Visual Arts

2026 Fall Arts Hit List—Visual Arts

2026 Fall Arts Hit List—Visual Arts

The must-see gallery shows of the season.

September The 2026 Recology King County AIR Program Exhibition Through September 12 Recology King County To wrap up its latest artist residencies, Recology King County presents the 2026 Recology King County AIR Program Exhibition, featuring fashion designer Janelle Abbott and photographer Eirik Johnson. Held at Mutuus Studio, the show is the culmination of a residency…

Studio Sessions: Ling Chun

Studio Sessions: Ling Chun

The Seattle-based artist brings playful color to ceramics and neon while exploring memory, transformation, and life between cultures.

For Ling Chun, creating begins with something sensed before it can be named. Working with clay, glass, light, and sometimes synthetic hair, the Hong Kong-born artist gives physical form to things that words cannot always hold. “For me, the magnitude of making goes far beyond the object that is eventually produced,” Chun says. “The object…

Studio Sessions: Gabi Nirino  

Studio Sessions: Gabi Nirino  

Working with textiles to explore ideas connected to nature, community, and womanhood, Buenos Aires-born Gabi Nirino never stops experimenting with her medium. 

Gabi Nirino carries bag of materials with her almost everywhere she goes. Cloth, thread, yarn, textile scraps, collected fibers—the pieces inside are a network of inspiration waiting for her hands. “You can work with textiles anywhere—on the floor, on a plane—which is why I always carry a project in my bag,” Nirino says. “It’s like…

Studio Sessions: Periko The Artist

Studio Sessions: Periko The Artist

The Mexican-born, Seattle-based artist paints vibrant figures that refuse to settle into fixed identities.

Can a painting ever contain an entire person? The works of Gerardo Peña, also known as Periko The Artist, leave room for their subjects to move and change, resisting the idea that any of us can be reduced to a single image or expression. Peña’s colorful, surreal figures capture something less fixed than a likeness,…

Studio Sessions: Liz Tran

Studio Sessions: Liz Tran

After 26 years in Seattle, artist Liz Tran returned to Oregon, but her impact on our city’s art scene will always remain.

Liz Tran’s work blooms with color, energy, and emotion. Bright drips and drops, petal-like shapes—in Tran’s skillful hands, canvas, paint, and fabric burst into dynamic studies of nature, transformation, life. Born and raised in Oregon, Tran spent the past 26 years in Seattle, returning to her hometown, Eugene, to be closer to her family—and the…

Studio Sessions: Jade Solomon Curtis  

Studio Sessions: Jade Solomon Curtis  

With an interest in how bodies retain memory, emotion, and experience, the award-winning choreographer and interdisciplinary artist Jade Solomon Curtis presents an immersive work at Seattle’s historic Union station. 

Discover choreographer Jade Solomon Curtis and her immersive dance installation, Keeper of Sadness, at Seattle’s historic Union Station this August.

Studio Sessions: Jennifer Leigh Harrison

Studio Sessions: Jennifer Leigh Harrison

Seattle artist Jennifer Leigh Harrison uses layers of paint and abstraction to explore what we carry beneath the surface.

Jennifer Leigh Harrison’s paintings are dense with movement. Color and texture gather into mosaic-like fields, as if they have been fractured and reformed. There are places in the work where a frenetic buzz seems trapped between the canvas and the first layer of paint. That energy runs through Patterns of Belonging, her current exhibition at…

Studio Sessions: Lila Alexis Thomas 

Studio Sessions: Lila Alexis Thomas 

After curating a group exhibition that celebrates life in the Black community, artist Lila Alexis Thomas is bringing her emotionally driven work to two additional summer shows—and teaching drawing along the way.  

Painter and educator Lila Alexis Thomas is having a busy summer. In addition to curating the group show This Room is Ours: Centering the Black Figure, on view through July 18 at ARTS at King Street Station, Thomas is heading up programming connected to the exhibition—she will host a figure drawing workshop July 11th—as well…

Studio Sessions: Nakisa Dehpanah

Studio Sessions: Nakisa Dehpanah

Artist Nakisa Dehpanah’s new show uses suspended textile forms and movement to explore identity as something layered and always changing.

Seattle artist Nakisa Dehpanah’s work hovers between sculpture and performance. First developed during a residency at Base Art Space, Suspended Selves is now on view at Method Gallery in Pioneer Square, where billowy, vessel-like sheer fabric forms hang with geometric clay elements integrated into them. They seem like soft shelters or skins waiting for an…

Studio Sessions: Eirik Johnson 

Studio Sessions: Eirik Johnson 

In a residency hosted by Foster/White Gallery, local photographer Eirik Johnson observes the collision between nature and humanity, and the longing by the latter to leave a mark in place and time. 

Most people view the advent of summer as a signal to slow down and relax, but for artist Eirik Johnson, this year’s warming months are a time to ramp up as he prepares to debut two creative projects. Born and raised in Seattle, Johnson, whose deeply emotional photography covers a range of subjects, will release a…

Best in Show: Schack Art Center’s Annual Juried Exhibition Opens in Everett

Best in Show: Schack Art Center’s Annual Juried Exhibition Opens in Everett

This spring, Everett’s Schack Art Center opened Present Tense: 24th Annual Juried Exhibition. A longstanding tradition, the show will feature pieces from artists working in a range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, glass, ceramics, printmaking, photography, and mixed media. “We select emerging artists and those with well-established practices,” says Schack’s marketing and communications manager, Aaron…

Studio Sessions: Jo Cosme

Studio Sessions: Jo Cosme

The Seattle-based multimedia artist and 2026 Neddy Award winner challenges the postcard version of Puerto Rico and centers the persistence of its people.

Jo Cosme knows how seductive a postcard can be. The Seattle-based Boricua (Puerto Rican) multimedia artist works across photography, installation, video, sound, and interactive elements to examine and pull apart how Puerto Rico is seen, sold, and misunderstood from the outside. Trained in photojournalism, with a BFA in photography from Puerto Rico School of Fine…

Studio Sessions: Sangram Majumdar

Studio Sessions: Sangram Majumdar

Working at the confluence of history, culture, and various painting traditions, UW associate professor Sangram Majumdar is one of this year’s Neddy Artist Award winners.

Discover the art of UW professor Sangram Majumdar, a 2026 Neddy Artist Award winner. Learn about his inspiration and upcoming Seattle exhibition at Cornish.

Join The Must List

Don't miss a thing.
Get Seattle's best events,handpicked
and delivered to your inbox weekly.