Welcome to our weekly roundup of must-see exhibitions, performances, and events for the upcoming week. We’ve curated this list to include everything from the hilarious and scandalous to the beautiful and mind-bending. For an even more tailored experience, register for an account on our website. Users can bookmark events on their calendar, then circle back to their favorites later on. Now, time for the recs!
OUR PICKS:
Cadence Video Poetry Festival Northwest Film Forum / Frye Art Museum
The 8th Annual Cadence Video Poetry Festival kicks off Thursday, April 24 at Frye Art Museum with a screening of video poems followed by an in-person discussion with festival co-directors Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and a handful of participating artists (including Public Display editor, Amanda Manitach, whose 58-second-long filmic poem about pornography in the trash pile makes an appearance). The Thursday night screening is a great chance to get a crash course on video poetry, what it is, and why you should be obsessed. (Case in point: video poems tend to be compact, quick, delicious hits of intensely emotive imagery—and sometimes words. It's like an endless buffet of amuse-bouche for the brain, but it'll stick to your ribs for days, years.) The festival picks up Friday at Northwest Film Forum, where it continues through the weekend, offering multiple showcases across a variety of themes. If you still need convincing, check out the article from our April print issue, where we dig into the festival's origins. April 24-27 (in-person), April 25-May 4 (online)
Power of the Presses Bainbridge Island Museum of Art
Print is dead. Long live print! A medium that seems to be ever-teetering on the edge of obsolescence in the age of screens, print—and specifically the material borne of the printing press—is being celebrated with gusto in an exhibition at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Power of the Presses takes us back to the beginnings of the printing press, from its inception in the 1440s by German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, and continues to trace its evolution to its contemporary use by artists and activists who have championed the tool as a means of facilitating freedom of speech at street level. The exhibit offers an extensive selection of artists’ books, broadsides, and prints made by collectives such as Partners in Print (PiP), a Seattle-based organization of printers, and artists like Eileen Jimenez (who was featured in the February 2025 issue of Public Display). If the exhibit whets your appetite for printing, you’re in luck: The museum will host drop-in printing workshops and demos every weekend throughout the exhibition. So hop yourself, your friends, or your family on a ferry to Bainbridge and make a day out of celebrating this very old but very alive artform. Through June 8
KSRA: ONCE WAS Gallery ERGO
Gallery ERGO is the hidden treasure of a gallery nestled in Pike Place Market, kitty-corner to a magic shop, next to a bookstore, across from one of those timeless tchotchke palaces that sell brass ohm ornaments and incense holders—the kind Ginsberg haunted half a century ago. A more recent arrival, Gallery ERGO offers a consistent source of excellent work by local artists, some of whom moonlight as street artists. This includes the former graffiti artist known as KSRA (pronounced “que sera”), whose ability to construct miniatures is so profoundly hyperrealistic, it’ll make your brain hurt and your wallet pop open. The latest collection of her work, ONCE WAS, comprises minuscule reconstructions of signs belonging to iconic Seattle businesses now shuttered. Down to the rust stains, she’s reproduced their weathered, faded glory. But any faithfulness to hyperrealism ends there, because each sign is interrupted by glitch, a smear, a zag. Like the memory of the thing, it flickers, unstable. Through May 5
Dads Drama Tops and Washington Ensemble Theater at 12th Avenue Arts
The words queer tragedy may make you cringe and say, “No thanks, Hanya Yanagihara, I’ve seen this one before.” (IYKYK.) But rest assured, this is not your average Brokeback Mountain-inspired trauma porn! This queer tragedy is served hot, with a side of leather bondage wear. Dads, from queer dance duo Drama Tops and Washington Ensemble Theater, is described as a “holesome, sci-fi dreamscape” (that’s not a typo) that will take the audience on a journey through the modern minefields of masculinity, fatherhood, and grief. Dance partners and choreographers Elby Brosch and Shane Donohue—the minds behind Seattle’s “hottest nightlife performance duo,” Drama Tops—explore their own associations with masculinity and the queer discourse around dads and daddies: having them, becoming them, desiring them, grieving them. This incredibly vulnerable and at times laugh-out-loud funny performance, which is selling out fast at 12th Avenue Arts, is sure to have you reflecting for days on what the concept of fatherhood means to you. April 24–May 10
LAST CHANCE:
At Gallery 4Culture, Hyunjeong Lim: Trip West is on view through Thursday, April 24. These gorgeous Hieronymus Bosch-esque paintings of the artist’s trip through America’s west coast are not to be missed.
SOIL’s April shows are up through Saturday, April 26: Strange Time, curated by Max Cerami, is an exploration of unusual timekeeping devices, and Lee Davignon takes over the backspace with Primordial Ooze.
Columbia City Gallery’s By Light is up through Sunday April 27. This group exhibition is bursting with bright lights and neon. Curated by Tommy Gregory, Port of Seattle icon, it features local brilliance by artists Kelsey Fernkopf, Grace Athena Flott, Sean Hennessy, Henry Jackson Spieker, and KCJ Szwedzinsk.
JUST OPENED:
Cornish College of the Arts has two shows to see next week. Already on view is Oh, To Return (through May 1), an exhibition featuring work from current Cornish College of the Arts' art students. On April 26,Synthesis: 2025 Design BFA Exhibition opens—a showcase of work by graduating Graphic Design, Animation, UX, Illustration and Game Art students. Get a taste of the future!
At the Henry Art Gallery, see Carmen Winant’s Passing On(Through Sept. 25). No rush here: It’s up until September. But there’s never a bad time to take a trip to UW’s gorgeous contemporary art museum. Passing On offers a series of newspaper collages from Ohio-based Winant, whose work explores collective acts of feminist care, survival, and resistance.
