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The Whatcom Museum presents Endangered Species: Artists on the Front Line of Biodiversity, an interdisciplinary exhibition featuring 80 works of art, from rare books to cutting edge video, that span the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It opens September 8, 2018 in the Museum’s Lightcatcher building and closes January 6, 2019.

Offering a unique perspective of the critical work that artists are contributing toward natural science and environmental issues, this exhibition represents an international group of 60 artists who celebrate biodiversity's beauty, interpret natural and human-caused extinctions of plants and animals, and focus on species from diverse ecosystems under stress...

The little-known-to-the-public Svalbard Global Seed Vault boasts the world's greatest repository of seeds. It was unvelied a decade ago - in the northernmost inhabited spot on Earth with an airport - and stores in its vaults an astounding 850,000 see varieteis culled from 5,000 core agricultural crop species. That's just 18 percent of the vault's capacity...

James Lumsden impresses with a body of work that pushes the boundaries of painting itself. These abstract canvases in acrylic, executed between 2013-2017, represent a bold and adept vision whose sense of color and form are mature, captivating and full of feeling. Lumsden lives and works in Scotland and has exhibited internationally throughout North America and Europe. The paintings here range from small to medium in scale and are realized through an ordered aesthetic process wherein dozens of crystalline films of gloss medium and pigment are layered, pulled, and arranged over the surface...

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) proudly presents New Territory: Landscape Photography Today, a survey of contemporary landscape photography from around the world. The exhibition of more than 100 photographs will gauge how living artists stretch the boundaries of traditional landscape photography to reflect the environmental attitudes, perceptions and values of our time. The works in New Territory will depict landscapes in unexpected ways, challenging visitors to see photography differently. Organized by the DAM and curated by Eric Paddock, curator of photography, New Territory will be on view June 24, 2018 to Sept. 16, 2018....

It was a typical hot and muggy Texas day when I made the 45-minute drive from Austin to Elgin. I was on my way to visit artist Margo Sawyer for the second time, almost exactly one year after the first time I had been in her studio. Sawyer was recently named a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, an award meant to help developing scholars and artists engage in research and creation. The fellowship is given to artists who have already demonstrated exceptional production and creativity in the arts, a distinction that can only be used to summarize the more than 30 years of Sawyer’s artistic production, her time as an educator, and her advocacy...

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to present Eric Cruikshank’s exhibition, PAPER SKIES, representing a selection of twelve, intimately scaled oil on paper paintings created during the past year. An opening reception will be held Saturday, June 30^th, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will continue through September 29.

The Scottish artist Eric Cruikshank is a modern painter. Born in a country and into a culture with a strong narrative tradition, his work departs from customary figuration, yet revels in the craft and artisanship of his chosen medium. While this embrace of non-figurative abstraction is thoroughly modern, Eric Cruikshank's devotion to his craft is conservative in the best sense...

Stuart Arends is fond of saying that he lives in the middle of nowhere. Ever hear of Willard, New Mexico? The landscape around the artist’s house is austere, almost barren, with a view of some mountains off in the distance. He is “off the grid and under the radar” as Christian Mayeur, the founder of Mayeur Projects, wrote in Arends’s catalogue for the exhibition Tin Man, Slabs, and My Father’s House. It’s as if Arends, in his choice of a site for living and working, deliberately wished to evoke the idea of stepping into a void in order to make the work—but a void that is in actuality a transactional space where objects take on subtleties of meaning, even if meaning is bracketed only by the specificity of materials…

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to present James Lumsden’s exhibition Reflexion, representing a body of work developed over the last three years. An opening reception will be held Saturday, May 19th from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, following the group show Manmade in 2016. Reflexion will continue through August 11.

Lumsden’s paintings continue to investigate how raw materials innate to the medium can be turned into something poetic – an object filled with light, feeling, atmosphere, and emotion. Led by his chosen medium and a deep understanding of the subtleties and contradictions of the painted surface, Lumsden expands the possibilities of the medium through adept experimentation...

Margo Sawyer, the Elgin-based artist whose art intersects sculpture and architecture, has won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced 173 fellowships (including two joint fellowships) in arts and sciences for 2018. This honor comes with up to $45,000 to support one of the winners’ future projects.

“The Guggenheim Fellowship would allow me time and resources to cultivate designs of spaces transcendent,” Sawyer says. “Public places that foster contemplation.”...

Margo Sawyer’s artistic practice investigates the relationship between space and transcendence; the places where architecture and ritual converge to create transcendent qualities that encourage a state of contemplation within the viewer. The central actor in her work is color. Sawyer’s practice bridges site-specific installations and public art to transform mundane architectural structures into euphoric icons, join exquisite objects and materials into domestic spaces, and turn large public spaces into intimate refuges. Sawyer’s art unites the complex and unexpected, where the physical, material, perceptual, and psychological effects of color interact...