Image: Bainbridge Island Museum of Art
Bainbridge Island Museum of Art has opened 'Carletta Carrington Wilson: Object Lessons', a solo exhibition running July 3 through September 20, 2026, across the museum’s Feferman Gallery, Beacon Gallery and Beacon Window Gallery. The museum’s summer season announcement places the show within its yearlong celebration of Handwork 2026, a national initiative honoring handmade practice, and describes the exhibition as one that navigates time, identity and place through fabric and found materials.
The museum says Wilson merges poetry, collage and installation to explore memory, ancestry and the power of objects. The exhibition description emphasizes her use of fabric and found materials as “portals to the past,” with image and text used to reclaim generational knowledge. Wilson’s work is framed as moving between personal and collective histories, with each piece operating as a site of remembrance where hand, memory and material converge.
On the exhibition page, BIMA expands on that approach by noting that Wilson, who is based in the Pacific Northwest and identified on the site as a Seattle artist, treats cloth as both a material and a metaphor: “a constellation,” a geographical expanse and a translator of time. The museum also says her practice links eye and hand, mouth and mind, and that her work is rooted in the region’s skies, mountains and bodies of water. The artist statement posted with the exhibition goes further, presenting objects as a way back into history and a means of retrieving what has been lost when generational knowledge is absent.
'Object Lessons' is one of three current summer exhibitions announced by BIMA for the same date range. It is listed alongside 'Cloth, Paper, Stitches', a selection of artists’ books from the Cynthia Sears Artists’ Books Collection, and 'Indigenous Craft', a survey of Indigenous craft artists from the Salish Sea region. BIMA says the season is dedicated to craft artists and makers across forms, media and backgrounds, and that the exhibitions continue its Handwork 2026 programming.
The museum’s exhibition page lists related programming for 'Object Lessons' in the PRISM series. An artist talk titled 'Object Lessons: An Artist Talk with Carletta Carrington Wilson' is scheduled for August 1, 2026, from 4 to 5:30 pm in Frank Buxton Auditorium; the page notes it is sold out and will include an audience Q&A and reception. A second related event, 'Meet the Artist: Carletta Carrington Wilson', is listed for August 26, 2026.
Wilson’s exhibition also connects to her broader publication and collections record. BIMA notes that her poems, artist’s books and artworks are held in local, regional and national collections, and identifies her as the author of 'Poem of Stone and Bone: The Iconography of James W. Washington Jr. in Fourteen Stanzas and Thirty-One Days'. The exhibition page displays several works, including 'field notes: water deeper than trees is high', 'field notes: hear that bull whip cryin', 'blooms', 'soak' and 'self portrait', alongside installation views and related images.
BIMA, located at 550 Winslow Way E. on Bainbridge Island, lists the exhibition as part of its summer 2026 schedule and says the museum is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm with free admission.
