Seattle is about to step inside the most poetic circus on earth — no tickets to the big top required. This November, the Seattle Art Museum presents Karon Davis: Not My Circus, the brand-new solo exhibition by the winner of the 2025 Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, one of the most celebrated honors for a rising Black artist in the country.
Los Angeles-based Karon Davis is famous for her life-sized plaster figures: ghostly, theatrical sculptures cast from real people — friends, family, strangers she befriends on the street, even herself. Inspired by ancient Egyptian mummification practices, she wraps each cast in plaster strips, then builds them out with glass eyes, chicken wire and found objects, turning bodies into actors in a silent, mysterious play.
For Not My Circus, conceived especially for SAM, Davis goes full ringmaster. The Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Gallery transforms into a big top, its walls lined with red-and-white striped paintings, where three brand-new sculptures created just for this show share the stage with two existing works and a suite of new paintings. As the daughter of performers, Davis draws on her own family history to explore the beautiful duality of entertainment: pleasure and pain, wonder and vulnerability, all under the same spotlight.
The exhibition opens November 5, 2026 and runs through July 4, 2027 — plenty of time to plan your visit to this celebration of performance, power and humanity, right in the heart of downtown Seattle.
Photo: Seattle Art Museum
