UW Press is proud to copublish and distribute books and catalogs for acclaimed art exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Whether you’re planning a visit or experiencing from afar, these titles offer deeper insight into the works and themes explored in each show.
Beyond Mysticism
Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest situates artists of the early twentieth century within the broader history of Modern art in the Pacific Northwest through an exploration of key themes: industrialization, ecocriticism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. This exhibition catalog retells the fascinating story of Northwestern Modernism to reveal the range, complexity, and significance of local Modernists—including Fay Chong, William Cumming, Z. Vanessa Helder, Kenjiro Nomura, Albert Smith Sr., Kamekichi Tokita, Julius Twohy, and James Washington Jr.—within the context of American Modernism.
Copublished with the Seattle Art Museum, the publication is edited by Theresa Papanikolas, the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art. A specialist in American and European modernism, she has published widely on Dada and Surrealism.
On view at Seattle Art Museum through August 2, 2026.
Shadows of a Fleeting World
Shadows of a Fleeting World: Pictorial Photography and the Seattle Camera Club by David F. Martin and Nicolette Bromberg provides a rare glimpse into the regional Pictorialist movement, documenting the lives and artistic accomplishments of the SCC photographers. The SCC was one of the most active and successful in the United States, and, fortunately, preservation of its works and history allow for a rich interpretation of its art. Japanese immigrants formed the club’s core, and their work routinely blended Pictorialist methods with Japanese aesthetic traditions. The Japanese-influenced Pictorialist works of the SCC made a unique contribution to the international art movement.
In commemoration of the second printing of this seminal publication, Cascadia Art Museum curator Martin has assembled over seventy rare, original photographs.
On view at Cascadia Art Museum June 17–September 13, 2026.
Chicano Camera Culture
Accompanying a major exhibition of the same title, Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966 to 2026 edited by Elizabeth Ferrer is the first publication to survey the entire history of photography by Chicano artists based throughout the United States—from early activist photographers shooting in the 1960s and ’70s to contemporary artists of subsequent generations, whose work builds on this powerful legacy. The exhibition was organized by the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum in 2026 and curated by Ferrer, the leading scholar of Latinx photography in the United States.
On view at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture at Riverside Art Museum through September 6, 2026.
Handling a Mother’s Archive #1, 2023
inkjet print on archival paper
16 x 20 in.
Mary Sully
New Yorkers or visitors to the city have another chance to view Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully’s enigmatic work following the lauded exhibition at The Met. Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, Mary Sully was largely self-taught. Steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork, quilling, and hide painting, she also engaged with the experiments in time, space, symbolism, and representation characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist art. Her position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times.
In Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, historian Philip J. Deloria recovers his great-aunt’s work from obscurity, exploring her stunning portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women’s aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s.
On view at James Cohan gallery through June 27, 2026.
Past Exhibitions
