal, since the prisoners were allowed to bring almost nothing with them, to tiny painted brooches, and dolls made from reused kimono fabrics. The curators provide background where they can, sometimes include pre- or post-War art careers; some of the artists are unknown, or known only in the sense that other work by the same artist is known, but nothing about the artist's life.
This is a traveling exhibit; I don't know where else it may be going, and googling on "the Art of Gaman" found me various articles from other museums and cities where it's been shown over the last few years. It's at the Bellevue Art Museum until October 12. If you have a King County library card, you can get a free pass for museum admission for two. (These are for specific days, but I had a wide choice of dates, including Saturdays and Sundays.)
As long as we were there, we also went to an origami exhibit: this was a mix of naturalistic works, including a frog, a gecko, and a dinosaur skeleton, and geometric abstractions. Some of the pieces were traditional one-sheet-of-paper origami, others used many sheets or combined paper with bits of other materials (the frog was sprayed with something metallic). There's also an example of an origami-inspired plastic tent, and pictures of a space telescope whose design is based on computational origami. Unlike The Art of Gaman, I wouldn't make a special trip for the origami exhibit, but I enjoyed it.
Almost everything on display is small; it ranges from practical things like scissors and teapots made from scrap metal, since the prisoners were allowed to bring almost nothing with them, to tiny painted brooches, and dolls made from reused kimono fabrics. The curators provide background where they can, sometimes include pre- or post-War art careers; some of the artists are unknown, or known only in the sense that other work by the same artist is known, but nothing about the artist's life.
This is a traveling exhibit; I don't know where else it may be going, and googling on "the Art of Gaman" found me various articles from other museums and cities where it's been shown over the last few years. It's at the Bellevue Art Museum until October 12. If you have a King County library card, you can get a free pass for museum admission for two. (These are for specific days, but I had a wide choice of dates, including Saturdays and Sundays.)
As long as we were there, we also went to an origami exhibit: this was a mix of naturalistic works, including a frog, a gecko, and a dinosaur skeleton, and geometric abstractions. Some of the pieces were traditional one-sheet-of-paper origami, others used many sheets or combined paper with bits of other materials (the frog was sprayed with something metallic). There's also an example of an origami-inspired plastic tent, and pictures of a space telescope whose design is based on computational origami. Unlike The Art of Gaman, I wouldn't make a special trip for the origami exhibit, but I enjoyed it.