New Exhibition by Mary Ann Peters Is a 15-Year Exploration of Arab Diaspora and the Middle East
The Whatcom Museum is proud to present myself inside your story, the newest exhibition by artist Mary Ann Peters. This expansive project explores 15 years of the Seattle-based artist’s work addressing lost or little-known histories of the Middle East. Peters uses drawings, paintings, and sculptural installations to delve into the colliding narratives that inform Arab culture. The exhibition opens August 16, 2025 and runs through January 25, 2026.
A second-generation Lebanese American woman, Peters employs a perspective that is simultaneously connected to and distanced from her heritage. Her pieces pull from generations of stories, photographs, and lived experiences – as well as news sources that shape and sometimes limit our understanding of the region and its people.
“I’ve long admired Mary Ann Peters’ ability to approach a topic indirectly through material and image choices so that the viewer might respond with curiosity. Her process has certainly led me down a path of personal learning about a complex and misunderstood region of the world,” said Whatcom Museum Chief Curator Amy Chaloupka. “I am excited for audiences to experience this work in person and engage in dialogue with others about topics that are very present tense. This is the first time that the breadth of Mary Ann Peters’ attention to this topic has been seen in such scope, and we are proud to be the museum to present it.”
An artist and activist for close to five decades, Peters has conducted grant-funded research trips to Beirut, Mexico City, Marseille, and Paris, allowing her to mine cultural and academic archives in regions of the world where Arab communities exist. She looks for information that might hide on the periphery of sanctioned accounts, interpreting her findings into compelling and lyrical works that sensitively reflect the complex experience of migration and displacement.
Several works included in the exhibition are from the artist’s impossible monument series. Through found and altered materials that are reworked into formal presentations, they reflect historical and contemporary experiences that often go unnoticed as they occur but that carry great significance.
Peters stated, “I define an ‘impossible monument’ as something that deserves reverence but, by virtue of its incidental nature, would never be elevated to that status.” The first impossible monument that Peters made is a set of cast bronze pita bread. The work enshrines the ubiquitous food item, a staple in most Middle East meals, into a rarified object.
Also on view are three works from her series this trembling turf, created after a 2016 artist residency in Beirut. Large-scale, white-pen-on-black-clayboard drawings reference forensic archeology’s use of sound waves to uncover and map underground structures. The works suggest layered landscapes of compacted earth, each holding hidden or discarded histories.
Finally, Peters’ storyboard series draws from both historical and contemporary photographic sources. In these intimate paintings, Peters reflects the experience of displaced populations moving by foot through conflict zones. Akin to field reporting, the scenes – painted with the artist’s swift and loose brushstrokes – give the impression of snapshots that, taken together, unveil a larger and ongoing story.
In early November, the Whatcom Museum will host Mary Ann Peters for two days of public programming. Thanks to the support from a generous donor, the artist will be at the museum on Thursday, November 6, to host gallery discussions with students from area colleges. Then on Friday, November 7, the artist will offer exhibition tours that dig into the themes and subjects found in her work. More details will be available on the museum’s events calendar soon.
Io Palmer Brings New Installation to Bellingham
Also on view from August 16, 2025 – January 25, 2026 is Meander, a mixed-media installation by Io Palmer.
In 2023, Palmer was awarded the Spotlight Exhibition Prize for that year’s Bellingham National exhibition, Acts of Healing and Repair, juried by Grace Kook-Anderson, the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art at the Portland Art Museum.
Each hand-formed component of the works, which includes ceramics, wire, and acrylic, explores the tension between expansion and containment, evoking the complexity of human experience. Meander draws textural references from wild foliage, which reimagine cycles of growth and decay, and from commercial spaces of adornment, such as hair and nail salons, where beauty, excess, and accessibility converge. These natural and artificial touchpoints inform the vivid colors and glossy tack surfaces, inviting reflection about how we shape – and are shaped by – the spaces we inhabit.
Upcoming exhibition and event dates:
Whatcom Museum Member Preview & Reception for Mary Ann Peters and Io Palmer
Friday, August 15, 5 – 7 pm
Must be a Whatcom Museum member to attend.
On View: myself inside your story and Meander
Opens Saturday, August 16, 12 – 5 pm
Included with museum admission.
Dinner & Curator Tours of myself inside your story and Meander
Wednesday, September 17, October 15, December 3, and January 14
5:30 – 8 pm
Afternoon Curator Tours of myself inside your story and Meander
Friday, September 12, October 10, December 12, and January 23
1 – 2 pm
Included with museum admission.
Access for All Free First Friday artist exhibition tour with Mary Ann Peters
Friday, November 7, 2025
Details forthcoming.
About the Whatcom Museum
The Whatcom Museum was founded in 1941 and overlooks Washington State’s Bellingham Bay. Notable projects have included the 2019 retrospective exhibition WANTED: Ed Bereal for Disturbing the Peace, featured in The New York Times; the award-winning, co-curated exhibition Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea, which traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2023; and Verdant: French Masterworks from the National Gallery of Art, which is on view through early 2027. Also on view are El velo exquisito / The Exquisite Veil: Works by Alfredo Arreguín and A Pull to the Pacific: West Coast Lithography of the New Deal Era. The Whatcom Museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
The Whatcom Museum campus in downtown Bellingham includes three buildings: the Lightcatcher, Old City Hall, and Old Fire Station No. 1. For more information about exhibitions and admission, visit whatcommuseum.org.
