SEATTLE, WA.- Drawing inspiration from the Seattle Art Museum’s celebrated African collection, Disguise: Masks and Global African Art (opening June 18, 2015) is a groundbreaking exhibition that celebrates 21st-century evolutions of the mask and explores contemporary forms of disguise. In honor of this innovative collection SAM is throwing a party on June 19 featuring the creativity and beauty of African art, culture, music and dance during Night of Disguise. Six artists featured in this exhibition will be present at the celebration.

“In this era of innovation, when digital culture is upending our visual framework, artists are reinventing form in an ever-expanding choice of mediums,” says Kimerly Rorschach, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director and CEO. “With Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, the Seattle Art Museum’s important collection of masks has become a catalyst for artists, encouraging them to present fresh visions of masquerade and the shared instinct to hide from ourselves and from each other.”

Over the past two years, Seattle Art Museum’s Curator of African and Oceanic Art Pamela McClusky, and Consultant Curator Erika Dalya Massaquoi, have sought out contemporary artists from Africa or of African descent who are exploring the notion of disguise.

“While masks were exported in vast quantities to become a signature art form representing the African continent in the 20th century, masquerades were left behind,” says McClusky. “Disguise attempts to bridge the gap between the mask observed in isolation and the masquerade experienced as a catalyst.”

Disguise is more than an exhibition—it is a bold move to bring the masquerade into the museum, and the museum’s renowned collection of African masks to life. Organized by SAM, Disguise will travel to the Fowler Museum at UCLA from October 18, 2015 to March 13, 2016 and to the Brooklyn Museum from April 22 to September 11, 2016 after its presentation in Seattle.

"Throughout the exhibition genres are blurred,” says Massaquoi. “This blurring forces audiences to shift their attentions back and forth between multiple narratives and ways of storytelling. These alternating perspectives will hopefully raise a lot of questions for spectators: What is being told? How is it being told? From whose perspective? Museum goers are challenged to query their frames of reference.”

One artist is composing a soundtrack to set a base pulse. Performance commissions are prominent in the exhibition, showcasing disguises being enacted in city streets, in forests, and in museum galleries. Two women have enacted and documented their own masquerades in Nigeria. Several artists are coming to Seattle to install their contributions—one will unleash a herd of fake animals wearing fake masks, while another will stage the visit of a new species, come to impart wisdom about human and animal relations.