Food & Drink
A New Exhibit at the Frye Explores Appropriation and Emojis
The museum's new show appropriates the appropriated.
By D. Scully November 8, 2017

This article originally appeared in the November 2017 issue of Seattle magazine.
Tlingit artist Alison Marks, born and raised in southeast Alaska, appropriates familiar imagery and objects “with an indigenous flair,” she says, an act that often appropriates the appropriated. Among the approximately 25 new works in her first solo museum show, One Gray Hair, viewers can expect themes that she says vary from the “introduction of coffee, emojis and space travel to the culture” to the loss of indigenous language.
The winner of the museum’s 2015 James W. Ray Venture Project Award, a $15,000 grant that culminates in an exhibition, Marks will show mixed-media work, button blankets, and a variety of photographs, prints and paintings. The pieces are simultaneously confrontational and confounding, illuminating, as Marks says, “where the Tlingit culture is in this stage of Western contact.”
One Grey Hair
11/11–2/4/2018. Free.
Frye Art Museum, First Hill
704 Terry Ave. 206.622.9250
fryemuseum.org