For the past decade, Tacoma artist Priscilla Dobler Dzul has been steadily gaining the attention of the Seattle art world. From a solo show at the now defunct Mad Art in South Lake Union to winning the Neddy Award in 2022, Dobler Dzul’s career has continued to blossom. Water Carries the Stories of our Stars, which opened on Oct. 18, marks Dobler Dzul’s expansive museum debut at the Frye Art Museum. 

For her exhibition, Dobler Dzul produced an entirely new body of work spanning glass, ceramics, video, weaving, and embroidery. Working with Tacoma’s Museum of Glass, the artist partnered with expert hot shop technicians to create blown-glass vessels from her drawings of animal-like beings connected to Maya cosmology. An armadillo and piglet are represented in pitcher-like vessels bearing local waters from Chambers Bay and Flett Creek, while possum and jaguar adorn the transparent glass lids of containers that hold blue pigment, cochineal, and precatorius and ojo de venado seeds. Elsewhere, thorny vessels display hand-dyed henequen threads used for weaving. 

Her reverence for materials echoes German artist Wolfgang Laib’s displays of jarred flower pollen and natural pigment in his shows. But in her exhibition, Dobler Dzul points the viewer’s attention toward ancient technologies from the more-than-human world, to go beyond an aesthetic display of the artist’s materials to remind us of where cultural memory and lineage reside.

The land was divided and the river provided.

Photo by Yeshe Lhamo

The exhibition continually interrogates cultural memory as a major theme. Visitors entering the gallery are confronted with two massive, double-sided wall-sized textiles mounted on individual standing looms, inspired by looms Dobler Dzul’s grandmother and mother used to weave hammocks. Each machine-embroidered textile, represents the history of places that are key to the artist’s identity, whether her home in Tacoma or Yucatán. The Yucatán loom reimagines creation stories in the artist’s own visual language, while the Tacoma loom documents the Puyallup creation story and speaks to present-day realities of environmental violence. As visitors circumambulate the textiles, past and present converge into uneasy stories of destruction and extraction.

Priscilla Dobler Dzul. Hardshell piglet, burrows the rains that fall from the skies, from When the three armadillos arrived with the water. The lords of the underworld brought the offerings. And vessels removed their thorns to weave the threads together, 2025. Blown glass, water from Puget Sound. 20 x 8 3/8 x 15 in.

Photo by Jueqian Fang

Just past her textiles, the focal point of the show is The four winds gathered around Tree and her threads—a series of red clay sculptural vessels that evoke the female form and have been shaped by a memory of the artist’s body and impression through touch. The vessels are tethered by henequen straps to woven hammocks anchored by a Western red cedar tree, in a shape that evokes the practice of backstrap weaving with a portable loom. Dobler Dzul made the twill, tartan patterns in two of the weavings to honor her Scottish grandmother. The red and black hammocks were made in collaboration with master weaver and environmental educator Doña Brigida Lopez and cultural advocate and community organizer Daniela Mussali Meza.

The guardians remind us of what we have forgotten features a wall of four red clay figures inspired by ritual Maya censers. The fierce visages watch over the space. While working with the University of Washington as an artist in residence, Dobler Dzul created these larger-scale pieces using the art school’s ceramic studio and kiln. Inspired by the intricate decorative styles of the Classic Maya period, the backgrounds of each sculpture feature patterns from different architectural sites. The figures represent spirit dwellers and protectors.

The show also features a video viewing station with two films that bring together her reflections on ecological decline in both the Yucatán and Tacoma. The artist worked with Iva Radivojevic to create a film that reflects on the impacts of the construction of the Tren Maya railway on the Yucatán Peninsula. Henequen thread production is depicted, showing the colonial history that continues to exist and contribute to the destruction of the connection and history that Maya people had with this plant through displacement, development, and land privatization. Dobler Dzul moves through the landscape trailing literal threads of her ancestral lineage behind her.

Priscilla Dobler Dzul. The guardians remind us of what we have forgotten, 2025. Oregon red clay with grog. Dimensions variable.

Photo by Jueqian Fang

An additional film, made with A.J. Lenzi and Jonathan Jacobson, mourns the loss of water to industrial expansion in Tacoma. Dobler Dzul appears in the film carrying 70-pound ceramic vessels filled with water and lugging a rake she uses to return seeds to the earth. During filming in Tacoma, Dobler Dzul tore a ligament. Filming took place over three days across five seasons in both early morning and nighttime conditions. Throughout both films, Dobler Dzul grieves environmental injustice while invoking ancestral memory rooted in water to explore liberatory possibilities for reimagined relationships to the elemental. 

Priscilla Dobler Dzul. Lo único que existía era el movimiento de las aguas y los cielos / The only thing that existed, was the movement of the waters and the skies (still), 2025 . Digital video (color, sound); 18:00 min. each.

Courtesy of the artist

The Frye Art Museum will host “Interwoven: Panel & Weaving Demonstration” on Sunday, Oct. 26, from 1:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Priscilla Dobler Dzul will be in conversation with her collaborators Doña Brigida Lopez and Daniela Mussali Meza. The event is moderated by curator Tamar Benzikry. Following the panel, there will be a live demonstration of backstrap weaving—an ancient technique highlighted in the exhibition.

Water Carries the Stories of our Stars will be on display through April 19, 2026.