Jessica Jackson Hutchins: Wrecked and Righteous / Sky Hopinka: Subterranean Ceremonies

Jessica Jackson Hutchins: Wrecked and Righteous  
Jessica Jackson Hutchins (born 1971, Chicago) has plumbed the relationship between art and everyday life for nearly thirty years, playfully melding materials with an intuitive, “by any means necessary” approach to traditional mediums and found objects alike. Wrecked and Righteous is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition on the US’s West Coast and the most comprehensive yet in the Pacific Northwest, her home since 2005. 

While Hutchins has rarely shown works from various stages of her career together, Wrecked and Righteous comprises works created—and sometimes reconfigured—since the late 1990s. The nonchronological presentation surveys her pursuit of immediacy and communion through art, beginning in the museum’s rotunda entryway with a richly textured, two-story fused-glass window commissioned for the occasion. In the galleries, the artist’s relief paintings, intimate tabletop objects, and needlepoint compositions mingle with selected furniture sculptures—well-worn sofas and chairs cradling lumpy ceramic forms that read as surrogates for the human body. 

The relational aspect of Hutchins’s work comes to the fore in a recent group of wearable food vessels that will be activated during a special performance. The exhibition links these unwieldy prostheses to the artist’s early milagros (miracles) sculptures: papier-mâché body parts created to symbolically heal suffering people she knew or followed in the media. Drawing a throughline of vulnerability, interdependency, and repair across Hutchins’s practice, Wrecked and Righteous honors the artist’s special capacity for finding the sublime in ordinary places and neglected things. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a free experimental publication in the form of an abecedarium—An ABCs of Jessica Jackson Hutchins. 

Organized by Amanda Donnan, Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions. Lead support provided by The Ford Family Foundation, administered by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Generous support provided by Frye Members. Media sponsorship provided by KEXP. 

Sky Hopinka: Subterranean Ceremonies 
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, born 1984, Ferndale, Washington) layers imagery and poetic prose to create art that foregrounds relationships between communities, landscape, and language. His work intermingles English and Indigenous dialects such as Chinuk Wawa, a revived Chinookan creole of the Pacific Northwest, to consider how language shapes perception of place and acts as a container of culture. This presentation—the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the Northwest— features four recent films and new photographs that focus on personal and political notions of Indigenous homeland.  

Growing up in Washington State, far from his ancestral tribal lands in Wisconsin and Southern California, Hopinka traveled the western powwow circuit with his parents. These foundational experiences of itinerancy continue to influence his artistic practice. The films in Subterranean Ceremonies revolve around transit and life on the road, a liminal zone the artist embraces as a space of community and knowledge production. Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021), for example, layers disjointed, often hypersaturated landscapes to ruminate on relationships of memory and place, while The Island Weights (2021) narrates a journey along the boundaries of Ho-Chunk homelands in search of four water spirits from the tribe’s creation story. 

The photographs in the exhibition glimpse disparate locations linked through the artist’s travels and include etched phrases drawn from stories, songs, and his own poetry. Guided by an impulse to wander, Hopinka’s artmaking defies ethnographic conventions and privileges Indigenous-centered approaches to storytelling. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a free publication featuring a poetic writing commissioned by the Frye from Stó:lō scholar and artist Dylan Robinson. 

Co-organized by Georgia Erger, Associate Curator, and Amanda Donnan, Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions. This exhibition is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Lead individual support provided by Rhoda Altom and Cory Carlson. Generous additional support provided by Frye Members. Media sponsorship provided by Encore Media Group.