SEATTLE, WA.- The Frye Art Museum will present Wallflowers, a group exhibition that reconsiders one of art history’s most enduring yet underestimated genres: the floral still life. Bringing together nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings from the Frye’s collection with newly commissioned wallpaper designs by contemporary artists, Wallflowers explores how artists across centuries have turned to floral imagery as fertile ground for experimentation and reinvention.

The exhibition unfolds like a cultivated landscape, with special-built trellised walls guiding visitors through moments of focused reflection and immersive pattern. Still lifes offer up a range of approaches, from the shimmering ephemerality of American Impressionists John Marshall Gamble and Soren Emil Carlsen, to the eclectic energy of Grigory Gluckmann and Nicolai Fechin’s textured brushstrokes, to the flattened forms of mid-century modernists Jae Carmichael and Margie H. Griffin. These discrete junctures are countered by a diverse array of richly printed wallpaper designs, including Azadeh Gholizadeh’s angular digital blossoms, Greg Ito's gridded garden of personal symbolism, and the vibrant bursts of Polly Apfelbaum’s design that pays homage to the underrecognized British color theorist Mary Gartside. The exhibition culminates in a stunning presentation from Nick Cave, in which a work from the artist’s ongoing Grapht series of wall hangings—crafted from vintage metal serving trays which explode into tangles of cut-tin flowers—is displayed alongside the mural-like Wallwork, developed with artist and designer Bob Faust.

Boren Banner Series: Chloe King
April 15–October 11, 2026

In spring 2026, the Frye will debut a new Boren Banner from artist Chloe King. Created for this project, the new work will continue the artist’s recent explorations into the politics of the dance floor and the duality of Queer nightlife as both a sanctuary and site of excess. Positioning Queer nightlife as both a lifeline and a liability, King references the dilapidated and occasionally illegal environments of “the scene” and examines its function as a platform for radical joy, reinvention, and world building.

Tom Lloyd
May 16–September 13, 2026

The Frye Art Museum is proud to bring to Seattle a landmark presentation of the work of Tom Lloyd, organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem as the inaugural exhibition in their newly renovated building. Artist, activist, and community organizer Tom Lloyd (1929–1996) was an early pioneer of using electric light as an artistic medium. Collaborating with an engineer at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Lloyd developed a highly experimental and technologically advanced art practice in the 1960s that challenged popular understandings of what role the work of Black artists should play.

Drawing on new scholarship and conservation efforts, the exhibition will illuminate Lloyd’s lasting impact at the intersection of art, technology, and Black cultural history. Bringing together a selection of artworks from throughout Lloyd’s artistic evolution, the exhibition marks the first time these works will be shown together, including during the artist’s lifetime.

Lotus L. Kang
June 6–September 27, 2026

The Frye Art Museum is pleased to present the largest museum show to date of Lotus L. Kang, featuring two major installations created for the exhibition together with a new body of works on paper. Developed in direct response to the museum’s distinctive architecture, Kang is conceiving two distinctly atmospheric installations. Together, these ambitious artworks will offer the material and conceptual proposition that our bodies—and our cultural, diasporic, familial identities—are in a perpetual state of becoming.

Lotus L. Kang works across photography and sculpture, creating site-responsive installations with sheets of industrial-sized film. Interested in the generative possibilities of misusing materials, she exposes the film to varying unpredictable natural and artificial light conditions in multiple locations. Kang refers to this process as “tanning,” likening the film to skin and situating the works’ meaning in relation to the permeability of the human body, memory, and diasporic identity. Striking bands of color emerge, often imperceptibly, on the surface of the continually sensitive film over time, forming abstract visual records of their movement (from her studio to the greenhouses where she tans the film to the galleries where they are exhibited, and beyond).