Mark Tobey Film Screening at SAM

Seattle Art Museum is turning a Saturday matinee into a primer on Mark Tobey, with three short documentaries screening April 25 in its downtown auditorium. (seattleartmuseum.org) The free program runs from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Plestcheeff Auditorium and is part of SAM Films, the museum’s recurring screening series. The museum says capacity is limited and registration is required. (seattleartmuseum.org 1) (seattleartmuseum.org 2) Scarecrow Video curated the spring film selections, and SAM tied this one directly to “Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest,” the museum’s current survey of regional modern art. Seattle Met listed the screening in its weekly events guide with RSVP information. (seattleartmuseum.org) (seattlemet.com) Tobey is one of the artists most closely linked to the Northwest School, the loose group of mid-20th-century painters associated with Seattle modernism. SAM’s exhibition places him alongside Kenneth Callahan, Guy Anderson, and Morris Graves, then pushes past that “Big Four” frame with more than 150 works from across the region. (seattleartmuseum.org) That context is the point of the screening: the films sit next to a museum show that reexamines how Northwest art history gets told. SAM says the exhibition covers the period from 1860 to 1970 and includes artists whose work addressed daily life in the region, not only the mystic image long attached to the movement. (seattleartmuseum.org) Cascade PBS, previewing the week’s arts calendar, called Tobey a “famed Seattle modernist painter” and noted that the April 25 program arrives “in conjunction with the sprawling Beyond Mysticism exhibition.” That pairing gives viewers the films and the gallery argument in the same visit. (cascadepbs.org) SAM Films has been running free screenings at the downtown museum nearly every fourth Saturday from July 2025 through June 2026, according to the museum’s program page. The Mark Tobey matinee fits that format, but with a sharper local-art focus than a standard repertory screening. (seattleartmuseum.org) For Seattle audiences, the draw is simple: a two-hour, no-ticket-cost way to see rare Tobey documentaries and then walk upstairs into a major Northwest modernism show while it is still on view. “Beyond Mysticism” runs through August 2, 2026. (seattleartmuseum.org 1) (seattleartmuseum.org 2)