Chamber Music

for Chamber Music Exhibition

watercolor on paper, 10.5" x 14.5", 2012

The Frye Art Museum presented 36 Seattle artists in Chamber Music curated by Scott Lawrimore, the Frye’s Deputy Director, Collections and Exhibitions, in his inaugural exhibition at the Museum.

Each artist created a newly commissioned artwork in response to musical compositions based on James Joyce’s volume of poetry entitled Chamber Music. The artists included in the exhibition span generations and reflect a broad aesthetic spectrum. Uniting them is a shared dedication to artist-generated activities that strengthen Seattle’s arts community beyond their own art practices. Chamber Music is both a celebration of individual mark-making and a cooperative composition about love for the City of Seattle and how artists choose to leave their mark on it.

As a supplement to the thirty-six new artworks on view, the exhibition includes a living library archiving the artists' contributions as curators, critics, academics, theoreticians, writers, civic organizers, and founders or members of important artist cooperatives and independent exhibition spaces. This library presents documents and ephemera from such watershed projects as and/or, 911 Media Arts Center, and CoCA, as well as more recent initiatives toward community-building like NEPO House, Free Sheep Foundation, and The New Mystics.

Francisco Guerrero Archive, 2012