Visual Arts

posts about art, art shows, galleries and other visual arts…

The Carpenter’s House — A New Multidisciplinary Events Space

The Carpenter’s House was envisaged by Justin La Gra, who wanted to manifest a warm, intimate, and inclusive community space for creativity and art made for real people with real materials. Murphy and Ruiz joined the project, with their own specialized skills, resulting in a creative venue, involving a functioning carpentry studio, an art gallery, a live music venue, a community gathering space, and a developing broadcast and media studio. They say that it began as one person’s original idea that grew stronger with a collaborative vision, which was shaped by the community around them.

Refuge and Remedy — Marilyn Frasca at Childhood’s End

Marilyn Frasca’s drawings, on view through Nov. 16 at Childhood’s End Gallery in downtown Olympia, exist at the intersection of dreams and stark reality, “I had arranged to do this one-person show years ago,” she said, “and in the process, the world fell apart. I’d look at the abstract images and I’d see horrible things because I’d been hearing about them. … I thought, ‘I’m going to have to cancel this show. I can’t work.’ ”
(And then) Frasca found her way through after she heard historian Heather Cox Richardson encouraging artists to work. “She said many artists she knew had trouble working during that time and that what the world needed was for them to work,” Frasca told Oly Arts.

Copper Wolf 10th Anniversary Exhibit and Celebration

Copper Wolf Studios and Gallery, nestled off 2ND Avenue in Tumwater, is in a craftsman house with much of the old-world charm of the original house made into a beautiful gallery with great lighting and welcoming communal space, alongside the tattoo artists’ personal studio spaces. Danny Gordo says, “Copper Wolf creates a space showcasing art, bringing people together to further conversations and bridge gaps.” Aimee Schreiber rightly points out, “Art needs walls and space.” Gordo and Schreiber are board members of Olympia Artspace Alliance.

Oly Arts Fall Winter 2025 Print Edition

The Fall/Winter print edition of OLY ARTS N0. 34 is published! Here is a list of the articles and where in the Olympia area you can pick up your FREE copy. Enjoy!

David Mollari Sederberg, a 45-Year Art Retrospective

Nobody does it like David Mollari Sederberg, an artist whose work is simultaneously otherworldly and grounded in reality. You have certainly seen his otherworldly Glowhenge (2020-2021), nine brilliantly painted monoliths standing upright on the mound by the shore of Capital Lake, each lit with black light at night and each painted by a different artist. During fall Arts Walk this year, Sederberg’s work will be featured in a retrospective exhibition of artworks in various media assembled by the artist: painting, sculpture, lighted installations, and video created from 1981 to the present at the Olympia Ballroom.

SPSCC’s 2025 SW Washington Regional Juried Exhibition

There’s a sense of spaciousness and silence in the art of the Southwest Washington Regional Juried Exhibition at South Puget Sound Community College in such works as Danny Schreiber’s graphite-on-paper Lost Between the Stars and Foam and Jeanette Jones’ Fire Hazard, a still life that illuminates, as gallery manager Sean Barnes put it, “a quiet moment of rest.”

25 Years of Oly Ink

The Sunday, August 10 art show celebrating Spidermonkey’s 25th anniversary features artists that have become part of the Olympia tattoo circle over the past few decades, some stretching as far back as Bryan Childs’ early days over 30 years ago. As Childs says, these pieces will not be physical tattoos, but rather “a gallery of paintings that dream of being tattoos tailored for the back.”

Bear’s Souper Sunday Cookbook: Recipes for Hungry Animals

Bear’s Souper Sunday Cookbook: Recipes for Hungry Animals is a charming cookbook for the whole family with recipes and stories by Olympia author Chris Hyde and illustrations by Olympia artist Roxanna Groves. The Souper Sunday movement began with an idea that came to Hyde to foster community togetherness and feed his neighbors in a world isolated after the Covid pandemic. What started out as a Facebook group that offered free soup to community members flourished into something bigger including this book.

Lynn Di Nino talks TRIPOD in Tacoma

Tacoma’s TRIPOD began more than five years ago, where Lynn Di Nino brings artists of all stripes around to show off what they’ve done, what they’re working on, and where they’re going. Artists will come up on stage, readied with a projector, and show off 50 images over 15 minutes, guiding the audience through a story, or just giving them an inside look at their creative processes. The effect is somewhere between a TED Talk, show-and-tell, and a friend sharing their vacation slides.

Collaborative Paintings at Tobin Gallery: Jazz in color

“This work needs to be seen by more than the 120 people who attended the opening,” said Tobin Ropes, owner of the new Tobin Gallery in downtown Tacoma, which is showing Schmitt & Hall: Collaborative Improvisations through August 15. Thirty-one Schmitt/Hall paintings are on display in the gallery, mostly figurative, most telling a story. While the artists cite German expressionists such as Max Beckmann as an influence, they’ve veered away from the darkness of expressionist paintings. Rather, these works feature color.

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