Announcing the 2025 The Current, an Artist Award, Nominators and Nominees

Nominator – Alexis L. Silva

Alexis L. Silva is a second generation Salvadorean American curator specializing in contemporary art, with a focus on BIPOC, LGBTQ+ praxis, aesthetics and theory. They currently hold the position of Curatorial Assistant at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA, where they’ve curated solo exhibitions including Mary Ann Peters: the edge becomes the center and Boren Banner Series: Natalie Krick. They also co-curated Hanako O’Leary: Izanami and supported numerous exhibitions such as Rafael Soldi: Soft Boy, Antonio M. Gómez: LINEAJES and Hayv Kahraman: Look Me in the Eyes. Alexis also works closely with the museum’s collection and archive, evaluating valuation and care of works along with the preservation of exhibition material. Since 2019, they’ve acted as guest curator for a variety of venues such as the Wing Luke Museum, Bainbridge Arts & Crafts Gallery, Mount Analogue Gallery, flower.flower, the Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish College of the Arts, and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Alexis holds a BFA in Performance, Installation, Photography, and Art History & Theory from Cornish College of the Arts. They are originally from Las Vegas, NV.

Nominator – Hanako O’Leary

Hanako O’Leary is a craft-based sculptor and installation artist. She was born and raised by her Japanese mother and American father in the American Midwest. She grew up speaking Japanese at home, but English in school and everywhere else. Until she turned 18, for two months during the summer, Hanako’s mother would send her and her siblings on a yearly pilgrimage to their maternal home in the Seto Inlet Sea of Japan. This deeply influenced her spiritual beliefs, artistic voice, and feminine ideals. 

Building off this personal history, Hanako looks to Japanese folk traditions of the Setonaikai Islands as a basis for her artwork. Through handmade objects, installations, and storytelling, Hanako explores this relationship with her matriarchal lineage and the complexities of feminine love, sexuality, and power. 

Her major artistic accomplishments include solo shows in galleries such as Method, Edmonds Community College, King Street Station, and most recently Frye art Museum and Gallery 4Culture. Major awards include the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture City Artist Grant, Bernie Funk Fellowship, Robert B. McMillen Grant, Neddy Award Finalist and Artist Trust Fellowship. 

Nominator – Moses Sun

Moses Sun is a Seattle based artist, curator and community organizer who fuses hip-hop, jazz, afro-futurism, and the black southern diaspora of his childhood into a mix of visuals that blurs the lines between digital and analog art. His interdisciplinary practice comes from the hip-hop ethos of grinding in the studio, creating multiple tracks (series of works) that he remixes into afro-abstractions expressed on various surfaces, screens, assemblage, prints, plywood, and large-scale murals.  

Nominee – Chris Paul Jordan

“I make paintings, sculptures, and installations as time-capsules to hold, bury, and connect. I’m interested in the afterlife of memory; in the ways oral tradition is altered and negotiated in conditions of diaspora. My practice deals with continuance, analog internets, infrastructures of knowledge and care, and technologies for corresponding with locations beyond reach.” 

Born in Tacoma WA (1990), Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter and public artist who investigates the afterlife of memory, simulating conditions of removal to reexamine human relationships. Lacing salvaged textiles such as window screens and debris netting with acrylic paint, Jordan separates his paintings from their original surfaces while generating new histories from the traces they leave behind. Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, his inquiries are often enacted or permanently embedded in public space. Jordan’s first museum exhibition: In The Interim – Ritual Ground for a Future Black Archive, buries African American predictions of the end of the world on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamisseverybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan is a Leslie Lohman Museum Fellow, A Queer|Art Fellow, and holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2023). 

Nominee – Aisha Harrison

Aisha is a studio and public artist working primarily in clay and bronze. They discovered clay in a community studio, while working toward a degree in Spanish at Grinnell College in Iowa. After graduating, she spent the next two years teaching third and fourth grades in Atlanta, Georgia, and exploring clay at Callenwolde Fine Arts Center in Georgia, and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Aisha decided to go back to school and received a BFA from Washington State University, and an MFA from University of Nebraska- Lincoln. Aisha uses the body as a site to explore the lived experiences of racism, ancestral (human and non-human) connection, and, as a mixed-race Black person, the complicated blend of histories held within their body. Their work shows reverence for real bodies while also incorporating elements that are physical manifestations of the intangible. The humans they make are often interconnected with elements of the natural world, many of whom are native to the Pacific Northwest where Aisha’s family has lived for four generations. Aisha’s work attempts to balance the individual and the collective, where each piece contains a unique individual but also references a larger collective of people and/or our relatives from nature. Aisha is currently working on a large-scale outdoor public art commission with The University of Washington Tacoma and the Washington State Arts Commission. She is also working on pieces for a solo exhibition at the Bainbridge Museum of Art. 

Aisha’s studio work is shown nationally with recent work at Pottery Northwest, The Whatcom Museum, The Bascom: Center for the Visual Arts, Crocker Art Museum, Northern Clay Center, Wa Na Wari, Bainbridge Museum of Art, Jordan Schnitzer Museum at WSU, and at the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery at South Sound Community College. Aisha has done residencies at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Baltimore Clayworks. They have taught workshops/courses/programs at Pottery Northwest, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Penland School of Crafts, The Evergreen State College, Bykota Senior Center, Baltimore Clayworks, University of Nebraska- Lincoln, and the Lux Center for the Arts. 

Nominee – Paige Pettibon

Paige Pettibon is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tacoma, Washington. She works with a range of mediums, including acrylics, oils, watercolor, fiber art, jewelry, and digital design, to create pieces that reflect both personal identity and collective experience. As a Black, White, and Salish (from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) artist, Paige draws deeply from her multicultural heritage.  

Her work serves as a bridge between communities, offering a space for reflection and dialogue. Through her art, she explores themes of identity, cultural connection, and shared humanity, fostering allyship and understanding through compassionate storytelling and imagery. Her work has been featured at the Tacoma Art Museum, the Smithsonian, and various galleries in the Puget Sound region. Additionally, her jewelry line, Plain to Sea, has garnered national support from collectors who are drawn to her ability to merge cultural expression with fine craftsmanship. 

 The Current: an Artist Award is supported in part by Tacoma Creates, ArtsFund, the Windrose Fund of Common Council Foundation, and our wonderful Tacoma Art Museum Members