Critic’s Corner: Best Visual and Performing Arts of 2024

Many of the South Sound’s best theater and visual arts critics write for OLY ARTS. We asked six of them to highlight some of their favorite visual and performance art shows from 2024, and we congratulate and celebrate the Olympia and Tacoma-area artists selected. Due to the limitation we put on the critics of no more than two or three shows, we are aware of and acknowledge that many great shows and artists were not picked. We are lucky to live in such a vibrant creative community.

Don Freas Sculpting a Life

“I remember the crisis one day.” Sculptor Don Freas, already a well-respected craftsman who’d shown his furniture in galleries, said. “I said, ‘No, I can’t make a chair. I want to do something new.’ And it became a sculpture.” This retrospective at Childhood’s End Gallery in Olympia through April 21 is a meditation on Freas’ creative process.

Collaborating With Nature: The Installation

Atop each of the 27 pilings in Toten Inlet is a Boucante figure, bodies mostly made of weathered wood, heads and faces of sculpted stone, distinctively dressed in all manner of antiquated machine and engine parts and salvaged odds and ends. The faces are wide-eyed and staring, the mouths open, the effect inscrutable or spooky, depending on the direction of the light.

Nancy Thorne Wins Plinth Project

This year’s winner of the Percival Plinth Project in Olympia, “A Song for Nurturing Peace” by Nancy Thorne-Chambers, is a bronze statue of a girl holding a bird’s nest with an egg in one hand while the mother bird, a white dove, perches on her other hand.

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