Mary Ann Peters: the edge becomes the center

Seattle artist Mary Ann Peters (born 1949, Beaumont, Texas) has attended to overlooked narratives for almost forty years, interpreting her research through mediums including painting, sculpture, and installation. Peters unearths hidden diasporic histories, often through travel, and contextualizes them within her experiences of the contemporary Middle East as a second-generation Lebanese American. the edge becomes the center brings together the artist’s series this trembling turf for the first time and presents it alongside a new installation—works that together surface the ways forgotten and repressed pasts shape present experience.

this trembling turf features ten abstract drawings, including one from the Frye’s collection, which the artist crafts by applying thin strokes of white ink to black clayboard. The series interprets natural habitats where activity occurs beneath the surface, with rhythmic patterns referencing sound waves used by archaeologists to uncover buried traces of civilization. These intricate drawings imagine the missing records of populations and cultures physically covered over, reminding us that forgotten histories could be buried below us, lost within our collective memory.

The exhibition’s new site-specific installation continues the artist’s ongoing impossible monuments series, works of disparate materials and forms that memorialize disregarded details of socio-political events. Peters writes, “I define an impossible monument as something that deserves reverence but by virtue of its incidental nature would never be elevated to the status of a monument.” Together, these bodies of work ask viewers to consider which narratives are written into history and which are erased.