Frye Art Museum

Through November 14

Art on the Mind: Ten Years of Creative Aging

Since 2010 the Frye Art Museum has been at the forefront of museum programming for people living with dementia and care partners. Featuring artwork from program participants, this exhibition illustrates the success of arts engagement in bringing joy, respect, and dignity to people living with dementia while destigmatizing the disease.

Through August 15

Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem

With works in a variety of mediums by nearly eighty artists dating from the 1920s to the present, Black Refractions presents close to a century of creative achievements by artists of African descent. Organized by the American Federation of Arts and The Studio Museum in Harlem, this landmark exhibition proposes a plurality of narratives of Black artistic production and multiple approaches to understanding the Studio Museum’s powerful collection.

Through August 21

Human Nature, Animal Culture: Selections from the Frye Art Museum Collection

This exhibition focuses on portrayals of domesticated animals from the Frye Art Museum’s collection as a way to examine how human-animal relations have shifted over time, and to reflect upon the role art plays in mediating our relationships with animals more broadly.

Through October 17

Boren Banner Series: Russna Kaur

The Boren Banner Series is a new public art initiative that gives regional artists the opportunity to create a billboard-size work for the museum’s east facade. This presentation features a new work by Vancouver-based artist Russna Kaur that incorporates the artist’s bold use of color and modular approach to abstraction.

September 11, 2021–January 23, 2022

Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art

This presentation brings together seven artworks—all acquired in 2019 and on view at the Museum for the first time—by a range of local, national, and international artists. The works showcase diverse perspectives and forms of expression while complicating the narratives around mediums and genres traditionally associated with the Frye’s collection, such as painting, landscape, and portraiture.

September 18, 2021–January 16, 2022

Duane Linklater: mymothersside

Duane Linklater works across a range of mediums to address the contradictions of contemporary Indigenous life within and beyond settler systems of knowledge, representation, and value. This survey brings together sculptures, video works, and digital prints on linen, as well as new adaptations of key installations and site-responsive pieces.

October 23, 2021–April 17, 2022

Boren Banner Series: Sadie Wechsler

The Boren Banner Series is a public art initiative that gives regional artists the opportunity to create a billboard-size work for the museum’s east facade. For this presentation, Portland-based photographer Sadie Wechsler is creating a new work inspired by the ecological history of First Hill, where the Frye is located.

February 12–June 5, 2022

Christina Quarles

Los Angeles–based artist Christina Quarles paints bodies that are subjected not only to the weight and gravity of the physical world but also to the pleasures and pressures of the social realm. Her evocative scenes feature ambiguous figures whose limbs, torsos, and faces merge with familiar domestic objects made strange through unexpected color choices and experimental painterly gestures. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, this exhibition is the largest presentation of Quarles’s work to date.

Frye Publications

Catalogues are published by the Frye in conjunction with our exhibitions. Each book features photographs of artworks and installation images accompanied by essays and historical texts by scholars, art historians, and artists. Catalogues are available for purchase in the Museum Store as well as for purchase online.