Image: Brenda Mallory (Cherokee Nation), Adaptive Connections, 2024. Waxed cloth, waxed felt, nuts and bolts, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Mario Gallucci
The Frye Art Museum in Seattle opens ‘My Body Is a Basket’ on 24 October 2026, an exhibition of sculpture, weaving and mixed-media painting by three Indigenous artists based in Washington and Oregon: Brenda Mallory (Cherokee Nation), Danielle Morsette and Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos). The show runs until 11 April 2027.
The exhibition was organised by Faith Brower, the museum’s former director and curator of collections, and the independent curator Asia Tail (Cherokee Nation). It was conceived in dialogue with ‘An Indigenous Present’, the nationally touring exhibition that is making its only West Coast stop at the Frye this season.
Basketry serves the show as both method and metaphor, ranging from tightly woven wool tapestry to stapled bundles of found fibres. According to the museum, the three artists carry textile traditions into new territory, drawing on ancestral teachings to make work grounded in the present and in their own place, and in doing so anchor a broader conversation about modern and contemporary Indigenous art in the Pacific Northwest.
Mallory’s ‘Adaptive Connections’ (2024) gathers bound, vertical sheaths of waxed cloth and waxed felt held together with nuts and bolts. Siestreem’s ‘dance apron’ (2025), lent by the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, is a large painting on panel boards measuring 80 by 200 inches, worked in acrylic, graphite, coloured pencil and Xerox transfer. Morsette’s ‘Weaver’s Eye’ (2015), a wool tapestry of 45 by 60 inches in white with black and red accents, is lent by the Suquamish Clearwater Casino Resort.
The museum is marking its new season with a public exhibitions reception on 6 November, preceded by a reception for members. Support for the exhibition comes from the Raynier Institute & Foundation, the Ford Family Foundation and Frye members, with media sponsorship from Encore Media Group.
