Lynette Charters, now showing through the end of January at the gallery at Tacoma Community College is having fun setting the record straight. “The Matildas are the joyful part,” she said. “The Missing Women series poses the question of why women aren’t included in exhibitions and museums and history, but the Matildas are all about what women achieve and how important their achievements are.”
Steven Miller is a local artist and photographer with work in Tacoma Art Museum’s collections. The museum approached him about creating a workshop on queer photography. “As part of his practice, he’s been experimenting with cyanotypes, and we wanted to host a workshop about this unique photographic process,” said Rachel Ervin. Director of Marketing and Communications at TAM.
Tacoma Light Trail, December 31 through January 12, brings much-needed illumination to the dark winter streets of Tacoma. The Light Trail will line the streets of Tacoma with light art installations, and the entire free event will be blessed by the Puyallup Tribe of Indians. Food trucks will be on hand to make this a perfect family-friendly way to ring in the new year.
The current Childhood’s End Gallery show, up through December 23, is visually impressive and stimulating and yet simultaneously very relaxing to be with, demonstrating the versatility, and diversity of paper. The variety of styles and skills of the artists are cohesively unified by their shared love of the material.
Olympia Family Theatre, which has closed its adjacent all-ages space and reduced staff hours, is hard at work on raising the money it needs to keep the theater on solid footing going forward. Dean Shellman, chair of the non-profit theater’s board, said, “We’re carefully looking for savings opportunities that don’t change the experience for our audiences and students. OFT provides magical moments for families, and that won’t change.”
In this rendition of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at Lakewood Playhouse there’s an added meta structure where the actors we see on stage are playing actors in the ‘40s, who are then playing the characters we know from It’s a Wonderful Life. “You’re an audience within an audience in the play within a play, which I think some people will be surprised by,” says director Brittany D. Henderson.
“A Christmas Carol,” playing at Harlequin Productions Nov. 29 to Dec. 24, “is the greatest redemption story ever told, wrapped up in the trappings of a ghost story,” said Artistic Director Aaron Lamb. “A story of redemption is fundamentally a story about hope and forgiveness. If audiences leave a little more hopeful and a little more open to forgiveness after they see this production, we have succeeded.”
At Evergreen City Ballet, currently based in Renton, Artistic Director Maximiliano Guerra has plans to embrace an enhanced learning philosophy. During the school’s 2024-2025 season, Guerra and the team are establishing a unique curriculum that includes the study of broader topics, with art, history, and classical music to complement instruction in ballet. In December they will be performing Wade Walthall’s The Nutcracker.
The question was posed to Native artists, “How can we lovingly honor our ancestors, heal generational traumas, and preserve culture in the modern world?” Their many responses varied, vibrant and intriguing responses can be seen in this art exhibition at SPSCC’s Leonor R. Fuller Gallery at the Kenneth J. Minnaert Center for the Arts through Dec. 13.
‘The Oculist’ by the two-person punk band nightmayor (Percy Boyle and Stella R.S.) is an irreverent retelling of the true story of John Taylor, an itinerant eye surgeon who traveled through Europe in the 18th century. See it at Olympia’s Wild Child November 14 through 24.