The Frye Art Museum’s curatorial team, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Robin Held, announced today the upcoming exhibition season at the Frye Art Museum. “It redefines the Museum’s position,” Held remarked, “as both intensely local and unabashedly international in its aspirations.”

The new season begins in Fall 2010 with two premier exhibitions that offer unique explorations of ecstatic and altered states. Séance: Albert von Keller and the Occult brings major European paintings by the Munich Secessionist Albert von Keller to the Frye Art Museum and explores the artist’s fascination with the paranormal and with Seelenleben, the life of the soul, at the turn of the 20th century. Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why, the first art museum exhibition of the acclaimed Seattle performance group, features sculptures, costumes, props, masks, video- and photo-documentation of selected past performances as well as a new performance created especially for the Frye. Both exhibitions, which explore uncertain states of being and becoming, will be on view October 9, 2010 through January 2, 2011.

2011 will begin with another international collaboration, this time with the Singapore Art Museum. Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION, an award winning exhibition by the Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong, will open at the Frye Art Museum on January 22, 2011. First presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale where it won the Special Jury Mention award, the exhibition addresses issues of racial identity in a tribute to Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), a Hollywood melodrama. In another installation titled In Love for the Mood, Ming Wong evokes Wong Kar Wai’s Hong Kong film, In the Mood for Love (2000), set in the 60s. Four Malay Stories is a re-interpretation of four of Malay showbiz icon P. Ramlee’s most famous films in which Wong himself plays 16 stock characters in a comedy, a melodrama, a social drama, and a period drama. Ming Wong re-reads “national cinema” constructed through language, role-playing and identity, by re-interpreting films that are familiar to audiences spanning two generations, and which engage with performative notions of mis-casting and parroting. The exhibition runs from January 22 to February 27, 2011.

Spring 2011 at the Frye will bring yet another premiere with the first museum survey of work by the groundbreaking Seattle performance company, Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE). Conceived and executed in close collaboration with the artists, the Frye’s multifaceted interdisciplinary project includes both an exhibition and a performance/installation event and premieres DAE’s latest site-specific performance, Red Shoes Project (working title). Featuring objects, costumes, films and sound works from their performance Sonic Tales (2009), as well as earlier performances, the exhibition re-imagines the group’s event-based art as a museum installation. The project underlies the Frye’s ongoing commitment to present under-recognized work of significance and to engage diverse audiences through interdisciplinary, boundary-breaking artworks-in-progress.

All exhibitions will be accompanied by a series of lectures and conversations. Among the many highlights will be a lecture by the internationally renowned scholar Professor Georg Braungart from the University of Tübingen in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Germanics Department and the Simpson Center for the Humanities, with the support of Humanities Washington. A series of conversations and lectures by Robin Held, Frye Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Collections, will focus on issues and debates in recent performance art scholarship. These include the ways in which performance art troubles the assumptions and methodologies of art history, liveness versus mediation, performance and sexual difference.

In addition, Séance: Albert von Keller and the Occult is accompanied by a fully illustrated 104-page catalogue with essays by the curators of the exhibition published by the Frye Art Museum and distributed by the University of Washington Press.

Séance: Albert von Keller and the Occult is organized by the Frye Art Museum and curated by Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Gian Casper Bott. The exhibition is funded by the Frye Foundation with the generous support of Frye Art Museum members and donors. Seasonal support is provided by ArtsFund.

Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why is organized by the Frye Art Museum and curated by Robin Held in collaboration with artist Ryan Mitchell. The exhibition is funded by the Frye Foundation with the generous support of Frye Art Museum members and donors. Seasonal support is provided by ArtsFund. Implied Violence is supported by the 4Culture Site-Specific Program and the Mayor’s Office for Arts and Culture.

Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION is co-organized by the Singapore Art Museum and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, and funded by the Singapore Art Museum and the Frye Foundation with the generous support of Frye Art Museum members and donors. Media Sponsor for the exhibition is KUOW. Seasonal support is provided by ArtsFund. Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION is guest curated by Tang Fu Kuen. Coordinating Curator at the Frye is Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker.

Degenerate Art Ensemble is organized by the Frye Art Museum and curated by Robin Held in collaboration with the artists. The exhibition is funded by the Frye Foundation with the generous support of Frye Art Museum members and donors.  Seasonal support is provided by ArtsFund.

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