- — December 18, 2009
New Blood, Old Times. Barnaby Furnas, Painter
Selected by Robin Held, chief curator and director of exhibitions and collections, Frye Art Museum
John Brown , 2005, urethane and dye on linen, 72 x 60 inches
Brilliant, black-clad Frye Art Museum Curator Robin Held, the Northwest’s first-ever fellowship winner at New York’s Center for Curatorial Leadership, has a prizewinning new touring show. The Old, Weird America is a study of Americana refracted through the dazzlingly distorting lenses of some of the best and edgiest artists in America today. “It’s not folk art,” says Held. Rather, it is about the stories that define us: cowboys and Indians, masters and slaves, madness and genius.
One highlight is skyrocketing art star Barnaby Furnas’s portrait of abolitionist John Brown, whose 1859 attempt to start a slave revolt got him martyred and sparked the Civil War. “If Kurosawa were to do a Civil War battle scene, it would look like a Barnaby Furnas painting,” says Held. “The blood spilled is like movie blood, like Kill Bill , where there are three or four colors of movie blood.” Bullets aimed at Brown bloom like flowers or funerary candles; he spouts a saint’s nimbus of gore and hovers miraculously beneath unseen gallows. “He’s thin like an ascetic, hung, and not hung — he looks suspended,” says Held. “The rope is slack. It’s about the wars that created our country, and our cinematic imaginings of war. And it’s just a gorgeous painting.”
Working with state attorney general Rob McKenna last summer, Held helped reinterpret the Fryes’ will, which used to require a perpetual, frozen exhibition of the founders’ collection. Now you see it in context with eye-popping new art from all over — and living artists. “Barnaby will speak here and work with Seattle University
painting students,” says Held. The Frye has come out of the twilight zone and into the hot spotlight.
For more information, visit Frye Art Museum's Web site.
