SEATTLE, WA.- SAM Next, the Seattle Art Museum’s contemporary art exhibition program, continues in 2009 with works by New York-based artist Corin Hewitt, on view April 4–October 18, 2009, and German-born, Seattle-based artist Heide Hinrichs, on view November 7, 2009–June 13, 2010. The SAM Next series introduces audiences to emerging or underappreciated artists working in the Northwest, around the U.S. or internationally. Both 2009 SAM Next exhibitions are curated by Marisa C. Sánchez, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at SAM.

CORIN HEWITT, APRIL 4–OCTOBER 18, 2009
Through photography, sculpture and performance, Corin Hewitt explores memory, decay, preservation and trans-formation. Hewitt spent one week in September 2007 on view in a gallery in Portland, Oregon, creating vivid and complex still lifes out of a variety of materials, both organic and inorganic. He photographed and often rephotographed these still lifes, producing a dynamic body of seventy-five color images. The collection, called Weavings: Performance #2 (Portland, Oregon), goes on exhibit to the public for the first time as part of the SAM Next series. These photo-graphs have never before been on public view, but they are the subject of a limited-edition book Weavings: Performance #2 (Portland, Oregon), published by J & L Books and avail-able to purchase in SAM’s Gift Shop. The book includes an interview with the artist by critic and art historian Michael Brenson, and an essay by Sánchez.

On Friday, April 3 at 6:30pm Corin Hewitt will present a lecture about his work in the Plestcheeff Auditorium, SAM Downtown.

Born in 1971, Hewitt received a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from the Milton Avery School of Art. His work has been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe, including group shows at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, the Wanas Foundation in Sweden and in Brooklyn, NY, through a Public Art Fund commission. Hewitt recently completed Seed Stage, a site-specific installation and performance at the Whitney, where he publicly manipulated a host of materials through cooking, sculpting, heating and cooling, casting, canning and eating. Hewitt is represented by New York’s Taxter and Spengemann Gallery.

HEIDE HENRICHS, NOVEMBER 7, 2009–JUNE 13, 2010
For the following SAM Next exhibit in November, Heide Hinrichs will create an environment including sculptures and drawings that is an imaginary topography. Interested in the way language shapes experiences and perceptions, Hinrichs subtly transforms a variety of handmade and found materials, appearing not as the objects that we know, but as reimagined fragments existing within a larger system of relationships and perspectives.

Hinrichs, who was born in Oldenburg, Germany, in 1976, studied at the University of Kassel and at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden. She has had solo exhibitions in Ghent, Belgium, and Frankfurt, Struppen and Dresden, Germany. Her work was recently included in Manifesta 7, a biennale of contemporary art in Italy. Hinrichs currently resides in Seattle, Washington.