Women’s Stories, on view through April 1 at Seattle Municipal Tower Gallery, features 20 artworks by 11 female artists in a variety of media, including watercolor, paper batik, oil on canvas, collograph, fabric appliqué and quilting, gouache on silk, acrylic on paper, photography and mixed media.
Shefrin’s Food Drops in Afghanistan depicts women collecting food parcels dropped by the Bush administration in 2001. Above the scene, she has stitched the contents of one of the humanitarian daily rations, or HDRs. “I stitched Food Drops in Afghanistan in compassion for the Afghani people who have done no wrong, and in distress about the bombing, and about the travesty of airline meals as food aid.”
Conversation, a series of watercolors by DeCaro, features a young girl in the foreground with silhouettes of adults in the background. DeCaro states, “My interest in creating the Conversation suite was to relate an idea in the form of a sequence, as if it were a video.”
Artist included in the exhibition are Marsha Burns, Claire Cowie, Pat DeCaro, Jody Isaacson, Fay Jones, Deborah Lawrence, Sherry Markovitz, Anne Mathern, Liza Von Rosenstiel, Sima Elizabeth Shefrin and Barbara Earl Thomas.
“The narrative artworks in this exhibition can be explicit or mysterious, suggestive or didactic, political or humorous,” explains Curatorial Assistant Blake Haygood, who selected the pieces for Women’s Stories from the city’s Portable Works Collection. “The show features only a few of the many women in the collection, but it shows the strength and variety of work and highlights some lesser known artists alongside more established names.”
IMAGES: Pat DeCaro, Conversation, 1999-2000, watercolor on paper; Sima Elizabeth Shefrin, Food Drops in Afghanistan, 2001, fabric appliqué and quilting; Fay Jones, Untitled, 1982, acrylic on paper.
