October 10 – November 15, 2026
Artist Reception: Sunday, October 11, 2–4 pm
AMcE Creative Arts | Capitol Hill, Seattle
Opening Saturday, October 10, 2026
AMcE Creative Arts and Koplin Del Rio are pleased to co-present and co-curate In Between: A Cross and a Hardgrave, bringing together concurrent solo exhibitions by Seattle artists Tim Cross and Robert Hardgrave.
The exhibition offers an intimate encounter between two distinctive voices in Seattle’s contemporary art community. Both artists embrace an expansive, multimedia approach, moving fluidly among painting, drawing, transfer printing, collage, and unconventional material processes. Yet their visual languages and conceptual concerns occupy distinctly different territories.
Rather than emphasizing similarities, In Between celebrates the individual character of each artist’s work while acknowledging the shared city, community, history, and generations of experience that have shaped their practices. The exhibition also reflects the artists’ longstanding friendship and deep mutual respect.
Bringing Cross and Hardgrave together creates an opportunity to consider not only what connects their work, but how each artist contributes to the broader visual movements and aesthetic conversations of the Pacific Northwest—and how those conversations extend beyond the region.
The exhibition is co-curated by Eleana Del Rio of Koplin Del Rio and McLean Emenegger of AMcE Creative Arts, longtime colleagues and friends whose relationship stretches back more than 20 years to their days in the Los Angeles art scene. Their recent collaborations include LAnd SEA and Assembly Art Fair, where they shared space as part of the new Seattle-based invitational.
Bio | Tim Cross
Tim Cross is a Seattle-based multimedia artist, educator, and curator. He received a BA from The Evergreen State College in 1995 and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003.
Cross brings together natural and organic forms with layers of painterly gesture, transferred imagery, drawing, and material experimentation. His longstanding fascination with nature, architecture, construction, growth, and decay continues to inform his work, while his newest paintings are particularly attentive to the psychology of place.
This latest body of work is distinguished by bold, definitive light. More than an atmospheric device, light clarifies, isolates, and intensifies elements within the compositions, allowing forms to emerge with an almost psychological force. Familiar landscapes become something simultaneously observed and imagined.
“With my new body of work, I am playing with contradictions of structure and disorder, playfulness and solemnity, reason and the irrational.”
Cross has exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest and nationally, including at the Kirkland Art Center, WA; Portland Art Center, OR; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; and Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI. His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Microsoft Art Collection, City of Seattle Portable Works Collection, King County Public Art Collection, and Seattle Public Utilities.
Bio | Robert Hargrave
Fueled by experimentation and a drive to continually push his artistic boundaries, Robert Hardgrave creates work through an ongoing investigation of technique, material, and process. His subject matter is strongly influenced by Indigenous and primitive art, particularly the communalities he finds within these traditions and his own personal connections to their ideas and symbolism.
Hardgrave allows the nature of his materials and tools to guide his process. While his work touches on collective symbolism, the resulting imagery remains deeply personal.
For his latest series of paintings and sculptures, Hardgrave uses an acrylic-based concrete patch as a surface coat, building it up to function as a relief before adding transparent layers of paint. For this exhibition, he has also returned to painting on canvas after more than a decade of working primarily with photo-transfer techniques.
“I am currently working on simpler pieces while trying to maintain the same disorienting feeling that I explore in my more complex paintings. It has been a rewarding challenge to expand and reduce my focus at the same time.”
