The first gallery that visitors enter in the installation, Storied Places fittingly starts with the land itself, exploring diverse approaches to place, nature, and the landscape genre. Shaun Peterson (Tulalip/Puyallup) is a contemporary artist who both carves cedar and paints on canvas. With the graphic, banner-like Song for the Moon (2022), he echoes a spiritual connection to the land, bringing a narrative long transmitted orally into vivid representation: the story of dukwibuł, the Changer who formed the land, and Wolf, who protects humans through prayer and ceremony. Nearby, Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Mount Rainier, Bay of Tacoma – Puget Sound (1875) reflects a tradition of capturing sublime places that are meant to be observed or tamed. Gifford’s focus is the immense beauty of the light and the mountain (called Tahoma by the region’s original inhabitants). He did not intend the figures rowing across the water to be specific portraits, while visitors today may wonder about them: are they perhaps traveling by canoe to work in the hop fields?

Transnational America explores how North America became part of a global network of ideas, economies, and cultures that flows in and out of its borders. A Haida bracelet with a totemic eagle design (ca. 1900) was created for trade by an unknown maker from silver coin of Russian or American origin. Native artists responded to new markets brought about by colonialism by creating objects in silver, wood, and argillite; however, these artworks were dismissed by their buyers as craft and not valued as works of technical genius and deep cultural expression. Similarly, Gypsy Baron crazy quilt (ca. 1887) by an artist known only as Mrs. Jones is layered with both material and meaning. Though used in a typical domestic setting, the kaleidoscopic arrangement of imported materials and Asian motifs brought together by an English stitching technique evoke the complex system of international trade and cultural exchange that made it possible.

Reimaging Regionalism was curated by Inye Wokoma, a visual artist and co-founder of Black cultural space Wa Na Wari. Invited by the museum to create a new artwork, he was inspired to curate a new interpretive framework around some of the collection’s most well-known works. Albert Bierstadt created the epic painting Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870) without ever visiting the area; its billowing clouds and charging waves are an act of imagination. The Indigenous figures along the dramatic shoreline seem inconsequential to the grand possibilities of the land: the subtext for this painting commissioned by a wealthy merchant. The elevator screen from the Chicago Stock Exchange (ca. 1893-94) by the “father of skyscrapers” Louis Sullivan is an utterly literal symbol of economic expansion, its seed grain symbols representing the overwhelming might of colonialism. Now installed so that visitors can move entirely around it and look through it, the screen offers an opportunity to consider what this gateway was leading to—and what it kept out. 

In Memory Keepers, four pairs of eyes are searching for you, looking out from Alfredo Arreguín’s exuberant, highly patterned painting Four Self-Portraits (1995). A new acquisition, this is the first work by this major Northwest artist to join SAM’s collection. Celebrated for his patterned compositions of iconic figures such as the Virgin Mary, Frida Kahlo, Mexican revolutionaries, and Aztec gods, in this painting the artist creates a mysterious map of symbols of his own past. Pattern also conveys memory in Blocks (2003) by Annie Mae Young, in this case of the famed quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Young’s bold composition of large shapes in a pulsating field seems to convey a sense of improvisational rhythm. Made from worn or discarded scraps of clothing and passed down through families, these quilts express the continuation of matrilineal knowledge and are now respected as significant examples of modern art.