Decades in the Making: Ten Years of SOLA Awardees
Tacoma Art Museum • Tacoma, WA
Decades in the Making: Ten Years of SOLA Awardees, reveals many layers like a slow burn. The collected works of artists recognized for tenacity and skill demonstrate both individuality and a subtle unity in this show.
SOLA (Support of Old Lady Artists) was founded in 2016 by two artists, Ginny Ruffner and Marge Levy. To say they had foresight misses a big part of the point. In much the same way that the Guerrilla Girls used radical data to illustrate the inequity of museum representation of women and people of color in 1984, SOLA’s numbers also tell a story.
Thirty-two awardees from the past ten years are represented in this exhibition, along with the two founders, Ginny Ruffner and Marge Levy. The annual award goes to ten women artists, one of whom is Black, Indigenous, or a person of color. They must be over 60 years old and have committed to the practice of making their work for over 25 years. The cash award is $5,000, and its total worth is estimated at over $12,000. As of 2026, 41 artists from around Washington state have received support. Ten years since it started, the grant has invested over $200,000.
Even with such powerful quantitative evidence, the impact of this award reaches far beyond numbers. SOLA recognition points to values like reciprocity, care, and time that illustrate a kind of alternative, philosophicaleconomy. What is the sum of breaking ground and persevering multiplied by creativity? What is the net value of not giving up? Looking for answers begins in seeing the work.
Enter the gallery and the range is immediately clear. To the left, Tip Toland’s hyperrealistic ceramic figures—first, the animated bobbing head and shoulders of an aging swimmer, and soon after, a lithe reclining figure on a cot with a harmonica held to her mouth—startle with their human scale and eerily muted color palette. The uniformly matte surface of “Love Song for Ukraine” (2022) doesn’t differentiate between skin and fabric. And yet the details of a single wrinkle in the shorts hitched at the protruding hip, the hollow, pink-rimmed eyes and the dirty feet of the camo-clad girl speak volumes. Such moments of focus plumb deep into the emotional realm.
On the right, MalPina Chan’s “Gui Shi Ghost Book” (2015) pulls the viewer inward by way of a translucent artist book. This isn’t a book with bound paper pages, but an intimate handheld object rendered through layers of printed, fused glass. Chan, who passed away earlier this year, involves her signature imagery in this piece: historic family portraits, diagrammatic patterns, waves, and spirals. The cumulative effect suggests whispers, or breath made visible, a translation of lived experience into to a dreamy narrative that is also materially rigid and weighty.
Evidence of humanity surfaces in many of the pieces in the show. As a wall label incants, “Cedar bark, color-filled clay, reflection, and moving image carry traces of time and touch. Forms built to unfold with a sense of continuous emergence; others explore reflection, fragmentation, and the shifting nature of memory itself.”
Norie Sato’s “Untitled” (1988) and “DIS/CONNECT” (2021) reverberate across the years, tugging between facets and fragments. The former, an ethereal diptych hung like a book, fanned out and adjacent along two walls, uses layers of powdered pigment edged with alternating jagged and straight lines to create an atmosphere. The latter combines light, video, sound, and the fractured face of the viewer in mirrors to make a whole.
In “Shawl” (2020) Gail Grinnell translated a blue tarp from an overlooked exterior, industrial world into a softened, protective space. The actions of tending to the material by washing, fraying, draping, and drawing on it connect the viewer to unseen domestic work and to the invisible hand of the artist. Grinnell leaves the tarp intact for the viewer to see, but the poignance of her care is equally clear.
Imagination makes a path toward something that doesn’t yet exist. Ruffner and Levy imagined an award into existence that carried fiscal support as a counterbalance to hurdles faced by aging women artists. “Together, these artists create spaces that feel at once grounded in material presence and open to states of contemplation, movement, and change,” the show text concurs. These women and their ideas are bold and strong because they are artists with complex lives worth sharing and celebrating. In honoring women in the present, they also shine a light on past generations of marginalized artists who have lived thoroughly into their crafts in spite of inequities of gender and race.
Kristin Tollefson
Kristin L. Tollefson is an artist and educator based in Tacoma, Washington.
“Decades in the Making: Ten Years of SOLA Awardees,” is on view Thursday and Friday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (free admission 5 to 8 p.m. on Thursdays), Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Tacoma Art Museum, located at 1701 Pacific Avenue in Tacoma, Washington. For information, visit www.tacomaartmuseum.org.
