Seattle has just a few days left to catch one of its most joyful exhibitions of the year. Eric-Paul Riege: ojo|-|ólǫ́ closes on Sunday, October 25, 2026, at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, and Happy City News recommends making the trip to the Upper Level Galleries before it ends.
Pronounced “oh-ho hol-ohn,” the exhibition brings together recent and newly commissioned work by Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege, born in 1994 in Na’nízhoozhí — Gallup, New Mexico. Visitors will find sculpture, textile, collage and video, all enlivened by moments of performance. Riege blends customary Diné practices such as weaving, silversmithing and beading with contemporary cultural forms, exploring Diné cosmology, histories of exchange, and what “authenticity” really means in Indigenous art and craft.
His tactile, modular soft sculptures are a highlight: made at an exaggerated scale from synthetic and natural materials, they invite a playful, hands-on way of looking. The show was developed in partnership with The Bell Gallery at Brown University and grew out of Riege’s research with Navajo collections at Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and the University of Washington’s own Burke Museum. Objects from the Burke collection appear alongside pieces from the artist’s home and studio, blurring the lines between past and present in the happiest way.
It is a warm, colorful celebration of ancestral knowledge and of making and remaking — a living practice of exchange that connects people across time and space. Catch it at the Henry, on 15th Avenue NE at NE 41st Street, before the galleries close on October 25.
Photo: Jueqian Fang, courtesy of the Henry Art Gallery
