Super Natural
A Northwest Tradition

Featuring artworks from the permanent collection of the Museum of Northwest Art, Super Natural highlights the fascination and reverence for nature across several generations of Northwest artists.  This exhibition is inspired by the disquiet and ferment, the care and hope so poignantly permeating the works by Meg Holgate and Steve Klein in MoNA’s downstairs galleries, A Precarious Edge. 

Super Natural, a Northwest Tradition offers a view of Nature seen now as origin and archetype, mother of awe and spring of mystical communion with man, now as incommensurable and inscrutable wonder, a mysterious manifestation of a higher power, a reminder of our fragility and transience. Whether idealized and mythologized as unchanging and arcane, or romanticized as double-edged, threatening, and looming, the paintings and drawings in this exhibition reflect the natural world as a pervasive sensibility and tradition of the Northwest. In this tradition, the artists participate in Nature’s many manifestations of beauty, caught as they are in an oscillation between the observed and the revealed, the natural and the supernatural.

With works by artists such as Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Richard Gilkey, Morris Graves, Clayton James, Leo Kenney, Mike Spafford, and George Tsutakawa, among the others, Super Natural, a Northwest Tradition offers but a glimpse of the exceptional breadth and depth of the Museum’s permanent collection.