It's 4:30 p.m. on First Thursday and once again you're madly scrolling the socials to make notes. Who was that art star guy who's opening this month? (It's Anthony White.)
Prefunk, midfunk, and afterparty As always, don’t forget to hit up Meyer on the pre-side to idle with artists, curators, pinball punks. Or Baba Yaga, the self-described “morning, noon, and night rock and roll clubhouse of Pioneer Square.” But before you get lost in conversations about the latest in Banksy or banana art scandals, consider popping into Bon Voyage to snag some authentic Seattle vintage, then dip into Lady Yum next door for a seasonal sugar rush. (Rainbow Nerds macaron topped with cherry lime buttercream, anyone? Not sponsored, but you have our number, Yum.) For the after party, we always recommend a detour to the iconic fireman’s bar, McCoy’s, if respite from the art crowd is what you want. But this month there’s an actual after party brought to you by Populus (see below). Find your way there if you can; it’s serving a little taste of summer Seattle Art Fair energy, and we’re here for it.
But we digress. Here's our picks:
Mel Carter: bitter, the mourning at Gallery 4Culture
Why it’s worth a visit:
Mel Carter’s installations resemble the machinations of a mad scientist gone witchy: arcane, alchemical laboratories where transparent glass vessels contain alurring mixtures and amalgams of symbolic material: salt, saffron, wishbone, honeybees. Carter's solo at Gallery 4Culture will expand on this theme. Carter writes that the work considers ways in which “spiritual frameworks can address environmental challenges and how our relationship with materials might reshape notions of permanence, consumption, and responsibility.” Each vessel reads like a poem if you look closely enough. Take notes.
Anthony White: Somethin Somethin
Christopher Derek Bruno: if/then/yes/and
Greg Kucera Gallery
Why it’s worth a visit:
Surely one of the places to visit this month on account of the inimitable Anthony White, whose work is a contemporary twist on 16th- and 17th-century vanitas paintings—the ones made by Dutch artists to remind us that all is vanity and we’re all gonna die. White takes the genre for a modern spin, painting elaborate still life compositions so cluttered with detritus of the everyday that the result is a kind of candy-colored horror vacui from which you cannot look away. Offering some relief from this sumptuous mortality and mayhem, Christopher Derek Bruno’s work is on a whole other plane, utilizing color and space to toy with visual perception. Reminiscent of the Light and Space movement of the ’60s and ’70s, with a dash of Op Art thrown in, his pieces are a paragon of precision and craftsmanship, with some somatic chill vibes thrown in.
https://www.gregkucera.com/
Romson Regarde Bustillo: *To Remember or Forget *at J. Rinehart Gallery
Why it’s worth a visit:
Effusive and vibrating color and pattern just oozes from Romson Regarde Bustillo’s work. While the show statement is stacked with dense language (an “investigation into our presumed capacity to hold multiple ideas, including contradictory concepts, while considering one's proximity to intended meanings”), the meaning is just the icing, because the materiality of Bustillo’s work is even more dense and rich. Bustillo is a recent 2025 Neddy Award finalist in the “open medium” category, and the mediums are flexing in this exhibition of sandblasted glass vessels, along with paintings, collage, prints, and tapestries.
Oasis at SOIL
Why it’s worth a visit:
A queer fever dream of an installation featuring work by Dinah J, Flora Wilds, AshaAung Helmstetter, and Jessica Marie Mercy. You really don't need more than this description: The gallery mutates into a high-camp desert fantasia...a maximalist, immersive escape where femme ghosts, queer saints, and acid queens reign...freaky, the fabulous, and the forgotten.
AXIS
Grab.Hold.Release. at Common Ground
Why it’s worth a visit:
Three Seattle painters of virtuosic skill—Sofya Belinskaya, Grace Athena Flott, and Alyssa Zoe Putnam—come together in Grab.Hold.Release., a show about the female body and its myriad historic and political connotations: the monstrous, the alienated, the sensual, the mythological. The figurative works on display are intensely visceral, at times uncomfortably so: images of fistfuls of contorted bright green-and-violet flesh, or a woman’s pallid face, eyes shut against a steady stream of wetness. Is she holding something back, eyes shut in pain or regret? Or is this calm? A cleansing? It’s hard to tell, and maybe that’s the point.
Eon Ephemere by Dez’Mon Omega Fair at Method Gallery
Why it’s worth a visit:
The word “immersive” is so often used in conjunction with “installation” that it often loses any sort of real meaning. Not so with Dez’Mon Omega Fair, whose work is more like an engulfing than an immersion. During Method’s recent takeover of the Georgetown Steam Plant for In Bloom, we witnessed Dez’Mon invite individuals to participate in an improvised waltz wherein strangers, eyes locked in mesmerized concentration, mirrored Dez’Mon’s movements as they transferred billowing watercolor paintings across the concrete floor—a kind of repetitive factory motion fueled by ephemeral connection, concentration, and poetry. We’re not sure what this exhibition has in store, but it's probably something you had to be there for, so don't not be there.
https://www.methodgallery.com/
The Shop at LMN Presents: Timea Tihanyi
Why it’s worth a visit:
Timea Tihanyi is a former neuroscientist whose work in 3D printed porcelain pushes the boundaries of the medium so far that she’s landed in her own category: “technoceramics”. A longtime student of the brain, Tihanyi’s work is rooted in a curiosity about the patterns we find around us, the ways we choose to make sense of the world, and our cognitive experience of space. She brings sculpture together with virtual reality to learn about how we learn. She’ll be at LMN from 5-7 p.m. to talk about all of this plus to give a live demo of her 3D printing. (You might get to experience one of her VR installations as well.)
Populus: Origins at Europa
Why it’s worth a visit:
Populus is the rebrand of Westland Hotel (it’s so chic it was renamed even before it opened), the latest addition to the perpetually brilliant and chronically art-forward Railspur conglomerate in Pioneer Square. This year Railspur commissioned 328 paintings by 35 local/regional/international artists, to fill the brand-new hotel that is too cool to convey on paper: each hotel room door has been screen printed with a unique silhouette of indigenous flora, sections of the walls and ceilings are lined in reclaimed hardwood salvaged from the historic building, etc. To celebrate the unveiling of this new landmark, the Railspur folks are throwing a party and First Thursday Art Walk exhibition, Populus: Origins, at Europa Gallery, featuring live music by Babes in Canyon (7:30-9:00 p.m.) This is free and open to the public. If you’re cool, you might even get into the rooftop bar for the after party.
