In the two years since 4Culture and King County Metro launched the latest iteration of the beloved Poetry in Public program, it has featured poems written by 120 King County residents, uplifting local voices. 

Formerly known as Poetry on Buses, the program has been enlivening commutes since 1992.  For the 2023–2025 iteration, the program was renamed to better reflect its expansion into other modes of transit and public spaces. Here’s a look at what Poetry in Public has been up to lately!

Poet Planner Laura Da’ developed the theme Places of Landing to honor the movements, places, and feelings that shape our days. In 2023, she and the program’s Community Liaisons facilitated a workshop series designed to inspire people to engage with the theme. During the workshops, poetry activities highlighted traditions connected to African American, Chinese, Filipino, Indigenous, Spanish-speaking, and youth communities. Workshops took place at many locations throughout King County, including festivals, cultural hubs, teen centers, libraries, and online and hybrid formats.

Hundreds of King County residents responded to an open call for poems interpreting the theme Places of Landing in late 2023. Then, beginning in April 2024, poems selected by a panel of local literary leaders were featured on King County Metro buses and Sound Transit light rail trains, at King County Parks trailheads, and on 4Culture’s social media platforms.

To celebrate the selected poems, Poetry in Public hosted an open mic session in collaboration with Hugo House. Additional poetry showcases followed throughout the summer and fall of 2024, produced in partnership with community organizations throughout the region.

Bedecked with Poetry in Public branding and a selection of poems curated by Da’, King County Metro’s Poetry Bus acted as an immersive stage where poets could connect with one another and read their Places of Landing pieces. The Poetry Bus made special appearances at cultural festivals, including Pista Sa Nayon at Seward Park Amphitheater as well as Fiestas Patrias and Festival Sundiata at the Seattle Center.

April is National Poetry Month, and we’ll be celebrating the accomplishments of Poetry in Public: Places of Landing as it comes to an end. We encourage you to visit our Storefront Media Gallery over the course of the month as we display a selection of poems that we hope will inspire you to write your own poetry. For more guidance, check out our poetry prompts or visit 4Culture to pick up a Places of Landing poetry prompt booklet!

Friendly greetings! I’m TORLEY, and I make sonic science fiction that explores the expressive edges of electronic music, blending contemporary synthesis with classical techniques. My focus is more on the aesthetic approach behind my craft than adhering to any one “style”. That said, I have a soft spot for saturated melodies, basic chord progressions that morph into wild configurations, and glitchy drum rhythms. I’m accessibly weird!

The 4Culture Album—click through for a free download!—or “T4CA”, is inspired by my sensory experiences traveling across Seattle and King County. This project wouldn’t have been possible without the support of 4Culture — not just through the grant I received, but also through the inspiration I found in their mission to uplift the creative community and our local ecosystem. *T4CA* is about taking recurring-yet-disparate motifs and unifying them in fresh, surprising directions.

One of my keystone references is Ted Chiang, also from this area. His thought-provoking “What if?” approach in every short story and his own contributions to SAL and the writing community inspires me to bring that same level of care and creativity into my music — aiming for quality and quantity.

A quote I obsessively check is Louis Cole’s gem: “If people actually followed [their tastes more], music would be a lot better than it is. It’s purely what I’m excited about and what I’m excited to hear.” This isn’t selfish, as I find that if what you made comes from a place of undiluted YOUness, then it resonates at the right frequency for others too — it shatters the idea that art must cater to a generic formula, instead embracing individuality as a powerful social connector. Thus, we can all be ourselves together.

Thanks to 4Culture, I was able to expand my “sonic spaceship” with new virtual instruments and multi-FX tools, which allow me to experiment and randomize ideas, curating the best results. I also used some of it on AI tools to come up with never-before-heard sounds and generate variations on what I already made. My belief in AI as a tool to accelerate established processes and enhance human creativity was deeply shaped by my work on the game Proxi with Gallium Studios, led by Will Wright (The Sims) and Lauren Elliott (Carmen Sandiego).

I primarily use the Expressive E Osmose synthesizer, a multidimensional instrument that has piano-lookin’ keys but senses superfine touch, enabling subtle flute lines and horn swells and odder fare. This time around, the rich jazz foundations of this area (dating back to Ray Charles and Quincy Jones RIP) strongly influenced my tracks, a tribute to the vibrant local culture.

Again, ultra-grateful and delighted 4Culture grants even exist. If you’ve made something possible with 4Culture fueling your rocket, let’s hear about it!

The Network of Support is opening a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for coaches, mentors, consultants, and technical assistance providers on March 6, 2025.

With increased funding from the Doors Open program, many cultural organizations are navigating new opportunities but may face unique risks and hurdles. The Network of Support brings skilled individuals and organizations to provide as-needed services to cultural organizations in King County, including those undergoing operational crisis and moments of tremendous organizational transformation as well as those undertaking facilities and real estate project development.

Who should apply?
We recognize that diverse perspectives, ideas, cultures, and life experiences of all are critical to our success. We strongly encourage people from historically under-invested communities and community-based individuals and organizations to apply. This application includes three areas:

• Coaches and mentors support leadership development and help assess needs and goals, for organizational success and sustainability or for community and cultural facilities project development.
• Consulting services strengthen internal processes and capacities in areas, such as: accessibility (language, ADA, facilities, mobility); board/board relations; communications, marketing, and branding; community and cultural facilities, including real estate project development; diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion; financial emergency planning; financial planning and/or strategy; fundraising/development; human resources; interpretive planning; leadership and board optimization; legal services; organizational design and management; and strategic planning.
• Technical assistance providers support grant preparation for our Launch and Building for Equity grant programs.

Compensation
Selected providers will be listed on a directory and will be reimbursed at a rate of:

• $185/hour for capacity building and technical assistance services provided;
• $92.50/hour for related project management, administration, and/or travel.

Note: Compensation is based on approved and completed work, and services are requested on an as-needed basis. No compensation is guaranteed.

How to Apply

1. Download and read the guidelines: PDF.
2. Set up an account: register early – account setup takes 1-2 days.
3. Submit online: complete and submit your application via our application portal by the deadline.

We are providing three Drop-in Hour sessions to answer your questions and work on your application:

March 20, 4:30–6:00 pm
Centro Cultural Mexicano
16300 Redmond Way, Suite 100, Redmond, WA 98052

March 29, 9:30–11:30 am
Zoom

April 1, 5:30–7:30 pm
Zoom

This addendum summarizes responses to questions to the RFQ.

As you prepare to apply, keep the application deadline of April 10, 2025 at 5:00 pm PDT in mind!

Questions?
Contact Cassie Chinn, Cultural Services Liaison, at . 

The guidelines and application are in English. If this is a barrier that stops you from understanding the RFQ or applying, please contact or call 206-296-7580 or TTY 711, and we will make sure you get the support you need.

Partner Opportunity
The City of Seattle Equitable Development Initiative (EDI) is issuing an RFQ. We will hold a joint selection process to strengthen each program’s efforts and minimize duplicate efforts for applicants. To be considered for the City’s program, apply separately here.

For 45+ years, Gallery 4Culture has been exhibiting innovative artists and art forms in solo and small-group shows. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the artists who will have exhibitions in the coming season. Check them out below!

Congratulations to our 2025–2026 artists, and thank you to our panelists—Judy Avitia-Gonzalez, Erin Elyse Burns, Em Chan, and Michael Hong—for their time and effort in reviewing and selecting six King County-based artists and artist teams.

4Culture would also like to thank all 119 gallery applicants for their interest in exhibiting with us and the panel for their diligence in making these selections. The next Gallery 4Culture season application cycle will open early November with a deadline of December 11, 2025.

Lee Davignon

March 5 – April 24, 2026
Opening Reception: 1^st Thursday, March 5, 6-8pm
Additional 1^st Thursday: April 2, 6-8pm

Lee Davignon transforms salvaged materials through textile techniques, sculptural experimentation, and material play, highlighting themes of waste, value, and craft.

Amara Eke and Jade Knox

October 30 – December 12, 2025
Opening Reception: 1^st Thursday, November 6, 6-8pm
Additional 1^st Thursday: December 4, 6-8pm

Attention, Earthlings! Just in time for the celestial spectacle of the Taurid Meteor Shower, Amara Eke and Jade Knox’s cosmic collaboration lands at Gallery 4Culture. Their vibrant sculptures and acrylic paintings will orbit a radiant ceramic meteorite, transforming the space into an otherworldly encounter.

Reilly Jensen

July 2 – August 14, 2026
Opening: 1^st Thursday, July 2, 6-8pm
Additional 1^st Thursday: August 6, 6-8pm

A tribute to the things that irk, confuse, or amuse, Reilly Jensen’s large-scale soft sculptures—hand-embroidered, machine-stitched, and adorned with rusted, discarded objects—explore the unsettling realization that our parents’ ways surface in us when we least expect it.

Clare Johnson

May 7 – June 19, 2026
Opening: 1^st Thursday, May 7, 6-8pm
Additional 1^st Thursday: June 4, 6-8pm

Every night for almost two decades, multidisciplinary artist Clare Johnson has drawn and written on a sticky note to save a small piece of each ending day. Currently including over 6,000 Post-its, this sprawling yet deeply intimate work honors what normal communication can’t—all the separate times held within ourselves, endlessly overlapping, collapsing, and refocusing.

Matthew Parker

September 4 – October 17, 2025
Opening Reception: 1^st Thursday, September 4, 6-8pm
Additional 1^st Thursday: October 2, 6-8pm

Matthew Parker’s installations of foam rocks and boulders explore the intersection of art and disability, shaped by his experience of creating a body of work without a working body.

Sadaf Sadri

January 8 – February 20, 2026
Opening Reception: 1^st Thursday, January 8, 6-8pm
Additional 1^st Thursday: February 5, 6-8pm

Drawing from Islamic iconography and Shia aesthetics, Sadaf Sadri utilizes digital worldbuilding to reimagine spaces of power and resistance. Legacy exposes the ironies of identity and inheritance, challenging imposed cultural hierarchies.

When Ric’kisha Taylor was growing up in Miami, vibrant clothes, glitzy jewelry, exotic reptiles, and bright-colored cars with flashy rims were all defining features of the city’s visual culture. Her own family had a pet iguana for a time. Her dad wore bright green crocodile-skin shoes to church on Sundays.

Now the bold nature of Taylor’s hometown oozes out of her current Gallery 4Culture exhibition, Gleaming, which features more than a dozen of her sparkly collages and soft sculptures. Taylor herself generally tries not to stand out too much in subdued Seattle, “But I’m flamboyant on the inside,” she says. “And that’s what I want my ideas to look like on the outside.”   

For the artworks in Gleaming, Taylor combined a medley of materials—from synthetic fabrics and artificial hair to rhinestones and glass seed beads. The majority of the pieces depict Black women in ways that Taylor intends to challenge the viewer. She wants you to look at what she’s made and reconsider what you think you know. She’s confronting stereotypes and expectations head-on. 

“Most of the work that I do is a way for you to get so close to the stereotype that you think it’s racist in a way,” she says. “For instance, someone sees red lips on a darker skin and they’re like, I feel like this is minstrel show. But I’m like, you’re making it into that—there are dark women who wear red lipstick. There’s a little conflict.”

Taylor also questions assumptions about beauty and conformity in the exhibition—“especially with the blonde wigs and the blue eyes,” she says. To her, the things people wear, whether clothing, accessories, or makeup, are a way into thinking about identity. In “Lot Lizard,” for example, she explores the complexities of sex work and what it means to be a queer Black woman.

But Gleaming is also about finding freedom from identity and expectation. Taylor’s collage “Rather live with the gators” started as a rumination about how Indigenous people once lived in the swamps of Florida, disconnected from society and connected to the natural world around them. The piece became a way for Taylor to look for liberation in a world where “you can’t travel freely, you can’t grow your own food, and you have to pay the rent.”

“Today we’re held up against so many forms of harm that it’s kind of hard to feel like you’re one with whatever’s happening,” she says. “We have privileges and opportunities, but it’s more convoluted to be in community.”

Like “Lot Lizard” and “Rather live with the gators” Taylor’s artworks often start with a snippet of language. That phrase might spark a drawing or a search for online images before she starts staging the canvas and experimenting with her materials. “After that, it’s just deciding what each figure may need,” she says. “Does this one need a pattern? Are the [sparkling] crocodile tears enough?”

To sufficiently embellish the pieces in Gleaming, Taylor made frequent use of the peyote stitch, aka the gourd stitch, a bead weaving technique with roots in Indigenous America and ancient Egypt; Taylor learned it in a workshop with renowned Black American artist Joyce J. Scott while she was a student at Cornish College of the Arts. “At first I thought it was just a 2-D form, but you can build it into a 3-D or 4-D type of material,” she says.

“I’m kind of obsessed,” she continues. “Now I find beads on my dining table. I find them in my food!”

Gleaming is on view through Feb. 27.

Hello! I’m Sol Dressa, Community Outreach and Engagement Support Specialist here at 4Culture. I’m so excited to help relaunch Hello 4Culture and help expand access to arts, science and cultural funding across King County! I will be traveling throughout the region to hear directly from communities—their ideas, questions, and concerns. As an artist, organizer, and staff member at 4Culture, I’m thrilled to connect with those who build spaces for communities of color—spaces that celebrate joy and play, honor ancestors through arts and culture, and foster healing and intergenerational learning.

Hello 4Culture is a program designed to engage King County residents in conversations about their individual projects, goals, and creative pursuits. Because of the pandemic, it’s been on hold for a while. Now that we are relaunching it, my mission is to ensure we’re building relationships that center those who have been disproportionately left out of cultural funding and public art opportunities. Over the next year, we’ll host pop-up Hello4Culture events and office hours, offering opportunities to ask questions about our grants and programs.

To that end, I’m thrilled to invite you to an upcoming Hello4Culture event in partnership with Friends of Little Saigon. Please join us on Saturday, March 1 from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm at Friends of Little Saigon’s space at 1227 S Weller Street, Suite A in Seattle. The event will be a BIPOC Arts Swap! Enjoy delicious food, exchange art with fellow local creatives, and learn more about how you can get involved with 4Culture grants and public art opportunities . At this event, you can:

• Share and trade your artwork (or a piece of artwork that you own) with other artists and creatives.
• Discover more about 4Culture grants and Friends of Little Saigon and how you can get involved.
• Connect with BIPOC artists and creatives in King County.

Any medium of art or craft is welcome! This event is open to all who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). We look forward to seeing you there, and stay tuned—more Hello4Culture events are in the works.

Last year, artist Laura C. Wright embarked on a months-long endeavor to plant a pair of dye gardens in Seattle’s Duwamish Valley and then harvest plants to make pigments for creating watercolor paints.

Commissioned by 4Culture and King County Wastewater Treatment Division (WTD), Wright’s waterplant was conceived to raise awareness about what happens when the area’s stormwater and wastewater systems are overwhelmed by heavy rains: With nowhere else to go, they currently overflow into the Duwamish River, causing harm to its flora and fauna. waterplant was a prelude to a big change getting underway this year: WTD’s new West Duwamish Wet Weather Storage Facility, which will hold stormwater and wastewater during large storm events and then divert it to West Point Treatment Plant for filtration before it’s released into the Puget Sound.

In spring, with help from members of the Georgetown Youth Council, Wright planted the Pacific Northwest Native Plant dye garden at Gateway Park North. She then planted the Georgetown Steam Plant dye garden with flowers of historical and cultural value. Plants are good for regulating stormwater runoff!

As summer arrived, Wright led foraging and pigment-making workshops with the Duwamish Valley Youth Corps, Georgetown Youth Council, and the general public. Participants learned how to ethically forage plants from the Duwamish Greenbelt, which sits on a hill west of the Duwamish River and is Seattle’s largest remaining contiguous forest—500 acres! After foraging, the groups went back to Wright’s studio to process the plants.

The pigment-making process uses a technique similar to WTD’s water filtration methods, offering insight into the water system in the Duwamish Valley.

Later in the summer, WTD staff led a tour of the brand-new Georgetown Wet Weather Treatment Station, specifically for residents of Georgetown and South Park. There, participants learned about the lifecycle of water and treatment process.

A series of additional workshops in August began with a walk through the Georgetown Steam Plant dye garden. Participants then returned to Wright’s studio to learn how to extract pigment and make watercolor paints.

Everyone who participated in workshops went home with watercolors they and other workshop participants made.

Reaching the end of waterplant’s series of temporary engagements, Wright distributed sample watercolors and offered a painting station at community events, including the Duwamish River Festival, the Georgetown Steam Plant Science Fair, and the Georgetown Garden Walk. She has since created a coloring book that both explains the lifecycle of water in the city and provides instructions for making watercolor pigments from plants at home. We encourage you to download it and consider growing and harvesting your own dye gardens!

“What would a firefly look like if it was actually on fire?” James Hartunian wondered.

At the time, he was in Ohio for grad school, living next to a neighbor from rural Idaho. One night in early summer, the neighbor “ran outside in this excited fervor,” Hartunian says, because he’d never seen fireflies before. The little glowing beetles were just “a benign part of reality” in Michigan where Hartunian grew up. He’d never really thought about them before.

Hartunian makes speculative artwork that starts with an everyday part of nature and then alters it somehow—think ice, plants, mushrooms. TIMBER!, the exhibition currently on view at Gallery 4Culture, began with the fireflies—and then by imagining a future in which they no longer exist, where forests no longer exist, and “the machines are trying to recreate life,” he says.

“Taking this idea, this thought experiment, I kind of pull it all the way to its furthest conclusion,” Hartunian says. “I have a starting point and then I’m like, okay, so in this particular world, what else would there be?”

TIMBER! features three installations, one of which is a mechanical firefly simulation. The piece uses a complex combination of motors, electronics, and mechanical camera sliders to randomly move a series of flickering LED lights; the work is held together using custom-designed 3-D printed pieces and some 700 screws.

In the past, Hartunian has adapted existing components to create kinetic work, but TIMBER! marks the first time he’s designed the circuit board and drivers himself. To do so, he relied heavily on online resources from the DIY electronics community, and a lot of trial and error. (After the exhibition opened, he was still troubleshooting a triggering mechanism that kept shorting out.)

Hartunian likes to figure out how to make things work, not just conceptually, but physically. That makes sense, given that he’s a scientist as well as an artist, with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and membership in the American Chemical Society. (Once upon a time he worked in polymer sciences, which are related to battery chemistry.) “I’m constantly seeking out information,” he says.

Prior to starting his MFA in 2020, he made wearables that re-imagined sensory experiences. But forced to work without other human bodies during the Covid lockdown, he pivoted to plants—an experiment that led him to grow a 10-foot sunflower indoors using a system of grow lights. It bloomed in the dead of winter.

“I never thought that it was actually going to do it,” he says. “There’s this built-in doubt whenever you do anything with electronics where you’re like, this is never going to work the first time…and then it does!”

For the second installation in TIMBER!, Hartunian again considered his mythical forest: “How would you create a tree falling if there’s no tree? What would that look like as a mechanized diorama?” Now an evergreen tree intermittently falls in one corner of the gallery.

“It’s absurd,” he says. “The idea of a tree falling just continuously is silly and stupid. It would never exist outside of art—science fiction, but also fantasy.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hartunian consumes a lot of science fiction books, podcasts, etc. Lately he’s been reading novels from the 1960s, which he says tend to be utopian, rather than dystopian. In those stories, “even when we are able to travel across the galaxy, it’s interhuman squabbles that get us in trouble. And so sometimes I just take out the human and imagine what the world would be like without the human.”

The third installation in Hartunian’s current exhibition is composed of two basket-like domes woven together with soldering iron and wire. With a 5-volt current running through them, the domes power a series of LEDs. Beneath them, grass is growing.

Though the effect is beautiful, “The entire [dome] is designed out of utility, not necessarily aesthetics,” Hartunian says.

In the speculative world of TIMBER! the sun is obscured, so everything has to be grown under artificial light. He started growing the grass a week before the exhibition opened—in his garage where it’s 58 degrees.

Yet nature has insisted on having its way: Mold spores found their way into the soil, perhaps during transport to the gallery. Hartunian grew the grass in coconut husk, rather than the soil he usually uses—the idea being that the coconut husk is more sterile and wouldn’t mold over as quickly. As it turns out, “It’s molding over way faster because there’s nothing in it.”

TIMBER! is on view through Jan. 30.

The Building for Equity program, designed to support the creation and improvement of facilities that promote equity and inclusion in our communities, is opening its next funding round on February 20, 2025. This year’s Building for Equity: Facilities grant will be available for projects with budgets of $10 million or less, and it comes with several exciting updates aimed at making it easier for organizations to access support for acquiring, building, or renovating spaces that foster culture, science, and technology experiences. 

Pre-Screening Deadline: for the first time, the Building for Equity program will require all applicants to complete a pre-screening process by March 25, 2025. This step ensures that applicants are eligible and have a well-defined project before proceeding to the full application. We recommend completing the pre-screening as early as possible to allow time for any necessary revisions before the final application deadline. After March 25, access to the application will still be available, but eligibility will not be pre-screened.

Free Technical Assistance: another new feature for 2025 is free technical assistance for all eligible applicants. You will have access to consultants who can help refine your project, advise you on the application process, and offer insights on project scope, budgeting, and feasibility. This support will be invaluable for those needing assistance navigating the application or gaining expertise in specialized areas. To connect with a consultant, simply complete your pre-screening by contacting Maya Santos, Building for Equity Program Manager, at .

Three Funding Tracks: in response to the diverse needs of applicants, the Building for Equity: Facilities grant now offers three distinct funding tracks to ensure the program better aligns with different project scopes and capacities:

• Track 1: Small Projects–projects with budgets of $250,000 and under.
• Track 2: Mid-Sized Projects–projects with budgets between $250,001 and $1,000,000.
• Track 3: Large Projects–more complex projects with budgets ranging from $1,000,001 to $10,000,000.

Each track has specific award limits and requirements. Full guidelines will be available on January 30, 2025, so be sure to carefully review the information and determine which track best aligns with your project.

Updated Criteria: economic Impact has been added as a new evaluation criterion looking at how the project benefits the local economy. This includes considering job creation, volunteer hours, in-kind donations, and other economic multipliers that positively impact King County. Indirect benefits, such as increased commercial activity, revitalized spaces, and enhanced community vibrancy, will also be part of the assessment.

Updated Eligibility Requirements: finally, nonprofit organizations and their fiscal sponsors must be incorporated in Washington State to be eligible for funding. If your organization or fiscal sponsor is not incorporated in Washington, you will need to complete the incorporation process to qualify. To incorporate in Washington State visit Washington State Corporations and Charities Filing System.

Don’t miss this opportunity for facility project budgets of $10 million and under.As you prepare to apply, keep the pre-screening deadline of March 25, 2025 and the application deadline of April 17, 2025 in mind! Please feel free to contact Maya Santos, Program Manager, at with any questions or to discuss your project. 

If you’ve been following along with us as we prepare to implement a full slate of new Doors Open programs, you’ve likely seen the onslaught of job postings. Now, as 2024 comes to a close, we’re incredibly thrilled to welcome 14 new staff members and congratulate two of our long-time colleagues on stepping into new roles! If you’re wondering who to contact with questions, concerns, and ideas, our full Staff page is a great place to start. Whether it’s at a grant workshop, site visit, or just over email, we hope you get a chance to say hello. We have more hiring planned for 2025, so make sure to keep an eye our Employment page. 

By way of introduction, we’ve asked all of our new colleagues the same question: what excites you most about your new position at 4Culture? Read on for their answers to get to know more about your new 4Culture staff:

Bart J. Cannon, PhD, Science and Technology Director
Science isn’t a bunch of facts to memorize. Science is vital to humanity because it provides a set of tools through which the universe in which we live can be understood. Without the tools and methods science makes available to all, reliable knowledge about this world would be impossible. It’s hard to imagine something more exciting than having a roadmap for exploration at one’s fingertips!

Calandra Childers, Project Director 2024 Doors Open Program 
I am ready to see what a better-resourced cultural sector can accomplish. Cultural experiences connect people to one another and build communities – and the cultural sector of King County has done so much already on shoestring budgets. Imagining what’s possible when we significantly invest in the power of culture excites me for what’s to come.

Casey Moser, Doors Open Facilities Program Manager 
I’m excited about the opportunity to contribute to this transformative legislation. It’s an exciting time to be able to say “yes” more, and I know this funding is going to have an impact on King County and its cultural spaces for years and years to come.

Liz Reyes, Doors Open Support Specialist 
What excites me most when it comes to working at 4Culture is being directly involved in Doors Open. It is such a unique program with so much potential for the non-profit sector as a whole, including Science and Technology. It’s a massive opportunity for us as an organization to develop something completely unique and generative for our area, an opportunity that the vast majority of places in the country just don’t have. I’m happy to be a part of such a significant shift in the organization!

Fundisha Tibebe, Doors Open Operating Support Program Manager 
I’m excited to be able to make an impact through my work in the same communities that have lifted me up throughout my life. I’m most excited to be in spaces with folks committed to supporting and uplifting the brilliance, creativity, and beauty of Black and Brown communities across King County.

Jackie Mixon, Communications Support Specialist 
As a new member of the communications team, I’m excited to be a part of getting the word out for new Doors Open programs. Especially for people involved in the Science/Technology sector. There’s a whole new branch of funding for us to give and we’re excited to share it!

Sol Dressa, Community Outreach and Engagement Support Specialist 
I’m so excited to help relaunch Hello 4Culture and expand access to arts and cultural funding across King County! I will be traveling throughout the region to hear directly from communities—their ideas, questions, and concerns. As an artist, organizer, and staff at 4Culture, I’m thrilled to connect with those who build spaces for communities of color—spaces that celebrate joy and play, honor ancestors through arts and culture, and foster healing and intergenerational learning.

Ana Sneed, Receptionist/Office Operations
Being a part of an organization that makes such a tangible impact on communities I’ve had the privilege of maturing in is motivating and proves my firm belief that there is no problem we cannot solve with diverse teams of intentional, passionate, critical thinkers who aren’t afraid to go the distance. To say I work within such a group is the cherry on top. I’m proud I work in a unique position that helps amplify the voices of my peers and strengthens the overall cultural fabric of King County.

Melissa Huggins, Operations Director
It’s inspiring to serve alongside such smart, dedicated, passionate colleagues, working every day to support individuals and organizations throughout King County. Our operations team does so much behind the scenes to ensure staff have the tools they need and community members have a seamless experience. I enjoy how operations intersects with every area of 4Culture’s work, creating opportunities for me to collaborate with staff, departments and programs across the organization.

Korra Kairos, Human Resources Assistant 
Outside of our core mission, I just enjoy the freedom I have in this workplace! It feels like I’m part of a great community who appreciates me and gives a sense of safety for me to be my whole self. I feel very fortunate to be here and am excited to continue my journey at 4Culture!

Jennifer Pritchard, Science and Technology Program Manager
I’m excited to work with such a passionate and dedicated team to connect in with and support our local science and technology organizations in the community.

Cassie Chinn, Cultural Services Liaison
The depth and breadth of work across the county is incredible. I’m grateful for and admire all of the people who bring so much goodness, and I’m looking forward to being in community together.

Elyn Blandon, Finance Contract Specialist
To be in a role that intersects with all programs at 4Culture is exciting; furthermore, to bring value to essential processes for the greater mission! 4Culture represents meaningful work and change that has purpose to me personally and professionally. To contribute to serving my local community and advancing underserved populations collectively with other talented professionals is a privilege I hold with high regard.

Jay Robles, Building For Equity Program Manager
I am most thrilled to be in a position where I can continue to serve our Indigenous communities. 4Culture is doing brilliant work and I’m so grateful to be a part of the team!

Bryan Wilson, Cultural Education Program Manager
At this very moment, all over King County, young people are boldly stepping up to microphones, making art, and encountering the vital stories that speak through historic places and through the land itself. At this moment, King County educators are creating innovative and intersectional partnerships with community organizations and teaching artists, making our schools and out-of-school-time programs some of the most energized and vibrant cultural spaces around. I am SO excited to be working with an incredible team at 4Culture, along with so many amazing community partners, to build new tools for these cultural organizations, public-school educators, and their students to connect and support their shared work, ultimately to increase equitable access for youth throughout our county to the healing, curiosity, and community-building that cultural experiences and expression offer. The year ahead is so full of possibility!

Natasha Varner, Heritage Program Manager
I’m a history nerd and so I’m excited to learn more about this region’s past by working with the people and organizations who know it best. I also really appreciate working for an organization that centers racial equity and uplifting the voices of individuals and communities that have been historically marginalized.

Almost exactly one year ago, the King County Council unanimously passed Doors Open legislation, dramatically increasing funding for King County arts, heritage, science, and historic preservation nonprofits through a 0.1 percent sales tax. Over the next seven years, Doors Open is expected to generate roughly $700 million—a major investment in the ongoing cultural vitality of our region.

The County designated 4Culture to distribute these funds, based on our deep grantmaking experience and expertise. In May, we submitted a draft Doors Open Implementation Plan to the King County Executive—and today the King County Council approved it unanimously.

We are deeply grateful to the Executive and Council for their leadership, and specifically to Councilmembers Balducci and Zahilay for their co-sponsorship of the plan. We thank all the elected officials and their staff who took their responsibility to heart, dedicating their time to ensure the plan represents the needs of cultural sector and the County.

This funding comes at a critical time, when many of the county’s more than 800 arts, heritage, science, and historic preservation organizations are still recovering from the effects of the pandemic. Doors Open will help those organizations stabilize, preserving jobs and helping to maintain public access to cultural experiences while shoring up the overall creative sector, which is a powerful driver of the local economy.

But Doors Open is not just about survival. It’s about creating the kind of meaningful growth and transformation that will power the cultural sector well into the future. Doors Open funding will help organizations to deepen their work—whether in research, interpretation, or the creative process. We hope it  will also catalyze additional philanthropic and government investments in the vibrant culture that makes people want to live and work here, because no one program, even one as robust as Doors Open, can do that work alone.

After years of preparation, we’re ready to make the first grants!

Doors Open would never have been possible without a decade-plus of steadfast advocacy by people throughout the cultural sector, particularly Inspire Washington and its executive director, Manny Cawaling. 4Culture is proud to have worked alongside these committed and visionary leaders.

Knowing that a Cultural Access program like Doors Open was a possibility, we have been getting ready for years, methodically laying the groundwork to ensure its success. Our preparation began at the heart of 4Culture, with updates to our mission, vision, and values. We convened community conversations that informed the creation of the King County Cultural Plan, the 4Culture Cultural Health Study and an Education Study to increase understanding of the local landscape. 4Culture has always been rooted in community needs and opportunities; Doors Open is a natural extension of the work we’ve been doing for 60 years.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be awarding an initial round of Operating and Capital Facilities grants designed to infuse desperately needed resources into the cultural sector, using funds that have been collected through the sales tax since it began on April 1, 2024. A list of these grants will be published on our website in December.

All Doors Opens grants are being made based on the application process. Discipline-specific Advisory Committees (composed of peers in the community) evaluate these applications and make funding recommendations to 4Culture’s Board of Directors. A minimum of 25% of these grants will go to organizations outside of the city of Seattle, expanding capacity in areas of King County that have limited funding for cultural resources. Doors Open grants are also following our existing equitable grantmaking processes and operations, which are designed to address historic systemic inequities in funding.

Next year, 4Culture will be rolling out additional Doors Open funding programs, we invite you to learn more about these efforts here.

We look forward to what the future has in store! You can expect more updates about Doors Open programs and their impact in the months ahead.

Back in 2008, JoEllen Wang was living in Ballard near Interbay, an in-between zone where RVs often parked. She found them charming, nostalgic. To her, in their autonomous freedom to roam, they hinted at the American dream. She started painting little portraits of them.

Over the years, as the region’s affordability issues intensified, the city began to remove RVs from the streets of Wang’s neighborhood. “They’d scrape them up and haul them away,” she says. “But they’d always come back, and they’d just be worse and worse off.” By then, her interest in the RVs had long since become a meditation on the nuances of shelter, choice, and insecurity.

Then the tarps started to appear, strapped to the roofs of deteriorating campers—and Wang started painting them instead. “I couldn’t paint the campers anymore; they were so sad,” she says.

Wang’s current Gallery 4Culture exhibition, Marginalia, includes a variety of her meticulous oil paintings of tarps, both big and small. Their shapes only suggest the mobile dwellings beneath them, resembling anthropomorphized figures teetering on bungie cord legs.

As an architect whose current practice focuses on residential buildings, “structures are part of what I think about and do,” Wang says. “At the time, I was watching my kids build pillow forts in the living room, and I was like, that’s never going to stand up. It’s the same with tarps.”

And yet, every day, people would try again and again to make them stay put. To Wang, the constantly reconfigured, ubiquitous blue sheets were evidence of the human impulse to create a safe space to call your own. They were a sign of life. “They were also just so ridiculous and inept,” she says. “Like, okay, maybe if I put one bungee here and one here, it’ll be fine. Inevitably it’s not fine.”

More and more, Wang found herself thinking about the places where RVs and tarps end up—on the edges of neighborhoods that are neither industrial nor residential, places where blackberries are also inevitably found. Wang questions the term “invasive” and considers blackberries “unfairly villainized,” not unlike RVs and their occupants. She points out that lately these spots are dotted with hulking concrete eco blocks that prevent people from parking on the streets.

“None of this is legal,” she says of the eco blocks and the stationary RVs. “None of this is actually allowed to stay long-term in public parking spaces. But there’s kind of a social norm where one is acceptable and one’s not. It’s a fascinating gray area.”

Each of Wang’s tarp paintings starts with a photo. Whenever she sees a tarp she likes (the more strings and bungies attached to it the better), she’ll take a quick picture. From there, she uses a combination of grid transfer, color-blocking, and projection techniques to render the tarp in hyper-realistic detail, depending on the size of the painting. “I do get kind of sucked in and then I’m like, oh my gosh, how many hours have gone by and I’ve painted two square inches or something.”

In addition to Wang’s paintings, Marginalia also features some of the artist’s work with tarps as the medium rather than the subject. In 2022, she created a temporary installation along the Beacon Hill Greenway, a sloped site beneath high-voltage electrical lines, on the edge of the neighborhood—a place where RVs sometimes park. Inspired by Seattle’s recent proliferation of Eastern Cottontails (which, Wang points out, are not invasive), she created 250 bunnies using tarps for their ears. For their bodies, she vacuum-formed milk jugs that she collected and melted in her toaster oven. Several of the bunnies are now on view, occupying the nooks and crannies of the gallery.

The bunnies allowed Wang to explore her lifelong interest in art that appears in unexpected, everyday places. Lately, she says, she feels increasingly interested in public and guerrilla art—and the tension between them. “I aspire to make artwork that’s relevant in someone’s life.”

At this point, nearly 20 years have passed since Wang first started painting RV studies and she has been obsessing over tarps for well over a decade. Will she continue?

“I would like to move on from them!” she laughs. “It’s a crummy material to work with—it shreds, it doesn’t melt well. I feel like I’ve kind of hit the limit of what I can do with it as a material.”

If she does move on to a new material muse, Wang will be looking for something that, like tarps, can tap into economic, environmental, and social themes all at once. “It’s got to be something underrated and immediately recognizable,” she says.

Marginalia is on view at Gallery 4Culture through Thursday, Dec. 5. A closing reception will be held that night from 6:00 – 8:00pm.

Michael Hong was attempting to recreate a cucumber dish that his mom had been making for him all his life. The dish seemed simple enough, but even with her recipe, and after many attempts, he just couldn’t get it right.

That’s when it hit him: He was missing his mother’s son-maat, the Korean concept of hand-flavor. “It’s this idea that there’s an indescribable flavor that comes from the hand—a lot of times rooted in the love and affection that the person who is cooking has for the person who will eat,” Hong says. Hand-flavor is passed down from generation to generation, often along maternal lines.

The connection to his art-making was an immediate aha! When Hong works with clay, he’s constantly engaged in tactile feedback with the material; he responds to the clay, and the clay responds to him. This, too, was hand-flavor. “I was thinking about this bodily relationship that I have with the clay,” he explains. “The exchange that happens as I interact with it must be my hand-flavor coming out.”

He knew what hand-flavor tasted like, but what did it look like? Hong brought that question into his studio and began to investigate. Over time, the question evolved, and he started to ask himself, where does my hand-flavor come from? The work he was making became an exploration of his own identity and the forces that shaped him.

The results of this research are currently on view in Hong’s Gallery 4Culture exhibition, Oi-ee Moo-chim, which takes its name from the Korean cucumber dish that first set it in motion. The exhibition features a series of abstract self-portraits as well as a series of pots that reference traditional Korean fermentation vessels called hangari. The artworks in the show also incorporate familiar household items that Hong remembers from his youth, like rice bags, pepper flakes, work gloves, and yarn.

Hong grew up in Koreatown, Los Angeles, a three-square-mile neighborhood dense with Korean and Korean American people and traditions. He and his two brothers were raised by their single mother, an immigrant, who worked hard to keep the family afloat.

“I never really see her take a break,” Hong says. “If she does take a break, it’s always with TV on in the background while she’s doing something else. Especially with cooking, she’s always going the long way with the time and work she puts into it. It’s like a way of saying ‘I love you.’”

Reflecting on his mother’s effort offered Hong a way to consider and embrace his own ferocious work ethic. He sees her constant activity as a coping mechanism, a way of escaping the uncertainties of life. “There’s a lot of similarities between being a single mother, raising three kids and me just living with my own uncertainties,” he says.

The self-portraits in Oi-ee Moo-chim began with Hong thinking about the physical space he occupies with his body. They all start at the base with his footprint and build to his 6-foot height by repeating a small pinching motion over and over again. The repetition creates a texture Hong calls “dumpling skin” and they require a ton of labor. “It’s out of that repetition and monotony that I’m trying to visually articulate hand-flavor,” he says.

These works arrived at their shape organically as Hong focused on his dialogue with the clay itself and “let it do its thing.” As he built it up, the forms reflected how his body was moving with the material, working to keep it from collapsing. Twenty of them collapsed along the way. In the finished pieces, he says, “I can see my arm sort of having gone through these openings or how I was trying to balance this piece so that I wouldn’t tip over.” To him, those openings resemble portals or gates for him to pass through as he seeks to understand himself.

With the earlier pieces, his mark makings show more irregularities and more of his physical presence, but the later ones become increasingly consistent and uniform. The older portraits took Hong a long time to make, but he increased his speed with practice. “Now I can probably get one up in two days,” he says, a pace he chalks up to the impatience he inherited from his mother.

The vessels in Oi-ee Moo-chim are inspired by the Korean pots that are used to ferment foods and store all sorts of things. On the outside, they look ordinary, but on the inside, they’re covered in the same dumpling skin as the self-portraits. “They’re an inside-out conversation,” Hong says, pointing out that these pots are meant to nurture or hide whatever’s inside them. “So, what am I hiding?” he wondered.

All sorts of things, it turns out, whether serious, funny, or both. He recalled some of his mom’s “weird rituals,” like hiding soda and junk food from Hong and his brothers by stashing them in the pots where they were unlikely to look. Those rituals inspired him to figure out ways he could similarly repurpose household items in ways that might not exactly make sense. One pot has a tiny video inside that shows Hong making his marks in the clay and plays audio from the reality show Love Island, a series he often listened to while working; it’s an homage to the TV shows his mom always had on in the background. Another pot features smells that recall the kimchi and soybean paste lunches she packed him for school.

As for the quest to find out what his hand-flavor reveals? “I’ve been looking so deep within myself, I think I’m at a point where I don’t know where I am. Am I who I am right now? How much of that is my old self?” Like his towering self-portraits, the answers build on themselves.

Oi-ee Moo-chim is on view at Gallery 4Culture through Oct. 31.

“If you meet an Iranian in the U.S., they’ve either been a political prisoner or are related to somebody who has,” says interdisciplinary artist Audineh Asaf.

Her father came to the United States as a college student in 1977 as Iran was on the cusp of revolution, but another family member was less fortunate: He was imprisoned in Iran in the 1980s for reading an anti-government book. “Obviously, that created a lot of trauma in the family,” Asaf says. “Prison in the U.S. is extremely different from prison in Iran. Torture is a part of what any and every prisoner experiences.”

Asaf’s Gallery 4Culture exhibition, Remember Me, traces back to her formative memories from that time, though it was sparked into being by much more recent political events—events that completely changed the trajectory of her art career.

Until recently, Asaf eschewed making political work, preferring to explore her Iranian American culture and identity by creating sheer beauty, often inspired by nature and the floral motifs of Persian carpets. “I really avoided politics in my art,” she says. “I avoided negative portrayals of Iranians and Iranian culture—because too often people only know and understand Iran and the context of war and terrorism.”

That all changed two years ago, when a young woman named Mahsa Amini was detained, abused, and killed by Iran’s morality police for violating the country’s hijab rules and allowing a small amount of her hair to show around her face. Her death and defiance inspired a massive uprising against human rights violations by Iran’s current regime—led by women and young people.

“I had never in my life seen a woman on the streets of Iran taking her headscarf off,” Asaf says. “I was so deeply moved to not only document these acts of protest, but to amplify the voices that were being silenced and censored by the Iranian government. I felt it was my duty to bring awareness to what was going on.”

Remember Me features 14 mixed-media portraits of Iranian political prisoners, activists, innocent bystanders, and more, including Mahsa Amini. Drawing on the traditions of Persian carpets and American quilting, they are tapestries of hand-dyed and distressed fabric, embossed paper, and acrylic transfers of photographs, with gallery tags that provide the names and stories behind people in the portraits. Despite the heavy meaning behind them, the artworks have a delicacy. “I wanted to show the wear of this life and of imprisonment, things being held together by threads,” Asaf says.

Choosing who to depict in these portraits wasn’t easy. Asaf wanted to represent a variety of people from different backgrounds, who had been involved in different movements for freedom during her lifetime. In the end, she decided to focus on individuals whose stories resonated with her most, exhaustively researching them in order to infuse each portrait with meaningful specificity. (A wall installation features the eyes of 100 additional people.)

To create the artworks in the exhibition, Asaf also tapped into the long history of American quilts and Persian carpets as record-keepers that “reveal a lot about the time that they were created” through their materials and construction.

She also sought to connect with them on a more spiritual level. “Whether they are still alive or not, I try to communicate with them and ask for permission to represent them,” she says. “It’s almost like method acting—like method art-ing. I don’t want to sound too crazy or weird, but I’ll say things to them as I’m creating their portrait, letting them know how much it means to me to represent them, telling them how beautiful they are, thanking them.”

In the course of her research, Asaf discovered the poetry of Mahvash Sabet, a prisoner of conscience currently serving a second prison sentence in Iran for her Baháʼí faith. Asaf was moved by the beauty of Sabet’s words—created in the face of unthinkable suffering—and by how Sabet somehow found a way to write them and smuggle them out of prison: Using a pen she was likely to find. Writing on napkins. Sewing them into the garments of prisoners just before their release. Relaying them a line or two at a time during phone calls with family.

Excerpts of Sabet’s poems appear in three of the works in Remember Me, disguised so that they can only be read up close—a nod to the poems’ subversive origins. Asaf is also offering 100 copies of Sabet’s Prison Poems to gallery visitors for free. She encourages visitors to the gallery to read the book in an area where she’s placed a large Persian rug, which she acquired through a stroke of serendipity. Asaf knew she wanted to place a large rug in the space, but she didn’t have one big enough (her family only had small ones that fit into a suitcase) nor did she have thousands of dollars to buy one. So she reached out to a bunch of local rug shops, and one of them responded.

“I came into the shop and to talk with this very kind man who has owned it for 20, 30 years,” Asaf says. “He told me his sister was executed in 1982 for being Baháʼí. He told me her story and sent me an article a human rights organization had written about her. He ended up essentially gifting me the carpet.” Asaf researched the shop owner’s sister—and she wound up becoming the subject of one the exhibition’s portraits, her image stitched together with transferred photographs of the carpet itself.

“Even though the media isn’t talking about it, these issues persist,” she says. “People are still being persecuted, they’re still being executed, they’re still in prison. I feel as though I’ve finally found my life’s purpose.”

Remember Me is on view through Sept. 26.

4Culture staff will be at several community events in the coming weeks to share information about Doors Open grants, as well as all our grant programs and Public Art calls. We’d love for you to stop by, say hi, and ask us any questions you may have! Here’s where we’ll be: 

September 21, 2024, 12:00–8:00 pm 
Georgetown Steamplant Science Fair 
Georgetown Steam Plant 

September 29, 2024, 11:00 am–2:00 pm 
Skyway Farmers Market
12610 76th Avenue South, Seattle, WA, 98178 

October 2, 2024, 3:00–7:00 pm 
SeaTac Farmers Market 
Matt Griffin YMCA Parking Lot 

October 12, 2024, 9:00 am–3:00 pm 
Federal Way Farmers Market 
1701 S 320th St, Federal Way, WA 98003 

October 2, 2024, 3:00–7:00 pm 
SeaTac Farmers Market 
Matt Griffin YMCA Parking Lot 

October 3, 2024, 5:00-8:00 pm
Museum of Flight
9404 E. Marginal Way South

October 12, 2024, 9:00 am–3:00 pm 
Federal Way Farmers Market 
1701 S 320th St, Federal Way, WA 98003 

 We’re excited to connect with communities and share more about the opportunities available through the 4Cultures Doors Open grants and what’s coming up in 2025. Feel free to swing by any of these events—we look forward to seeing you there!