Sept. 27, 2025 - Jan. 4, 2026

Location: Museum, 3rd Floor

About the Exhibit

Dancing with Life: Mexican Masks invites audiences to explore the rich festival culture of Mexico through historic and contemporary masks from the collection of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.

Exhibit highlights

• The exhibition centers around the work of the mask makers and dancers themselves through written and recorded interviews, including bilingual Spanish and English texts.
• This approach invites visitors to appreciate "danzas" as expressions of contemporary living culture, in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives coalesce into explorations of spiritual matters, political issues and community life.
• International Arts & Artists, the tourer of this exhibition, is honored to be working with the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and curator Dr. Pavel Shlossberg. Commonly referred to as the “MAC,” the museum preserves and cultivates the heritage of the Inland Northwest people through collections, exhibitions and programs that bring their stories to life.
• Dr. Shlossberg is the associate dean in the School of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University. As a young scholar, Pavel had the privilege to live with and learn from mask artists in Tocuaro, Michoacán, Mexico. His continuing collaboration with artists in Michoacán has shaped his work critiquing academic and museum approaches to framing and representing Mexican Indigenous masking practices in Mexico and internationally.