Tacoma Art Museum

Alice Engley Beek

(b. 1867, Providence, Rhode Island; d. 1951, Tacoma, Washington)
Low Tide, Puget Sound, Washington, 1890-1899
Watercolor on paper
Dimensions: 16 1/4 x 25 1/2 inches
Tacoma Art Museum, Gift of Homer O. Blair, 1998.51

Alice Engley Beek was Art Director at the Annie Wright Seminary (now Annie Wright School) in Tacoma for 17 years. She is one of a group of important early artists and art educators in Washington State--including Emily Inez Denny (1853-1918) and Harriet Foster Beecher (1854-1915)--who founded a number of Northwest cultural groups and institutions.

Though living quietly in Tacoma, Beek had an international reputation, including multiple awards from the Paris International Expositions. She worked almost exclusively in watercolor.

 

Michael Brophy

(b. 1960, Portland, Oregon)
January, 1997
Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 78 x 95 1/2 inches
Tacoma Art Museum, Museum purchase with funds from the Dr. Lester Baskin Memorial Fund, 1998.12

Michael Brophy is often considered the quintessential Northwest artist. His decades-long focus and wry approach to the people, landscape, and history of the region have earned him much attention from collectors, museums, and critics. His work is in the collections of several Northwest museums. He was the subject of a mid-career survey, The Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy, organized by Tacoma Art Museum, and was included in the recent survey Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art, which opened at Seattle Art Museum in 2003.

Imogen Cunningham

(b. 1883, Portland, Oregon; d. 1976, San Francisco, California)
On Mount Rainier 9, 1915
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: 6 x 8 inches
Promised gift of Shari and John Behnke

Pioneering Northwest photographer Imogen Cunningham trained in the Seattle studio of Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952)--best known for his 20-volume photographic series The North American Indian--before establishing her own photography business. Her studio became a gathering place for Seattle's progressive artists, many of whom served as models for her soft-focused compositions based on poetry and literature as well as Japanese aesthetics. The subject of this image is her husband, Roi Partridge (1888-1984) and is one of a series of three that will be alternately on view during the run of this exhibition. Cunningham relocated to California in 1917.

 

James Fitzgerald

(b. 1910, Seattle, Washington; d. 1973, Seattle, Washington)
The Buggy, 1968
Bronze
Dimensions: 31 x 27 x 38 inches
Tacoma Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1999.9

James FitzGerald studied art at many institutions in the United States, including briefly with Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. He exhibited extensively across the United States, including group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo. FitzGerald served as director of the Spokane Art Center in 1941. He is best remembered for his aggressive aesthetic that reflected the social turbulence of the 1960s.

Morris Graves

(b. 1910, Fox Valley, Oregon; d. 2001, Loleta, California)
Chalice Holding the Stimson Mill, 1936
Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 68 x 41 inches with frame
Gift of Robert Ohashi, Ross Ohashi and Arnold Ohashi, 2007.14

In the 1930s Morris Graves's paintings reflected his concerns about the state of the rapidly changing world. In this canvas he depicted the Stimson Mill (located just outside of Ballard in Seattle) isolated in the cup of a chalice. Graves adapted surrealist symbolism to make a powerful commentary on the negative impact of the rapid economic and political changes in Seattle. He emphasized his point by contrasting the gritty factory to the purity of fallow fields. Graves was one of several Northwest artists to experiment with surrealism, including Malcolm Roberts (1913-1990) and Louis Bunce (1907-1983) among others.