Spectatorship & Desire: Lust

Showcasing paintings from the Frye’s Founding Collection, Spectatorship and Desire, an evolving three-part exhibition, explores the relationship between viewers as spectators and art as a desirable object. It employs innovative strategies to investigate the complex relationships between consuming, collecting, memory, language, and interpretation.

Spectatorship and Desire: Lust imagined the viewing habits of Charles and Emma Frye, who established the Frye Art Museum. We presented our vision of the Fryes’ domestic sphere, where a mix of pedagogical value, personal eccentricity, and early twentieth-century conventions of art display influenced how they lived with their private paintings collection long before donating it to the Seattle public.

Spectatorship and Desire: Loss examined the relationship of contemporary viewers to the founding collection. Since the Frye Art Museum opened its doors in 1952, certain paintings have become beloved by Seattle viewers, who return to experience these works again and again. In Loss we removed some of the most popular paintings from the galleries in a dramatic rehanging of the Charles and Emma Frye Collection. We then invited visitors to put in writing memories of their favorite missing works.

Spectatorship and Desire: Love asks, “What does it mean to love a painting and just what is the painting one loves?” Even if two of us love the same painting, such as the perennial favorite, Alexander Max Koester’s Ducks (c. 1900), do we experience the same work of art? Love explores the idea that the painting one loves is as much a construction of memory and desire as it is a response to the direct encounter between the viewer and the art object. In this final installation of Spectatorship and Desire, we juxtapose written viewer remembrances from Loss with favorite paintings from the Founding Collection.