Zoe Dusanne: The Art of Seeing
Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, WA - To Jan 3, 2027
In a fresh museum iteration of her art collection, Zoe Dusanne: The Art of Seeing at Cascadia Art Museum takes a different tack. Instead of highlighting the big-name New York and European icons of 20th-century art Dusanne brought to Seattle through her extensive personal contacts, curator David F. Martin has narrowed his focus to two other areas: unknown women artists and Japanese American artists championed by Dusanne.
The results spotlight artists of the Pacific Northwest–Seattle area and bolster Dusanne’s position as the leading modern art dealer of the period, one who paid attention to local talent too.
Dusanne was not the first—or last—modern art dealer in Seattle. Others were Francine Seders, Otto Seligman, Henriette Woessner and Gordon Woodside. However, her personal charisma and financial support of the artists in lieu of collector enthusiasm are worthy of note. Both Seattle Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington requested to show her collec- tion, to which she readily agreed.
After the incarcerations of Japanese American artists during World War II, Dusanne went out of her way to exhibit the crucial four who returned to Seattle (some never returned): Paul Horiuchi, John Matsudaira, Kenjiro Nomura and George Tsutakawa, who worked in the US Army as a translator. Their paintings form the high-water mark of the exhibition and constitute the postwar arrival of gestural, geometric and hard-edge abstraction to the city.
Among the women, few of whom are remembered today, Martin makes a strong case for Virginia Banks, Mary Bass Bayley, Louise Lewis Gilbert, Vera Haller, Beulah Loomis Hyde and Jeannette Jackson Murphy. Their varied ap- proaches to abstraction confirm how artists geographically distant from New York could still have something to say and convey their own visions.
