Art News

Tacoma Art Museum Honors Life and Work of Oft-Forgotten Artist Virna Haffer

TACOMA, WA.- One of the most inventive Northwest artists of her time, Virna Haffer was an internationally recognized and respected Tacoma photographer who has slipped from both regional and national art history books. During the summer, Tacoma Art Museum uncovered her innovative artwork in A Turbulent Lens: The Photographic Art of Virna Haffer, on view from July 2 through October 16, 2011. In a career spanning more than six decades, Haffer found success as a photographer, printmaker, painter, musician, sculptor, and published writer, though she is known first and foremost as a photographer. Self-taught, she began her ambitious career in the early 1920s, both running a successful portrait studio (where she photographed the likes of the Weyerhaeuser and Chihuly families) and also exhibiting her unique artistic images around the world. The curatorial team of Margaret Bullock, Christina Henderson, and David Martin search