SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum presents Barbara Earl Thomas: The Geography of Innocence, the first solo exhibition at SAM for the celebrated Seattle-based artist. Featuring nearly all new work, the exhibition reflects Thomas’s longtime explorations: light and shadow, perception and knowledge, Black lives and experiences, and the limits and possibilities of empathy. In this exhibition, Thomas asks: “How do you read a face, and what are your expectations when you enter its terrain?”
The Geography of Innocence is installed in the museum’s Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence Gallery and the adjacent hallway gallery. The visitor first enters an immersive, light-filled installation. The gallery’s three walls are sheathed in backlit, intricately cut Tyvek panels, creating a lantern-like glow. In the center of each wall is an “altar,” with a backlit portrait in sandblasted glass and a corresponding hand-blown glass candelabra. In the center of the gallery is the only previously exhibited work, premiering for the first time in Seattle: Falling: Bodies in the Matrix (2017), a 12-foot luminaria formed of hand-cut Tyvek panels with highly detailed imagery.
After the immersive installation, the visitor enters a hallway flanked by a series of 10 cut-paper portraits, rendered in black paper against bright, hand-colored paper backgrounds. Each portrait is someone the artist knows and who is a part of her life, either a family member or a friend’s child. These portraits capture the subjects in unguarded moments. In a world where the mainstream adult gaze is often loaded with negative expectations, fear, and apprehension, Thomas invites viewers to pause and reflect on how these preconceived notions get in the way of truly seeing.
“My goal is to disarm,” says Thomas. “The exhibition is a portal, into a place where you are surrounded by beauty and you pause to take in the complexity of the stories being told. It’s a creative endeavor, one where I invite you to hold the pain alongside the beauty. I anticipate that the audience will come with their own experiences, some very different from mine, but my hope is that each person leaves having found some part in this story that belongs to them.”
“It has been a privilege to be in conversation with Barbara Earl Thomas this past year,” says Catharina Manchanda, Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art. “This new body of work is not a reaction to recent events but rather the crystallization of thoughts that have propelled her all along. That they resonate now speaks to the timelessness of these experiences and issues.”
Barbara Earl Thomas was born in Seattle in 1948, among the first generation in her family to be born outside of the American South. She earned a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Washington in 1977, with Jacob Lawrence and Michael Spafford as mentors and friends. Also, a writer and arts administrator, she is a former director of the Northwest African American Museum.
Notable exhibitions include a major career survey at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (2016). She is the recipient of a Washington State Governor's Arts & Heritage Award (2016), the Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award (2016), and a Mayor's Arts Award, Seattle (2013). In May 2020, Thomas was commissioned by Yale University to create a work to replace the controversial stained-glass windows in its newly renamed Grace Hopper College.
