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 Reaching Back, Guiding the Future, three artworks come together in a dramatic challenge to the legacy of structural racism and colonialism in the US. Nicholas Galanin’s commission for SAM, Neon American Anthem (2023), fills the gallery with white light from a custom neon installation that offers a proclamation and an invitation: “I’ve composed a new American national anthem: take a knee and scream until you can’t breathe.” Galanin envisions the work as a participatory performance piece that engages museum visitors to ring out with sounds of protest, mourning, or celebration. On the floor lies a grid of “Daisy Doormats,” the iconic AstroTurf welcome mats with plastic daisies in the corners; this symbol of Americana becomes both unsettling and humorously ironic in this setting. Another artist who makes scorching use of the color white and national symbols is Jack Daws; two of his works from SAM’s collection join Galanin’s. His White Flag (2001) is an all-white American flag that glimmers audaciously: is it signaling a surrender or exposing the country’s entrenched power structure?

Please Note: Neon American Anthem is open 1–5 pm Wednesday–Friday, and all day Saturday and Sunday.