The Museum of Northwest Art is excited to announce a major survey of the work of Ross Palmer Beecher. Ross Palmer Beecher is a Seattle-based mixed media artist who creates quilts, flags, portraits of famous American folk heroes, and Americana sculptural objects by stitching together scavenged materials such as aluminum cans, found metal, as well as found objects, wood, and fabric. Organized by MoNA, the exhibition will feature a broad range of works from the past three decades drawn from both public and private collections throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Beecher grew up in the Northeast U.S. She studied painting, printmaking, and illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 1978, she moved to Seattle and began making traditional quilts to relieve her homesickness for the Northeast. In 1993, Beecher started managing the art therapy program at the Bailey-Boushay House for patients with AIDS in Seattle. She continues to be part of that program that has informed and continues to inform her daily art practice. 

Beecher’s art is inspired by Americana folk art forms such as quilting, new England funerary art, offbeat flag-making, and other unconventional expressions such as visionary art, vernacular and outsider art. At the same time, her work echoes the bold material transgressions of landmark figures in contemporary sculpture including Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg’s early assemblage, and members of the Italian “Arte Povera” movement. Her work is informed by a refined sense of satire joined with pathos, thus blending humor with deep emotions, like mercy, compassion, and tenderness for the human condition. This is the case for her recent ‘tombstones’ for graves of renowned historical figures: in the leveling action of death, these sculptures are poetic, theatrical, humbling and poignant at the same time.