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! 

In 2021, the King County Council allocated $9.4 million in federal COVID relief funding to 4Culture to distribute to the cultural sector. At the end of last year the final round of this funding was put in motion, with roughly $2.7 million available for King County cultural producers who have experienced COVID-related economic impacts since March 2020. 

Streamlined applications opened in March 2024, and we’re now thrilled to have sent this critical support out to community members across the County. Here are some highlights:

• 693 grants went to cultural producers working in arts, heritage, and preservation.
• Total funding was $2,732,530.
• Awards ranged from $1,040 to $6,120.
• Grantees are from 25 cities and all 9 County Council districts.
• Over half of all applicants were new to applying for 4Culture grants.

We continue to be inspired by every member of King County’s cultural sector! Many thanks to all those who applied, anyone who shared information about this grant with friends and family, the community members who evaluated applications, our Board, and to the King County Executive and Council.  

A long and winding drape is hanging from the ceiling at Gallery 4Culture right now, made from hundreds of origami pieces in whites and peaches, taupes and creams, each of them intricately folded into the same form: a vulva.

“I was really excited about the opportunity to have a show where literally every piece of artwork in the gallery is a vulva,” Hanako O’Leary says about her current exhibition, Kamon. “If you’re going to go to the show, there’s nothing else for you to look at,” she laughs. “You have to look at it.”

For O’Leary, a show full of vulvas was a way of asserting freedom for women, an impulse that began taking shape during a particularly intense time in her own life.

In late 2018, O’Leary learned she was pregnant and decided to have an abortion. “It was in the middle of the Trump presidency,” she says. “There was a lot in the air—more than there was before—about women’s rights to their own bodily autonomy and safety.” She thought how different her life would be if she didn’t have reproductive rights or access to abortion care, and she got angry.

Then her anger set in motion a cascade of insights into what it means to be a woman.

With a longtime interest in mythology and archetypes, Shinto aesthetics, and Japanese storytelling culture (her mother is Japanese), O’Leary came across the story of Izanami, the Shinto goddess of the underworld. “In so many myths, once women go down to the underworld, they don’t come back,” she says. “But some cultures have goddesses like Izanami, who are goddesses of life and death, which makes sense—two sides of the same coin.”

Izanami became inspiration for a new body of work, which started with ceramic “Venus jars” and war masks. But after a while, those forms felt too limited. O’Leary was feeling more than just anger.

“The underworld that we as women possess inside our bodies is way bigger than reproductive rights or Western, capitalist ideas of feminism,” she says. “It’s just so much deeper than that—the strength to live in one’s own body and also the courage and intelligence and everything that it takes to actually live for yourself, to be true to yourself, and to be truly there in support of other women.”

Kamon, which means “family crest,” is the latest installment in O’Leary’s ongoing Izanami series. On view through Aug. 1, the exhibition features the origami tapestry as its centerpiece, surrounded by a variety of ceramic masks, large and small.

Many scholars believe the Izanami story originated in the Setonaikai Islands of Japan, which just happens to be where O’Leary’s mother was born. As a child, O’Leary spent two months there every summer visiting family, but she hadn’t been back since her early 20s. In 2021—then in her mid-30s, roughly the same age her mother was when she was born—she returned to reconnect with her relatives and do some research.

During her time in Japan, she noticed how Eastern and Western cultures each cling to their own versions of patriarchy, how societies create some freedoms as they modernize but also rebuild old barriers in new ways. “I felt really challenged about how to decenter that,” O’Leary says. “At the same time, I was coming to terms with my own queerness and my attraction for women and my lesbianism, and kind of making sense of all that.”

One bit of serendipity sparked the idea for the origami centerpiece. While on the island, O’Leary received a care package from her girlfriend. Inside? An origami vulva. “I was like, oh my God, this is such a cute fold!” she says. “It’s so beautiful.”

Back in Seattle, O’Leary originally imagined that she would fold all the origami herself, then quickly realized she was going to need help to make the tapestry as big as she wanted it to be. She posted a video of herself making one piece on Instagram and asked if anyone would be interested in making more. Then she hosted several origami-making gatherings, inviting people “who identify as daughters” to fold as many as they wanted to fold and then write down their maiden names, or their mothers’ maiden names, or the maiden names of their matrilineal lines as far back as they wished, alongside the places where their mothers’ families were from.

“The idea being that you’re remembering and holding onto these people and also the land that raised them and, in a sense, raised you,” O’Leary says. On Saturday, July 27, she will give an artist talk at 4Culture, which will be followed by an origami workshop. The vulvas folded at that event will get stitched onto the still-growing origami form.

Making the work in Kamon intensified O’Leary’s commitment to women’s courage, power, and freedom. It also deepened her gratitude toward all the women of the past who did their best and made sacrifices with future generations in mind.

“While I inherit that integrity and this sense of care and responsibility, I also want to be able to push back on what those past ideas are and see what’s actually possible for me in this generation and what kind of room I can create for the next one,” she says. “I am a woman—and that means I can be anything. I can express my femininity in any way I choose at any given time.”

O’Leary will give a free artist talk at 4Culture on Saturday, July 27 at 11 a.m., and an origami workshop will follow from noon to 2 p.m. The workshop is intended for those who identify as women or daughters. Register for the workshop here.

Like many holidays, Juneteenth has been known by various names, such as Freedom Day, Liberation Day, and Black Independence Day. While each of these names highlights different aspects of the significance of this day, today it is most widely known by a portmanteau that blends “June” and “nineteenth” into a single, recognizable term.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were finally informed of their emancipation—over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This day is a powerful reminder of the ongoing struggle for true freedom and equity in America. Here, we’d like to offer some points of intentional reflection to accompany the jubilation and promise of Juneteenth:

• Consider the resilience it takes to continue the fight against racial injustice.
• Recognition of progress, but not overlooking the challenges that still exist, reflect on current social justice issues and consider how we can contribute to positive change.
• Consider the two-year delay: why did it take so long for the news of emancipation to reach Galveston? What followed this?
• How can we support and uplift historically marginalized communities through our actions, both personally and professionally?

Celebrating Juneteenth can include participating in local events, supporting Black-owned businesses, or volunteering for organizations that have specific racial equity goals.

Historic Connection to King County

Juneteenth became officially recognized as a holiday for King County employees in 2022. However, its roots in the Pacific Northwest date back to 1890, when the first observation of Juneteenth was held in Kent, sponsored by the Sons of Enterprise. In 1980, Seattle held its first Juneteenth celebration at Seattle Center, sponsored by what became the Central District Chamber of Commerce.

The visibility of Juneteenth grew significantly in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The nationwide protests that followed sparked a renewed focus on racial equity and justice, leading to the declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday in 2021. Since then, Juneteenth’s popularity among all demographics has continued to rise, with increased budgeting and resources dedicated to its celebration and education. 

Local Events

• AFRICATOWN’s Summer of Soul Juneteenth Celebration, June 19, 12:00-8:00 pm at Jimi Hendrix Park
  FREE to the public, but you can make a donation and RSVP here
• Juneteenth Meditation: Liberated Rest by Mo Healing, June 19, 8:00-10:00 am at Inside
  $25, bring a yoga mat, journal, and any other reflection tools and personal items for an ancestor altar
• Celebrate with a visit to NAAM: June 19, 10:00 am-3:00 pm
  FREE admission for the public
• Juneteenth Celebration in Tacoma, June 19, 11:00 am- 5:00 pm at Stewart Heights Park
  FREE to public
• Celebrate Juneteenth with the Rewind: An Online Experience, June 19, 4:00-5:30 pm
  FREE to public, reserve a spot here.
• 3rd Annual Juneteenth Celebration, June 22, 11:00 am- 3:00 pm at Rainier Beach Community Center
  FREE to the public, RSVP here
• 8th Annual Juneteenth Celebration, June 22, 1:30-6:30 pm at Othello Playground
  FREE to public, RSVP here
• 13^th Annual Juneteenth Celebration: Freedom Day, June 22, 10:00 am- 3:00 pm at Morrill Meadows Park in Kent
  FREE to public, free food will be available from 12:00- 2:00 pm
• Black Sunday Juneteenth Celebration in Tacoma, June 23, 2:00-5:00 pm
  FREE to public, RSVP here

Resources

To deepen our understanding of Juneteenth and its significance, we’ve compiled some resources:

• Article from Vox focusing on why we all should be celebrating Juneteenth.
• Take in this Juneteenth Meditation by Adrienne Maree Brown (2020).
• Give a listen to this playlist by Yoli, Juneteenth: Freedom Day.
• Read the transcript of The Emancipation Proclamation.

Juneteenth at 4Culture

This year we are working with Arte Noir to support Black creatives by purchasing art from artist L. Haz for display in our offices. We’ve also purchased Juneteenth greeting cards by local artist Grace A. Washington—the artwork can be found on her website as part of her heritage collection and the cards are available to the public at our offices while supplies last! Lastly, we have some book recommendations from 4Culture staff for further learning to share:

• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
  
• My People Are Rising, Aaron Dixon 
  
• Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
  
• The Forging of a Black Community, Quintard Taylor
• The Anti-Racist Vocab Guide, Maya Ealey

John Feodorov was sitting in the Boise airport after giving a lecture at the University of Idaho when a phrase suddenly came to him: I cannot speak my mother’s language.

“I had no idea what it was, no idea what, if anything, I would do with it—but I liked it,” he says. As it turns out, those words set in motion an all-new body of work for the multi-media artist.

Back home in Seattle, he pulled out a book he’d inherited from his mother—a late 19th- or early 20th-century Pentecostal hymn book, written in Navajo. “Navajo is not a written language,” says Feodorov, who is of mixed Navajo/Diné and European heritage. “The book was used by missionaries when they were trying to Christianize Natives.”

He scanned the book’s pages, adhered them to a wood panel, and started to respond to them with paint—spontaneously.

“I wanted to stop thinking so damn much,” he recalls. After decades of making conceptual work, including installations, performance, and video, he’d recently found himself drawn to the abstract paintings of Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, and feeling jealous. “I just wanted to paint and not, like, have an idea, and then paint that idea. [This process] was a way to trick myself into not being frustrated staring at a blank canvas. It was a way that I could actually talk about something without necessarily thinking about something.”

The wood panel with the hymns became the mixed-media painting “I Cannot Speak My Mother’s Language,” the prototype for Assimilations, a new series now on view at Gallery 4Culture through June 27. Assimilations incorporates found materials from several old religious, reference, and cultural books, collaged into the artworks amid Feodorov’s brush strokes. The paintings hang alongside a series of the artist’s prints titled Ambivalence, which combine personal family photos with stills from old Hollywood Westerns. Together, the artworks in the exhibition examine the complex residual effects of colonization and dislocation.

Feodorov’s mother grew up on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico before being separated from her family and sent to boarding school. She later headed to Long Beach, CA, to work in the shipyard during World War II, married a white man, and moved to the Los Angeles suburbs. She became a Jehovah’s witness when Feodorov was a baby.

“There are aspects of the Native American experience that aren’t really talked about,” he says of the distance assimilation puts between “city Indians” and their roots. “It’s like, I wasn’t raised within the four sacred mountains. I wasn’t raised understanding the geography around me as having mythological significance. I couldn’t become a born-again Navajo, you know?”

This personal experience is not unlike what all immigrants and refugees go through, says Feodorov, who also works as an associate professor at Western Washington University, where he has students with similar experiences to his. They haven’t necessarily been to their families’ homeland and, like Feodorov, don’t speak their parents’ language. “We all have this sense of disconnection,” he says.

Whether in abstract paintings or pop-culture prints, Feodorov aims to create visual interest that seduces the viewer into a deeper conversation about identity and belonging. For him, a familiar image can be the hook that draws people in.

Which explains some of the visual references in his prints. Feodorov loved watching Westerns as a kid, and while he was too young then to articulate the unease he felt watching Indians get shot off their horses, he captures that tension in Ambivalence. His mixed-media painting “My Life As a Suburban Ind’n” started with an image from a 1960s TV comedy called F Troop that was a favorite in Feodorov’s family.

“I still think it’s kind of funny,” he says, explaining the show’s odd appeal. “There were the cavalry and there were the Indians, and all the Indians were [played by] Italians. But the cavalry was ridiculous, and the Indians were ridiculous. No one was smarter than the other.”

Throughout his career, Feodorov has often been called humorous—though that isn’t his goal. “If there is a laugh,” he says, “I hope it’s an uncomfortable one.”

Through its many layers of meaning, the work in Assimilations ultimately reflects the artist’s growing clarity about the value of his perspective, a clarity found over time and through much consideration.

“When I was in my early 20s, just beginning university and interested in art, I had no idea that I had anything to say. I mean, I was very conscious of being Native, but I didn’t think that I was Native enough to have any important insights,” Feodorov says.

“It took me a long time to realize that I actually am the Native experience.”

Heads up! This fall, Western Washington University’s Western Gallery will present a retrospective of John Feodorov’s work, curated by Tacoma Art Museum’s Faith Brower and featuring pieces that date back to the early 1980s.

Whether you’re out at parades and street parties or enjoying a quiet night in, there are so many ways to celebrate Pride Month in King County! Here, 4Culture staff have pulled together some of our favorite ways that the cultural sector is joining in this June: 

What is Pride?

Pride celebrations commemorate a series of demonstrations against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in 1969. At the time, the Stonewall was the only bar for gay men in New York City where dancing was allowed. The resulting Stonewall Riots were not the first or the last demonstration of LGBTQIA2S+ resistance, but they acted as a catalyst for a more formal and unified gay rights movement.

Pride in Seattle

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Seattle Pride! One of their events this year was a youth exhibit, funded by 4Culture, that displayed on June 6 for Pioneer Square Art Walk.

Our Pioneer Square neighbors, Beneath the Streets, offers a Queer Underground History Tour.

Explore MOHAI’s online exhibit, Objects of Pride, which aims to share a collective regional history of Pride. (Hey, we fund them!)

Our friends at HistoryLink include a variety of articles about LGBTQIA2S+ history in Washington State. (Hey, we fund them!)

Things To Watch

Vanishing Seattle’s short documentary on Capitol Hill (17 min, 2021), which we’ll be screening together at our office Pride event on Thursday. (Hey, we funded that!)

There Goes the Gayborhood: Seattle’s Shifting Queer Geographies: This 8-minute film follows the shifting geography of Seattle’s LGBTQIA2S+ community, and how Capitol Hill has changed since the 1970s.

UW’s Seattle Civil Rights & History Project produced this video on the local history of activism.

Things to Read

King County Public Library offers a variety of books and events during Pride.

Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile & Belonging: First published in 2003, one reviewer wrote that, “It offers the first published account of the formation of gay and lesbian political organizations in the city.”

LGBTQ Activism in Seattle History Project: This project of UW’s Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project was written in 2016 and shares a history of activism in our area.

During the pandemic, Maria Phillips used to walk along the beach near her home in West Seattle, picking up litter with her kids—often on Mondays when the sand was dotted with objects left behind from the weekend: masks, water bottles, cigarettes, press-on fingernails.

Beachcombing wasn’t new to her; she’d been cleaning the beaches in Florida for years, whenever she visited her parents there. “I’d bring in all the material,” Phillips says. “My mom wouldn’t let me empty it out in her apartment, so I would go to the stairwell and just lay it all out and organize it, whether it was colors, shapes, sizes. And then I’d photograph it.”

Trained as a metalsmith and jeweler, much of Phillips’ work in her early career revolved around found objects. Then a 2018 residency at Recology, an organization dedicated to waste reduction in Seattle and elsewhere on the West Coast, ignited a kind of ecological awakening in her. Since then, Phillips not only continues to work with Recology as a program manager for their Artists in Residence program, her work has taken on a mission: to engage people in conversation about the consequences of waste, plastic in particular.

“I’m only going to make from what I’m finding or have available,” she remembers telling herself as her environmental consciousness shifted. “I’m not buying supplies anymore.”

Phillips’ current exhibition at Gallery 4Culture, at what point…, presents a new body of work that provokes awareness of objects and the natural world. Much of it was made using material she found while “de-polluting” the surrounding Pioneer Square neighborhood. The exhibition includes roughly 40 “pick-up portraits,” each of which is composed of found items from a specific day’s haul, like a visual diary. Phillips thinks of them as sketches.

“At the beginning, I would just dump everything,” she says, recalling the early part of the process for these pieces. “And then it got to a point where it was interesting to look at the pieces. They started to get a little more curated, a little bit more artful, where it was like, Oh, okay, what objects am I looking at? What colors am I looking at?” Some days she makes colorful, beautiful compositions from garbage. Other days not so much: “This just needs to look ugly, because it is ugly.”

Phillips fixed each of the “pick-up portraits” by melting them between found layers of plastic packaging, like the baggies used for food or clothing ordered online. “There’s a randomness in the heat process—what’s going to melt, what’s not going to melt, what’s going to blend,” she says. “It’s almost like printmaking in a way. You have a sense of what’s going to happen, but there’s always these beautiful accidents, randomness that can take place.” (Visit the gallery and see how close you have to get to these portraits before you start to recognize their components.)

at what point… also includes several larger works, including an installation that resembles a huge cluster of mushrooms growing out of the wall—made from plastic Amazon shipping bags—and a pair of pieces made from balls Phillips found at the park. An unwound baseball drapes delicately on the wall, its recycled plastic and cork core held up by a Styrofoam plinth. Another deconstructed ball (a soccer ball, perhaps) also sits on a block of foam; Phillips’ dog tore off its outer layer, revealing a mass of fine threads.

“It was just beautiful,” Phillips says of the moment she first saw the peeled ball. She took the ball from the dog. “He was so mad! I put it on a shelf and he would just sit there—and I’m like, ‘Sorry, babe, you made art and it’s done.’”

For Phillips, focusing on plastic and waste in her work is not about steeping herself in doom and gloom. It’s about seeking out solutions and becoming part of them. “What’s the positive path? What are the innovations?” she asks. “Rather than going to the very dark side, let’s learn. Let’s turn it around.”

Phillips finds inspiration in the time before plastics, in the early 1900s, when immigrants would collect discarded glass, rags, broken tools, “things that they could repair, repurpose, resell.” She pauses before continuing optimistically: “I think we’re going to get back there.”

She points out how repair can make something more beautiful, like Japanese kintsugi fixing a broken piece of pottery with gold or staples, or the generations-old wooden spoon she fixed in her kitchen.

Phillips is thrilled to be among a growing movement of artists working with discarded materials, coming from so many different angles and backgrounds to help forge pathways to change.

“Let’s get creative,” she says.

Maria Phillips’ exhibition at what point… is on view at Gallery 4Culture through May 30.

Now that 2024 is well underway, we have two housekeeping items for grant recipients as you manage your award:

• Is your organization a recipient of Arts Sustained Support? Have you claimed your 2023 award? If you have not, you must claim your award by this coming June 30. Instructions for how to claim your award can be found online. If you have questions or need assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact Arts Sustained Support program manager Bret Fetzer at .
• All 4Culture grant recipients—both individuals and organizations—need to complete a demographic survey for each year. If you have not completed your 2023 survey, please do so! This data helps us track how well we’re doing in our mission to empower all King County residents to create and experience culture. It’s an invaluable resource for us and we thank you for your time and effort in helping us collect it! You can find the survey in your profile on our application portal. Please contact Jackie Mixon at  if you have any issues.

Thank you for helping us keep these resources in motion from us to you and out to King County! We know managing a grant and all the digital paperwork that comes with it is no small feat.

Hidden on the north side of Lake Union, next to Ivar’s and along the Burke-Gilman Trail, Waterway 15  celebrates the area’s maritime history and the public’s right to access commonly-held waters.

Like a pocket park, Waterway 15 is an artwork in the King County Public Art Collection. It was originally created as part of a 1990s restoration project related to a proposed stormwater pipeline from Green Lake Park to Lake Union. Due to public pressure to have a place to be near and on the water, the project was expanded to include a new waterway access point, with artist Elizabeth Conner and landscape architect Cliff Willwerth creating a design that honors the layers of history this site holds.

A highlight of Waterway 15 is a bench that Conner envisioned as a wooden boat under construction, which was designed and fabricated by Dick Wagner and Carl Lind at the Center for Wooden Boats, an organization dedicated to the tradition of building and sailing wooden boats. Approximately 16 feet long, the “boat bench” was moved to the Center for Wooden Boats’ facility in the fall of 2023 for restoration; it is expected to be reinstalled at Waterway 15 in fall 2024.

Led by woodworking programs manager Ducky Kimball, volunteers with the organization are currently refinishing the wood, completing another cycle of weathering and restoration on a piece first made by their community decades ago. Over the past 30 years, the Wagner family and the Center for Wooden Boats have dedicated innumerable hours to the restoration and cyclical maintenance of the “boat bench” – preserving a jewel of wooden boat technology for generations of visitors.

Conner and Willwerth’s design for Waterway 15 also included native plants, recycled paving materials that referenced the industrialization of the area, an artist-designed pipeline access hatch with a compass rose, and tiles featuring historic photographic images. Fabricated by artist Laura Brodax, these tiles illustrate the history of the site, including some of the first peoples of the area, who have used the lake since time immemorial, and who continue to steward the land we call home. (Pacific Northwest canoe culture will also be celebrated at the Northwest Native Canoe Center, which is currently being designed for the south end of Lake Union, led by the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation.)

At the time of its design in 1992, Waterway 15 provided one of the only public access points to Lake Union; today, there are many access points along the Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop, a trail named in honor of Cheshiahud, one of the leaders of the Duwamish villages located along what is now known as Lake Union. In the mid-1850s, Cheshiahud acted as a guide to early settlers in the area and he continued to live along the lake well into the 1900s.

Waterway 15 honors the waters of Lake Union, the many histories of this area, and the wooden vessels that once made travel possible across this region. With the efforts and expertise of the Center for Wooden Boats community, this artist-designed space will continue to inspire visitors for years to come.