Wallflowers

Wallflowers is a dialogue across time centered on one of art history’s most underestimated genres: the floral still life. Bringing together eleven paintings from the Frye’s collection with newly commissioned wallpaper designs from eleven contemporary artists, the exhibition explores how artists from the nineteenth century to the present have turned to floral imagery as fertile ground for experimentation and reinvention.

The floral still life 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. Today, contemporary artists continue to redeploy the floral as both image and symbol: an unassuming bouquet is actually neither quaint nor static, but full of cultural memory, and a site for subversive social critique.

Structured to mimic the delights of navigating a cultivated garden, Wallflowers oscillates between discrete paintings and immersive patterns, between contemplation and exuberance. The selected works tell a broader story of industrialization, design, and modernism’s ongoing flirtation with the decorative, and celebrate the ability of artists to invest familiar forms with fresh meaning.

Frye Collection artists featured:  

Sergei Bongart  (American, born Ukraine, 1918–1985);  Soren Emil Carlsen  (American, born Denmark, 1853–1932);  Jae Carmichael  (American, 1925–2005); Leon Derbyshire (American, 1896–1981); Nicolai Ivanovich Fechin  (American, born Russia, 1881–1955); John Marshall Gamble  (American, 1863–1957);  Del Gish  (Born 1936, Oklahoma City. Lives and works in Medical Lake, WA); Grigory Gluckmann  (American, born Russia, 1898–1973); Margie H. Griffin  (American, 1934–2024); Alfred Henry Maurer  (American, 1868–1932 ); Richard Alan Schmid  (American, 1934–2021)

Commissioned wallpaper artists:

Jite Agbro  (Born 1982, Seattle. Lives and works in Seattle); Polly Apfelbaum  (Born 1955, Abington Township, Pennsylvania. Lives and works in Elizaville, New York); Nick Cave (Born 1959, Fulton, Missouri, lives and works in Chicago) with Bob Faust (Born 1967, Chicago. Lives and works in Chicago); Elizabeth Corkery (Born 1986, Sydney. Lives and works in Sydney); Azadeh Gholizadeh (Born 1982, Tehran. Lives and works in Seattle); Patricia Iglesias Peco (Born 1974, Buenos Aires. Lives and works in Los Angeles);  Greg Ito (Born 1987, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles);  Koak (Born 1981, Lansing, Michigan. Lives and works in San Francisco); Graham McDougal (Born 1976, Edinburgh. Lives and works in Sydney); Natani Notah (Born 1992, San Bernardino, CA. Lives and works in Tulsa).