SEATTLE, WA.- Since its opening in 1952, the Frye has maintained its dedication to the art and culture of the present through collecting and exhibiting contemporary art. This practice is guided by the example of museum founders Charles and Emma Frye, who amassed a collection of paintings made within their own lifetimes, often by purchasing works directly from living artists. Over the past fifteen years, the museum has intentionally focused on broadening its holdings to include previously underrepresented identities, perspectives, and forms of expression. This ongoing work is an essential facet of the institution’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A Living Legacy marks the Frye’s seventieth anniversary, bringing together eight artworks—all acquired in 2022 and on view at the museum for the first time—by Amoako Boafo, Sky Hopinka, Gisela McDaniel, Bony Ramirez, Tschabalala Self, Ann Leda Shapiro, and Sadie Wechsler. Ranging from altered photographs to mixed-media assemblages, the works expand or complicate narratives around genres such as landscape and portraiture traditionally associated with the Frye’s Founding Collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American art. The exhibition reflects the museum’s engagement with both local and global artists and celebrates the collection as a unique, ever-evolving, and always imperfect chronicle of artistic production: a living legacy of the Fryes’ visionary patronage.

Gift of The Kulick Family, 2022.013.02

Amoako Boafo
Born 1984, Accra, Ghana
Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Three Slices, 2021. Oil and paper transfer on canvas.

Amoako Boafo’s colorful, large-scale portraits celebrate Black subjectivity, self-fashioning, and joy. The artist’s distinctive finger-painting technique gives the skin of his subjects a textural richness and complexity that contrast with the graphic flatness of their surroundings. Boafo often works from photographs because he feels they better capture a person’s real and spontaneous emotions than a long-held pose. Pictured in domestic interiors and familiar scenarios like the casual pizza dinner seen here, his subjects emanate a sense of self-possession and ease.

Gifts of Elie Khouri Art Foundation, 2023.002.01-02

Tschabalala Self
Born 1990, New York City
Lives and works in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut

Black Face Red Bone with Black Bob, 2021. Colored pencil, acrylic paint, gouache, charcoal, graphite on archival inkjet print.

Black Face with Wide Chest, 2021. Colored pencil, acrylic paint, gouache, charcoal, graphite on archival inkjet print.

Tschabalala Self creates exuberant, multilayered characters—not depictions of herself or others, but “avatars”—that resist stereotypical representations of Blackness. These works on paper are from Self’s series Black Faces, her response to the landmark 1985 essay “Art on the Frontline: Mandate for a People’s Culture” by political activist Angela Davis. Davis asks how artists and cultural workers might contribute to the creation of true social consciousness. Self answers with imaginative portraits of three individuals repeated in different hues and displaying a variety of expressions, suggesting a group inextricably connected yet ever changing: a community united by inheritance and distinguished by experience and self-presentation.

Purchased with funds provided by the Contemporary Council, 2022.003

Sky Hopinka
Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, born 1984, Ferndale, Washington
Lives and works in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Free me from this body, my voice can carry only so far. Free me from this body, as I lay on the grass it feels heavy and I can’t move. Free me from this body, the color burns brown with dark limbs so tired and missing the weightless breadth of above, 2020, Inkjet print on Dibond.

Sky Hopinka centers notions of Indigenous homeland and explores language as a container of culture. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist captured his wanderings in a series entitled Breathings. He created these works by composing poetic texts, then etching the words into each image, thereby uniting disparate landscapes that hold personal and cultural significance.

Hopinka took this photograph from a plane approaching Sea-Tac airport en route to visit his sister in their hometown of Ferndale, Washington. The clear sky outlined by the text lies east of Mount Rainier, which is known as Tahoma to Coast Salish peoples.




Purchased with funds provided by Monica and Rick Segal, 2022.006

Gisela McDaniel
Born 1995, Bellevue, Nebraska
Lives and works in Detroit

Mangahufo‘ I famaguon, 2021. Oil on panel, found objects, sound.

Gisela McDaniel’s recent work focuses on diasporic CHamoru (Chamorro), the Indigenous community from the Marianas Islands in the northwestern Pacific. McDaniel herself is of CHamoru descent, from the island of Guåhan (Guam), a US territory long subjected to Western imperialism and whitewashing. Her portraits depict Chamorro women and nonbinary individuals in lush environments that speak to their ancestral homelands, bringing visibility to a historically marginalized and geographically dispersed community.

McDaniel interviews and photographs her sitters—or “subject-collaborators,” as she calls them—before painting their portraits. In the process of cultivating a close bond, the artist invites her collaborators to share small meaningful objects that she incorporates into her compositions, such as the shells and beads embedded on the sitter’s face in this work. A sound element, or “audio portrait,” captures the sitters’ stories and gives each of them a voice in the encounter with their image.

Gift of the Kulick Family Foundation, 2022.001

Bony Ramirez
Born 1996, Tenares, Dominican Republic
Lives and works in Perth Amboy, New Jersey

Butterfly, 2021. Acrylic, soft oil pastel, color pencil, wallpaper, metal chain, dried coconuts.

Bony Ramirez’s work reflects his rural upbringing in the Dominican Republic and his experience as an immigrant in the United States. His paintings and mixed-media assemblages celebrate Caribbean culture, often incorporating mainstays of island life such as mosquito nets, coconuts, and machetes. The artist’s highly stylized figures reveal the influence of European Mannerism as well as the Catholic imagery he encountered as a child, a legacy of Spain’s lengthy colonial rule.
Here, the clamshell-inspired swirls of color in the figure’s ear and stalk of heliconia flowers below their body are drawn from Ramirez’s memories of the Caribbean environment. He uses these features, he says, “as a visual language to unite all the islands” across the barriers imposed by European colonization.

Museum Purchase, 2022.008

Ann Leda Shapiro
Born 1946, New York City
Lives and works in Vashon, Washington

Night Forest, 2022. Watercolor and watercolor pencil on archival paper.

In her artwork, Ann Leda Shapiro—a practicing acupuncturist as well as an artist—conveys her belief that living beings are microcosmic reflections of larger ecosystems and the universe as a whole. In this view, mental, physical, and spiritual imbalances scale up from the individual to society and influence humankind’s relationship with the natural world, and vice versa. In Night Forest, Shapiro abstracts and distorts elements of the landscape, amplifying their existence as parts of an interconnected, organic system. Suggesting a link to the human body, the branches, roots, and prominent shadows of the trees evoke veins and nerves, while the moon’s dappled light recalls cellular structure.

Purchased in honor of Director/CEO Joseph Rosa with funds provided by R. Todd Armstrong and Todd Rosin, 2022.004

Sadie Wechsler
Born 1985, Seattle
Lives and works in Portland, Oregon

Madrone + Mullan, 2021. Archival inkjet print in madrone artist’s frame.

Sadie Wechsler crafts photographic images through a process of intensive research. She often focuses on shifting environments and their histories, underscoring a landscape’s altered state by manipulating her images using physical and/or digital means. This work is part of a series of composite photographs in which Wechsler investigates the ecological history of Seattle, her hometown.

The series envisions plant communities present in the area around 1850—the period preceding the arrival of white settlers and the ensuing transformation of the land through logging, leveling, infilling, and urban development. With assistance from academic and tribal research contacts, the artist identified locations for photographing plant varieties akin to those present during the presettlement period. Rather than presenting a nostalgic or romanticized semblance of the past, however, Wechsler creates images that urge us to consider more deeply the species, terrain, and histories of the land we occupy.