A large-scale solo exhibition in a museum setting is a great honor for any artist.
Occasionally, though, it is the museum that is privileged to host such an event.
Such is the case this month, said Bainbridge Island Museum of Art executive director and curator Greg Robinson, with the opening of “Heaven On Fire,” a 30-year survey of paintings, prints and newer works in glass and paper by the peerless Barbara Earl Thomas.
“It is a big deal for the museum,” Robinson said.
Thomas — recently called “a legend worth the title” by the Stranger — is a Seattle based-artist and writer perhaps best known as the founding director of the Northwest African American Museum. She has exhibited work at the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Whatcom County Museum and other venues around the country. Her work is also included in a number of prestigious private and public collections, such as the Safeco Corporate Collection and the Microsoft Corporate Collection, among others.
She’s a 2016 Stranger Genius Award nominee, and she also recently won the Yvonne Twining Humber Award from Artist Trust.
“Storm Watch: The Art of Barbara Earl Thomas” was published in 1998 by the University of Washington Press and she twice received the Seattle Arts Commissions award for new non-fiction. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies and she is also famous for her charismatic speaking engagements.
“Heaven on Fire,” Robinson said, will combine both older iconic pieces and some newer work — sculpted glass and large paper pieces — never shown before.
“This is what I call a major solo exhibition,” he said. “It represents more than
30 years of art making [and] includes some of her earlier paintings, and the way the show is organized actually shows relationships throughout her work. Sometimes artists work in completely different series in their lives and they finish one thing and move on to a whole different venture. I think her work has a lot of cohesion throughout.”
Even Thomas herself was surprised when organizing the show, she said, at how well her older work fit with the new.
“What I wanted was to find works that are pieces that I thought really represented each sort of decade,” Thomas said.
“It all seems very present to me, that’s what I find interesting. That piece that
I did in ’89, it seems like I just did it. That
is a very pleasant feeling. Also that I still like the work.
“I was surprised when I walked in and saw all the work and was like, ‘Wow, it’s hanging together.’”
Thomas, whose last show of equivalent scale was in 1992, said she endeavors to create pieces that work on multiple levels, as deep or simple as the audience cares to consider them.
“I aim always to make something that I think is beautiful,” she said. “So, if people just want to deal with how beautiful it is, that’s what they deal with. And then, if they want to read the story and deal with that, they can do that to.
“I want to have a relationship with my viewers, I want to have a conversation with my viewers, so I try to find a way to have them enter the work at their own pace and take as much as they want.”
Common themes in Thomas’ work include family bonds, folktales, the treatment and preservation of nature, and depicting the human condition — “what we do in terms of how we take care of each other.”
Being called a legend, Thomas said, or any of her accumulated acclaim, is not something she dwells on.
“Those are lovely titles that other people are able to say about you, and you hope you honor them and you hope that you’re not going, ‘Oh, well. I did that,’” she said. “Then you realize how short life really is.
“You just wake up one day and you’ve lived long enough and you’ve been around. What I think is good for me is I don’t think I’m done.”
“This show is different because of the age I am and also because I just decided to just blow it out of the water,” Thomas added. “The work that’s here is the best work that I’m able to do at this moment. It’s good work, and I feel really proud of that and I pushed it really hard and I pushed myself really hard.”
In addition to the Thomas retrospective, BIMA’s summer exhibitions, on display through October, include “Marita Dingus: Hanging from the Rafters/Big Girl,” a two-story doll figure addressing non-recyclable plastics and the environment; selections for the permanent collection celebrating the museum’s third anniversary; and the next installment in the popular art book series, “Artist’s Books, Chapter 8: Everything–Including the Kitchen Sink.”
BIMA is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.
Visit www.biartmuseum.org for more information.
Good look at a legend
What: “Heaven On Fire,” a 30-year survey of paintings, prints and newer works in glass and paper by Barbara Earl Thomas.
When: June 25 through Oct. 2.
Where: Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (550 Winslow Way East).
Admission: Free.
Info: Visit www.biartmuseum.org for museum hours and more details.
