Running August 6th through 29th

New Hours: Wednesday - Saturday | 11 am - 6 pm

In June, the law firm I work for left an office it occupied for sixty-seven years. The office was in the Norton Building, a quiet Seattle monument. When it opened in 1959, the Norton was the city’s debut to the International Style and, briefly, the tallest building in downtown. It was largely the work of Myron Goldsmith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a former student of Mies van der Rohe. Its opening week included a science and space exhibition with a model of the Century 21 Exposition site planned to open three years later. Despite a warm welcome from the city and its commitment to the future, the Norton is now somewhat forgotten in the modern Seattle skyline.

I wrote both my undergraduate and master's theses on world's fairs like the Century 21 Exposition, and it’s easy to lament that the structures and ideas behind them were only trial runs. Whole cities were built to disappear months later. But the fairs were never an exception to the lifespan of the built world, they are a version running on a truncated timeline. Jenny Robinson’s work not only spotlights the mutable built world, but welcomes the impermanence of the world we create.

Robinson (British, b. 1957) was born in London and raised in Borneo. She earned a BFA in Printmaking from West Surrey College of Art and Design and was an Artist in Residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California, for over a decade.

Robinson has traveled extensively, living and working in London, San Francisco, Slovenia, and Australia, whose buildings and structures she often references in her work. She has taught at Kala Art Institute, the San José Institute of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Book Center, and the University of Chico, and in 2019 was awarded the Mario Avati Prix de Gravure by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Frameworks reimagines architecture and structure through abstraction, deconstruction, and repetition. Familiar elements from the built and natural world are distilled into new constructs that blur the line between observation and invention. Robinson builds spaces nestled between history and imagination, using materiality and process to explore how we shape, inhabit, and reconstruct the environments around us.

I have been thinking about which monuments we keep and which we are only passing through. The Norton stood for sixty-seven years of my firm’s working life and will stand long after. The office we left will become someone else’s. Jenny’s prints insist that this is not loss so much as the condition of the built world, and that honoring the impermanence is itself devotion.

Join us as we celebrate monuments. Or see the exhibition online.

- Elizabeth

N. 85

85 Yesler Way

Seattle, WA 98104

Kathryn Bilharz Gabriel: SUBMERGED

Opens Thursday, September 3. West Coast solo debut.

Kathryn Bilharz Gabriel comes from a family of engineers, doctors, and chemists. Her grandfather was among the first nuclear physicists in the United States. At ten she became the youngest recipient of a NASA art award, which sent her to Washington for a week of astronaut lectures and then to Space Camp. The stars stayed in her visual language after that.

She has since made her familial heritage and scientific interests a working inspiration to her artwork. Gabriel has worked with Dr. Eric Coughlin, an astrophysicist at Syracuse University, translating research on black holes and gravitational phenomena into visual form. She brings the same curiosity and knowledge to students in the public high school art department she chairs. 

Her visual language is further contextualized by traditional stigmas of women in the sciences. Gabriel notes that machinery and physics are territory coded male, but her practice of layered complexity and organic landscapes upend that structure. The soft painted lines paired with drawn geometric and technological overlays introduce romanticism to the hard science behind it. Her work demands the viewer confront the laws of physics as equally feminine to masculine. 

Gabriel’s method is reversed from that of many multi-media painters. The painted passages are laid down first and she draws over them in charcoal, ink and other media. Gabriel calls the result of her layering a “skin” on the paper. The image is fleshed out with contrasting forms both emerging from and subject to the science from which they began. The painting is submerged beneath drawing. The viewer is submerged in complexity. And the artist is submerged in the making.

Lockwood Dennis Closing Remarks

Throughout July, Lockwood Dennis’ loyal collectors made themselves known. We are pleased to meet you all! While the show closed at the beginning of the month, his work remains available. The full show is online, or you can make an appointment to see the prints in person.

Longtime collectors have called, emailed, and trekked to the gallery to rediscover the work and the world he built: the Northwest as it was, and sometimes as it still is. I’ve heard stories of long-gone buildings and of adventures in places just a few blocks from where I sit. His work invites reminiscence.

I’ve been honored and humbled to say I represent his estate. Thank you to the Dennis family for the opportunity to show the work. Thank you to Davidson Galleries for fostering the artist and the collectors who love him.

Dennis is my case study that art is localizing. He looked hard at the Northwest, but his work is more than a record of the place. Dennis captures the joy of life here by unexpected means of steep hills, old cars, and heavy industry. It can be stark. Yet, everything is animated and will often surprise you.

The show runs through August 1st. And online.

- Elizabeth

FRAMEWORKS | Opening August 6, 2026

Sign up for here early access to new work by Jenny Robinson ahead of her solo show next month!

SUBMERGED | Opening September 3, 2026

Kathryn Bilharz Gabriel brings science, technology, and family lineage to her mesmerizing paintings.

^{Kathryn Bilharz Gabriel}

^Signal

^{18"X 24"}

^{Pumice, Qor, acrylic, varnish}

After twenty-three years with Davidson Galleries, and helping carry that legacy forward into Nº85, Rebecca McDonald is retiring.

Many of you have worked with Rebecca over the years and know her for her generosity and printmaking expertise. Her degree in printmaking shaped how she talked about the works in our care and encouraged a holistic view of technique. Her knowledge changed how clients and visitors saw prints, generously offered to build appreciation into understanding. That same generosity extended to the artists we represent, whose work she championed, and whose trust she earned in turn.

Her plans had her staying on through the fall, but family circumstances on the East Coast moved things forward, and we’re glad to send her off now with our full support and gratitude.

She returns to her own printmaking studio at an interesting moment. Seattle has become one of the centers of revival in the medium, and Rebecca will now be part of it as a working artist rather than from behind the gallery desk. We can’t think of a better next chapter for her.

Please join us in thanking Rebecca for twenty-three years of expertise, care, and good company.

With gratitude,

Elizabeth Hawley

“…what animates a picture is what animates the objects in the picture. An attitude […] Houses watching a street. Cars disagreeing with each other. Trucks happily cresting a hill.”

- Lockwood Dennis

_{Lockwood DENNIS (American, 1937–2012)}

_{Bridge (detail)
Woodcut.
Edition 41/50. Signed.
15 x 12” (Image) 22 x 17” (Sheet)}

See Burn Rubber, Lockwood Dennis woodcuts | through August 1, 2026

As Seattle prepares to host its World Cup match in step with the nation's semiquincentennial, we thought there was no better occasion to celebrate the work of Lockwood Dennis. The Port Townsend printmaker’s woodcuts of Seattle's streets and industrial landmarks remain deeply beloved in the city.

Happy 4th and go team USA!

See the Exhibition Online

_{Lockwood DENNIS (American, 1937–2012)}

_{Car, Front
Woodcut. 1986.
Edition 35/37. Signed.
7 1/2 x 8 1/2” (image), 12 7/8 x 13” (sheet)}

Frameworks: Jenny Robinson | opening August 6, 2026

^{Jenny ROBINSON (British / American, b. 1957)}

^{Counterpart
Woodcut from watercolor drawing, laser cut.
Edition 9/10 EV. Signed.
35 x 47 1/2” (Image), 38 1/4 x 50 1/4” (Sheet)}

Submerged \ September 3 - 26, 2026

Art, science and family collide in the work of Kathryn Bilharz Gabriel making her West Coast debut at Nº85.

Kathryn BILHARZ GABRIEL 
Field Notes
Pumice, Qor, acrylic, and varnish on paper. 
18 x 24"