This fall, the Goethe Pop Up is partnering once more with Seattle-based German artist and gallerist Anna Mlasowsky to present the Pop Up Fall Showcase at
Das Schaufenster as a Covid-safe way to experience new art in our city.
An artist-run experimental window space working to bring interesting, joyful, and thought-provoking art to the Ballard neighborhood, Das Schaufenster is mounting an ambitious, international fall program, consisting of four successive monthly exhibitions.
These solo exhibitions showcase artists from different national and cultural backgrounds, to highlight their practice. Each artist will bring their individual experiences, culture, and understanding of their place in the world to the space.
About the artist in December:
Nikki Jabbora-Barber, Seattle-based printmaker and teaching artist, was born in Bellingham, WA to an Anglo-Swedish father and Lebanese mother. She focuses on the way people communicate feelings, culture cues, and emotional safety through botanical symbols and depictions of flora and fauna. She graduated from the University of Washington with an Interdisciplinary Visual Arts degree with a focus in printmaking and a separate Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Sciences. She primarily teaches printmaking at Pratt Fine Art Center, Seattle Artist League, Pilchuck Glass School, and other art schools in the Seattle area. She is represented by MESH Fine Art in Chicago, IL.
Nikki regularly leads community engagement projects, including with the Seattle Art Museum. She sits on the board for Seattle Print Arts and coordinates juried shows, in partnership with Davidson Galleries. Nikki balances making and selling her hand-pulled fine art prints; photographing works on paper for Davidson Galleries; and teaching community art classes.
About the work on display in December:
Shahrazad
From the “Wait…what are you?” series
Nikki Jabbora-Barber
"In the ‘Wait…what are you?’ series (a question all too familiar to mixed race people), I am making sense of intersecting influences that have led me to hate the word ‘exotic’ and resent the experience of being a woman for a good portion of my life. I re-examine female characters from stories I passively internalized in childhood. These womens’ individual voices and feelings were not included in the stories I heard growing up –only the actions of people/gods in positions of power over them. In this series, I undertake giving their perspectives authority.
For this 6ft piece, I focus on Shahrazad, the main character and narrator of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). This collection of stories began in India and picked up more stories as it traveled over to the Levant and Lebanon, where my mom’s family is from, and across to Egypt, over centuries. In it, a sultan finds his wife has been cheating on him. He has her beheaded and vows to marry and behead a new virgin by morning each day. Eventually, Shahrazad is selected. With her sister’s help, she tells the sultan a different story every night, leaving him on a cliffhanger each morning, escaping death for 1000 nights. On the 1001st night, the king decides to not kill her and keeps her as his consort.
I want to not only call on Middle Eastern (MENAP), Greek mythological, and Pacific Northwestern symbolism for their direct cultural meanings, but to also center the thousands of women’s voices that came before mine - many that were silent or silenced throughout history and today. It is important for me to remove the passive acceptance of accessible exoticism and redefine being a mixed race woman who is white-adjacent." (Nikki Jabbora-Barber)
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