Want more? Here’s everything we recommend this month: Music, Visual Art, Literature, Performance, Film, Food Drink, This That. Styled by the Streets: Black Women in Hip-Hop FashionOngoingWhen I think of the most important fashion moments in music, I think of Lil’ Kim’s purple pasty ensem ble (and other iconic monochromatic looks), Missy Elliott’s inflatable trash bag suit, Salt-N-Pepa’s matching kufis paired with spandex bodysuits, and TLC’s fishnet tops that spell out their band name. Black female hip-hop artists take fashion risks when others won’t, and continue to innovate when other artists imitate (summed up by the Lil’ Kim lyric, “I used to wear Moschino, but every bitch got it / Now I rock colorful minks because my pockets stay knotted”). The Museum of Pop Culture’s newest exhibit celebrates this history, showcasing over 30 artifacts—that’s wigs, nails, clothing, and accessories—from across time, with pieces worn by icons like Mary J. Blige, Lil’ Kim, Cardi B, and Doja Cat. (MOPOP) AUDREY VANN Kelly Bjork: LunacyThrough Oct 28Kelly Bjork’s work has always been about tenderness and the intimacy of interior spaces, but there’s another narrative threading through it: a personal reckoning. Their first solo show at J. Rinehart, Swimming Naked, marked the arrival of an imagery that was explicit, fleshy, and decidedly queer. In their new exhibition, Lunacy, that blissful raunch gives way to something darker, as Bjork dances with literal demons and confronts the spiritual, emotional, and physical disruptions of perimenopause. The work remains rife with impeccable patterns and intimate details sprinkled like Easter eggs throughout, but now those details reveal something grittier, wilder, and more brutally intimate than what’s come before. (J. Rinehart Gallery) AMANDA MANITACH Actualize AiR Takes Over The Stranger OfficesOct 8The love train for our 2026 Genius Award winners isn’t stopping anytime soon. On October 8, we’re letting Visual Arts Geniuses, Actualize AiR, take over the third floor of The Stranger offices for Capitol Hill Art Walk. Come! It will be so great! We told them they can do whatever the fuck they want, and since Actualize is a by-artists for-artists organization that encourages makers to take risks with their work, I, for one, can’t wait to see what they come up with. (Just please don’t break anything on my desk.) Another reason to visit us during art walk: candy! Stranger Marketing Manager Evanne Hall will be curating a Cursed Candy table full of wicked delights (juice-filled wax bottles and fish-flavored candy canes, anyone?), and I will be doing my damndest to make candy corn lovers out of anyone brave enough, with my candy corn smorgasbord. If you don’t like candy corn, you just haven’t had it in the right circumstances! Let me help you! Candy corn forever! (The Stranger, the entrance is located on 11th Ave E between the Gemini Room and Chophouse Row, 5–8 pm) MEGAN SELING Refract: The Seattle Glass ExperienceOct 15–18If you’ve ever yearned to deepen your knowledge of the region’s glass scene, gather with glassholes, or dabble in the hot shop yourself, let Refract be your guide. The annual festival takes place at galleries, museums, and studios across the greater Seattle area. Sample the hottest young glass artists in town (like Yale Wolf, Megan Stelljes, and Henry Jackson-Spieker) in Refract: Local Frequencies at The Space Columbia City, get hands-on making your own decorative autumnal squash at SLU’s Seattle Glassblowing Studio, or get downward-dog amid Chihuly’s many-tentacled splendors during a yoga class at the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum. My top picks, however, are the intimate artist open studio sessions with masters of the craft like Carol Milne, Morgan Madison, and Weston Lambert. (Various locations) AMANDA MANITACH Melissa MesserThrough Oct 31Melissa Messer describes her practice and work as “if Rothko’s daughter were obsessed with form.” I might add Albers to the mix: her approach to color is technical and clever and makes the eyeballs vibrate with a kind of ocular orgasm. But she’s right about Rothko, because her use of hue is almost spiritual in its ability to overwhelm. She is also a preeminent figurative painter, using the human body as an armature upon which to drape shades of deciduous greens, burnt orange, and acid gold. Beneath all that color, however, the figures hold their own. Messer paints to convey intimacy—the kind that comes from knowing the closeness of a body from innumerable hours of holding, caring, carrying, or resting. That feeling is palpable in the heavy limbs of the mothers, friends, and others who populate her canvases. They loom, stark and monumental, bodies dissolving into the color fields that surround them. (Spectrum Fine Art) AMANDA MANITACH Surge: A Geography of FlowThrough Jan 10It’s fitting that Surge, an exhibition that pairs visual artists with scientists to make work about climate change, takes place at the Museum of Northwest Art, located in La Conner, Washington. Climate change isn’t just a hypothetical in the Skagit basin, a 3,115-square-mile watershed that extends from the Cascades to the Skagit Bay. It’s experienced firsthand as the sea spills over levees, roads go underwater, and the familiar ways of doing things are swept away. This is the fourth iteration of Surge, curated by Chloé Dye Sherpe, and it’s always fascinating to see what happens when artists spend quality time in the trenches with the climatologists, hydrologists, biologists, and governmental policymakers tracking the changes that directly affect our region. This year’s robust roster includes artists working across media, from neon and glass to painting and assemblage: Holly Ballard Martz, Kelsey Fernkopf and Steve Gilbert, Melinda Hurst Frye, Morgan Madison, Steve Jensen, Sue Danielson, and Niki Keenan, to name but a few. (Museum of Northwest Art) AMANDA MANITACH Opening Temporal: Stories of Indigenous Present, Re-imagining Indigenous Futures Oct 2–Dec 31, Thurston County Museum of Fine Arts A Ballard Story: Pacific Fishermen Oct 9–Feb 28, 2027, National Nordic Museum Fantasmagoria Oct 10–Nov 7 with opening reception Oct 9, Roq La Rue In Between: A Cross and a Hardgrave—Tim Cross and Robert Hardgrave Oct 10–Nov 15 with an artist reception Oct 11, AMcE Creative Arts Boren Banner Series: Blake Blanco Oct 14–April 18, 2027, Frye Art Museum PCNW’s 2026 Benefit and Auction Oct 16, Block 41, 6 pm Meet Me at the Henry Oct 24, Henry Art Gallery, 11 am–4 pm My Body Is a Basket: Brenda Mallory, Danielle Morsette, and Sara Siestreem Oct 24–April 11, 2027, Frye Art Museum Betsy Eby: Beautiful Repair and Hyunjeong Lim: Archive of the Mind Oct 29–December 19 with artist reception Nov 7, Winston Wächter Fine Art Shutter and Light Collective and Photographic Center Northwest Present: Currents Nov 2–Dec 13, Photographic Center Northwest Ongoing Coffin Farm Summer Show 2026 Through Oct 10, RSVP at coffinfarm.com for location Jonathan Lasker: Drawings and Studies Through Oct 11, Frye Art Museum Artists’ Choice with Guest Curators Through Oct 11, Frye Art Museum Boren Banner Series: Chloe King Through Oct 11, Frye Art Museum Kelsey Fernkopf—Outside: In Through Oct 23,  Foster/White Gallery Allison Collins: War, Weft and Landlines Through Oct 24, Foster/White Gallery William Kentridge Through Oct 24, Greg Kucera Gallery Eric-Paul Riege: ojo|-|ól Through Oct 25, Henry Art Museum Here Now: King County Public Art Collection Through Oct 26, Gallery 4Culture Please Touch: Together, Breaking Barriers Invites Seattle Audiences to Experience Art Through Touch Through Oct 31, Gray Sky Gallery Granite Calimpong: Under the Bank, Up a Narrow Valley and Dick Weiss: Older and Weisser Through Oct 31, Traver Gallery Social Contract Through Nov, Actualize AiR Mia Mulvey: I Contain My Outside Through Nov 6, Jack Straw New Media Gallery Fulgencio Lazo: Iluminando Caminos [Lighting the Way] Through November 14 with an artist’s reception Oct 28, ArtX Contemporary Colored Girls for Colored Girls: Evolution of Expression Through Nov 15, Arte Noir RailSpur x Hall Spassov: The Way Is Open Through Nov 30, RailSpur Once Removed Presents ‘It Means: God Is Great’ by Gizelle Hadeed Through Dec 21, Actualize AiR Project NW: David Hytone: The Lee Shore Through Jan 3, 2027, Tacoma Art Museum Day-to-Day: Rhythm, Routine, Resistance Through Jan 3, 2027, Henry Art Gallery The Kondō Family: Storytellers in Clay Through Jan 3, 2027, Seattle Asian Art Museum Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan Through Jan 17, 2027, Seattle Art Museum A Room for Animal Intelligence Through Jan 2027, Seattle Art Museum Rebels + Icons: The Photography of Janette Beckman Through April 18, 2027, MOPOP Ten Thousand Things Through May 2, 2027, Wing Luke Museum Joiri Minaya: To Hell With Hibiscus Through May 2, 2027, Henry Art Gallery Chloë Bass: Soft Services Through Aug 2027, Volunteer Park Inconvenience Store Every Saturday and Sunday, Parnassus Pioneer Square Art Walk Every first Thursday Central District Art Walk Every second Friday Capitol Hill Art Walk Every second Thursday Belltown Art Walk Every second Friday Georgetown Art Attack! Every second Saturday Find all these listings and more on our sister site, EverOut Seattle! EverOut.com/Seattle The post Things to Do in October: Visual Art appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less