Gallery, museum and library events kick of the fall arts season

The Mariners are a hot ticket this weekend, but if baseball isn’t your pastime of choice, consider these arts and culture picks. Our guide is Crystal Paul, a features reporter for The Seattle Times.

Packaged Black

This features the work of Barbara Earl Thomas and New York-based artist Derrick Adams. It opens at the Henry Art Gallery this Saturday, and goes through May 1.

What's really great about this show is that it puts the two artists in conversation with each other. If you are familiar with their work, you know that color is a big part of it. To see them next to each other in conversation about topics like Black joy, Black resistance, and Black power in pop culture is going to be amazing.

Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West

This exhibit will be held at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. It spans a period from 1860 to 1940. It shows what we know of as the Old West in a totally different light. Hyper-masculine, gun-slinging cowboys and indigenous genocide is part of the story, but it also erases this massive history of queer and trans folk at the time. They feature prominent queer and trans people who were not only existing at the time, but very much existing loudly.

Seattle Reads Presents Brit Bennett with Jazmyn Scott

Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half was chosen as the 2021 Seattle Reads book. She'll be speaking virtually about her book with Jazmyn Scott through the Seattle Public Library. On its surface, it's a book about passing. It’s another in a long tradition of stories about mixed race or light-skinned Black people who can pass for white. What Bennett does is she takes the tropes of that tradition and draws them out across the generations. She examines what happens to the children when their parents literally erase their genealogy, and their family history, and all connection they have to their culture— essentially erasing all of their history on that side of the family.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.