Current/Upcoming Events & Exhibits

Post-SIFF Forum on films from Taiwan

A.C. Petersen — 2013-06-17T18:45:00Z

Discussion of films screened at Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). Panelists: Director General Andy Chin (TECO) Professor Haicheng Wang (UW Art History) John Vallier (Libraries Distributed Media Services) and Ailin Chiu (Asia Today). Opening remarks by Zhijia Shen, Director of East Asia Library.

Co-sponsored by UW Libraries - East Asia Library and Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Seattle

Photographic Finds in a Time of Transition

A.C. Petersen — 2013-06-03T17:45:00Z

As a staff photographer for the leading daily newspaper of Nakhodka, Russia, from 1978 through his retirement in 2008, Georgy Pakin created an extensive and eloquent visual record of the life of this Pacific coast port city of 160,000 inhabitants located sixty miles from Vladivostok. Pakin’s subjects range from the orthodox (such as visits to Nakhodka by top-ranking Soviet officials and foreign delegations, public parades on state holidays, and the activities of the Nakhodka fishing fleet) to the intimate, critical and sometimes iconoclastic (school children at play, workers on strike, a street beggar, cows taking over an urban road, Nakhodka during a flood).

This exhibit features sixty of Pakin’s photographs taken over three decades, from the recently dubbed “period of stagnation” of the 1970s and early ‘80s, through late-1980s perestroika and the social turbulence of the early post-Soviet 1990s. Pakin’s connection to the U.S. Pacific Northwest dates to the late 1970s, when Bellingham Cold Storage collaborated with the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries to create the US-USSR Marine Resources Company (MRC), a joint fishing venture. At its inception Pakin’s wife got a job in the joint venture’s Nakhodka office, and together the Pakins began hosting and befriending a long line of her American colleagues from Washington State.

The exhibit is sponsored by Bellingham Cold Storage-Profish Inc. and the Bay of America Club, an association of the former American directors of MRC’s Nakhodka office.

Dreamlogs: Artists' Books by Genie Shenk

A.C. Petersen — 2013-04-18T20:09:11Z

Since 1982, Genie Shenk has recorded each night's dream in visual form. Yearly records are a reference of ideas and a source for other works. Her imagery varies from circular monoprints to collaged paper to adaptations of illustrations found in antique atlases and dictionaries. The exhibit will highlight Shenk's extensive career.

After receiving an MFA from UCLA in 1990, Genie Shenk studied bookbinding with David Brock in San Diego, California. For seventeen years, she taught book arts at San Diego Mesa College and at the Athenaeum Library of Music and the Arts in La Jolla, California. She now focuses on studio work. Her one-of-a-kind artistsʼ books have been exhibited frequently and are represented in numerous special collections.