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.

It’s National Poetry Month and 4Culture is celebrating by launching a new phase of Poetry in Public – the poems! Look for poems on King County Metro buses and Sound Transit light rail starting mid-April and read and listen to selected poems online today.

Poems submitted by King County residents were selected by a panel consisting of local poets and literary arts administrators, including Poet Planner Laura Da’, who is leading the creative vision and conceptualized the theme for this iteration of the program. The theme Places of Landing honors the movements, places, and feelings that tell the stories of our days.

Participants were inspired to write short poems by prompts on the 4Culture website and at workshops led by Community Liaisons. These workshops brought community members together to engage in writing activities that interpreted and expanded on the Places of Landing theme and highlighted poetry traditions connected to their Community of Focus. Communities of Focus for the 2023-2025 Poetry in Public program include: African American, Chinese, Filipino, Indigenous, Spanish-Speaking, and Youth. Find inspiration on the website to guide your own poetry on the theme and remember that everyone can be a poet!

Previously known as Poetry on Buses, this long-running program features poems written by King County residents of all ages online, on transit, and in public spaces across King County. 4Culture’s poetry program began more than 30 years ago and has since published the written work of over 1,000 people from across the region. Some of those voices were professional writers, but the majority were ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds. Learn more about the history of this beloved program and how it has evolved since launching in 1992 in our recent blog post, How Poetry Hit the Road: A history of Poetry on Buses, 4Culture’s most popular and populist public art program.

We look forward to celebrating Poetry in Public and the local poetry community in a series of events this summer. Stay tuned for event information by subscribing to our enews and view weekly poetry posts by following us on social media.

In the meantime, help us to connect poems out in the wild with their poets by sharing photos on Instagram and tagging @kc4culture!

Gallery 4Culture has a 45-year history of exhibiting innovative, underrepresented artists and art forms in solo and small-group shows! Panelists Ricky Reyes, Rosaline Dou, Sara Osebold, and Stefan Gonzales reviewed submitted applications and selected 10 King County-based artists for the 2024-2025 season.

Audineh Asaf
September 5–26, 2024
Opening: First Thursday, September 5, 6:00–8:00 pm
In an ongoing commitment to provide voice for the silenced, Audineh Asaf’s paper “quilts” weave together the narratives of individuals who have been directly impacted by social injustices and human rights violations in Iran.

Michael Hong
October 3–31, 2024
Opening: First Thursday, October 3, 6:00–8:00 pm
Michael Hong’s ceramic sculptures embody the complexities of the immigrant experience and the concept of “hand flavor,” directly translated from the Korean term, 손 맛 (sown-maat), which denotes the unique care or skill a cook imbues into their food that is often passed down generationally.

JoEllen Wang
November 7–December 5, 2024
Opening: First Thursday, November 7, 6:00–8:00 pm
Using motifs and materials sourced from marginal spaces, JoEllen Wang examines the overlap of good intentions and systemic failures.

James Hartunian
January 2–30, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, January 2, 6:00–8:00 pm
Through the fabrication of hand-crafted kinetic devices, James Hartunian will recreate a conceptual forest from a machine’s perspective in pursuit of reimagining our natural world.

Ric’kisha Taylor
February 6–27, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, February 6, 6:00–8:00 pm
Ric’kisha Taylor employs craft techniques and lustrous materials to captivate, entice, and divert attention in a series of multimedia works that address her personal experience within the Black American diaspora.

Diana Falchuk
March 6–27, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, March 6, 6:00–8:00 pm
Colorful works on paper and object fragments assembled on mirror highlight the spiritual and material nature of interconnection, solidarity, and collective care–all of which are grounded in Diana Falchuk’s Jewish-Venezuelan-American identity and ancestral traditions.

Hyunjeong Lim
April 3–24, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, April 3, 6:00–8:00 pm
Influenced by her journey from South Korea to the United States, Hyunjeong Lim’s surrealistic landscape paintings blend personal and cultural narratives, inviting us to reflect on our own internal and external wanderings.

Nak Bou
May 1–29, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, May 1, 6:00–8:00 pm
Nak Bou’s intuitive multimedia paintings juxtapose cultural material from his parent’s generation with evocative representations of his own childhood memories. Raised in the Cambodian refugee enclaves of Dallas, Texas and Fresno, California during the late-1980s and 1990s, Bou explores the intersection of heritage and lived experience.

Mel Carter
June 5–26, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, June 5, 6:00–8:00 pm
Mel Carter blends various media into sensory-filled, tactile installations that unearth experiences within heritage and family dynamics, Japanese diaspora, queerness, and explorations in modern witchcraft, rituals, and mythology.

Althea Rao
July 3–31, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, July 3, 6:00–8:00 pm
In an era dominated by synthetic biology and pervasive surveillance, Althea Rao’s work humors the intricate connections between the data we generate and the tangible traces of our existence.

Congratulations to our 2024-2025 artists!

4Culture would like to thank all 140 gallery applicants for their interest in exhibiting with us and the panel for their diligence in making these selections. Artists who were not awarded shows are encouraged to reapply next year. The 2025-2026 Gallery 4Culture season application cycle will open in November 2024 with a deadline of December 11, 2024.

Limited-edition ORCA cards designed by emerging artists Yasiman Ahsani and Rey Daoed are now available at the King Street Center Pass Sales Office, while supplies last!

Developed in partnership with Metro and in celebration of the RapidRide Expansion Program, each artist’s work is distinct and features imagery tied to the contexts, histories, cultures and communities of the forthcoming G and I lines. The RapidRide G Line will connect riders with frequent and reliable service through Madison Valley, First Hill and downtown Seattle. RapidRide I Line will serve riders in the Renton, Kent and Auburn areas.

These are two of three cards in the series created by a cohort of young regional artists who were supported by mentors Angelina Villalobos and Jesse Brown. Jovita Mercado’s card was released in March, aligned with the launch of RapidRide H Line service.

You’ve likely heard the exciting news that last month, the King County Council unanimously passed Doors Open, a piece of legislation that will increase funding to King County cultural organizations by an estimated $90 million per year. Learn more about this landmark investment here.

To put this into better perspective, 4Culture’s current annual budget is roughly $10 million—this nearly 10-fold increase brings significant change to our organization! As we quickly get to work creating an implementation plan, a top priority is maximizing all of our grant revenue: Doors Open, Lodging Tax, and federal COVID-19 relief funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.

To that end, we’re sharing information about a change to our usual grant calendar. To best serve King County by taking full advantage of the funds available to us over the next two years, we have decided to postpone our 2024 Projects grant program. In its place, we will focus our efforts on getting roughly $1.1 million in remaining COVID relief funding out the door to individual cultural producers in King County, which federal law requires us to do by the end of 2024. The program will open in the spring, and details on eligibility, award amounts, and more will be available soon. 2024 funds for Art Projects, Heritage Projects, and Preservation Special Projects will roll over when the program resumes, creating a pool of roughly $2 million for Projects in 2025.

We’re keenly aware that Doors Open does not include funding for individuals. Supporting King County’s dancers, historians, writers, painters, researchers, sculptors, preservationists, performers, curators, and more is central to our mission. As we craft an implementation plan for Doors Open over the next six months, ensuring that these dollars positively impact individuals as well as organizations will be a priority. We hope organizations planning to apply for a Projects grant will take advantage of the Doors Open one-time facility and operating grants that will open in August 2024. More information on those programs to come soon.

Our Projects grant is a longstanding cornerstone of 4Culture funding. We know its impact in the King County cultural community and that this will represent a significant shift in many people’s plans for 2024. This decision was not made lightly, and we thank you for your flexibility as our entire sector navigates the early months of Doors Open. As always, our staff are available to answer any questions you might have—we know this is a lot of information! Please don’t hesitate to contact us. As we collectively embark on a new year, we could not be prouder to be entrusted with these resources in service of the King County cultural community.

4Culture and Metro are excited to announce the selection of not one but two artist teams who will help advance the future of regional public transit at the forthcoming South Annex Base in Tukwila and an expanded bus stop at Third Avenue South and South Main Street in historic Pioneer Square.

South Annex Base: Haddad|Drugan

Mobility is a human right and Metro is committed to getting people where they need to go—safely, equitably, and sustainably. As part of their transition to a 100% zero-emissions fleet powered by renewable energy, they are expanding capacity at their South Campus to house, operate, and maintain approximately 250 new battery electric buses. After construction, South Annex Base (SAB) will function as a stand-alone bus base. The artist team of Haddad|Drugan (Laura Haddad and Tom Drugan) has just been selected to join the SAB design team and will help influence the overall look and feel of the facilities, develop their own site-specific or architecturally integrated artwork, and recommend and support opportunities for two other artists/teams to lend creative thinking to the project.

Haddad|Drugan’s Seattle-based studio focuses on the creation of large-scale, conceptually driven art and multi-sensory aesthetic experiences that explore qualities of light, color, magic and wonder to reveal cultural and environmental conditions. Their partnership began in 2001 and they have since produced a wide range of innovative public art commissions and plans. Locally, they have worked as design team artists for the Elliott Bay Seawall, Climate Pledge Arena, and Sound Transit’s Angle Lake Station.

Third Avenue South and South Main Street: Preston Singletary and David Franklin

The Third Avenue Transit Corridor is used by tens of thousands of people each day and provides connections for bus riders who are traveling to and from sites throughout the county. A quarter of the buses that operate in the corridor pick up passengers at Third Avenue South and South Main Street in Pioneer Square. With more than 2,650 average daily riders and 24 different routes served, it has become Metro’s 10th busiest stop.

To create a safer, more accessible, and more reliable experience for people catching the bus at this heavily trafficked location, Metro and the City of Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) are repairing and reconfiguring the streetscape and installing new amenities, including a signature sculpture by artists Preston Singletary and David Franklin.

Singletary lives and works in Seattle. He started blowing glass at Glass Eye Studio in 1982, developed skills as a production glass maker, and attended the Pilchuck Glass School. At the studio of Benjamin Moore, Singletary broadened his knowledge and understanding of the medium by assisting Dante Marioni, Richard Royal, Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra. During this time, he also started to develop his own unique visual style.

Singletary’s practice has since become synonymous with the relationship between Tlingit culture and fine art. His sculptures merge themes from Tlingit mythology and traditional design, and he is recognized internationally for his use of glass as well as other non-traditional materials to bring new dimension to contemporary Indigenous art.

David Franklin developed a profound appreciation for the traditional art forms and histories of the Pacific Northwest when he moved here in his early 20s. Following an extensive apprenticeship with Duane Pasco, he began creating his own large-scale artworks. This experience eventually led him to initiate a collaborative public art practice with Singletary. The partnership leverages Franklin’s expertise in fabrication, project management and community engagement to support Singletary’s creative vision.

Doctors and nurses visit with patients. Staff stream through the hallways. Loved ones wait in lobbies. On any given day at Harborview Medical Center, thousands of people play a part in a range of procedures, tests, and treatments that heal the sick and injured. As all of these people make their way through the hospital’s clinics and corridors, they pass by numerous artworks on the floors, walls, and near the elevators. Each artwork offers a respite, a moment of beauty or perspective. Together these pieces keep the Harborview community grounded day after day, even in the face of extraordinary challenges.

A public hospital managed by UW Medicine, Harborview is the only Level 1 trauma and burn center serving Washington, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, and is also a teaching and research institution and the disaster control hospital for Seattle and King County. Its origins trace back to 1877, when the county opened a six-bed hospital; 146 years later, the facility today has 540 patient beds, with more coming as part of a 2020 bond measure to expand and modernize the campus. As Harborview continues to evolve to meet the needs of the region, it remains committed to treating everyone with exceptional care, regardless of their economic status or background.

Though some artworks on view at Harborview belong to the UW Collection, most were commissioned or acquired and continue to be stewarded by 4Culture as part of the King County Public Art Collection (KCPAC). The KCPAC at Harborview was established in 1977, rooted in the belief that art can help offset the emotional, psychological, technological, and institutional experiences of the hospital. It currently includes more than 500 works in an extensive range of media, all of which aim to reduce stress and convey a sense of human dignity. Since 2000, the KCPAC works have been guided by a holistic and comprehensive art plan created by Fernanda D’Agostino; the plan describes design principles for architectural elements, landscape design, and commissioned artworks that encourage healing and support connections to the surrounding neighborhoods.

The KCPAC at Harborview includes several subcollections and a mix of site-specific, integrated, and portable works. The Cultural Heritage Collection celebrates the hospital’s diverse community with 70 pieces by outstanding contemporary artists, among them Juan Alonso, whose large paintings honor his Cuban parents; Mark Calderon, whose pyrographs were inspired by Mexican devotional folk paintings; glass vessels by Preston Singletary; and quilts and soft sculptures by Marita Dingus. The Norm Maleng Collection—housed entirely in the Norm Maleng Building—showcases contemporary ceramics in the lobby, landscapes at elevator landings, and a number of permanently sited works throughout the building. In the West Hospital’s primary reception area, Linda Beaumont’s Full Circle, a sprawling mosaic and terrazzo floor, greets people with a mix of cultural and scientific imagery.

Outside, artworks dot the hospital campus in dramatic and subtle ways. A sculpture and seating elements by Ellen Sollod anchor the hospital’s main entrance. Sidewalks feature site-specific inlays by Robert Horner and Gloria Bornstein. In a work by Sheila Klein, classic textile patterns lend architectural detail to the exterior of the Patricia Steel Building. Many of the hospital’s rooms have views of Beliz Brother’s Harborview Pillows, which appear to hover above a courtyard as if tossed from an open window.

Harborview’s Ninth and Jefferson Building also contains many powerful artworks, beginning with Vereinigung, a monumental sculpture by Connie Watts that features animal figures from Northwest Coast cultural traditions and was created by Watts as she recovered from a major head injury. Then, at the reception desk, Isaac Layman’s Ice Cube Tray renders a meditation on time in astonishing photographic detail. Beside the lobby’s elevators sits Eric Nelsen’s Memory, Myth, Motif, clay assemblages fired in a traditional Japanese anagama kiln in Nelsen’s Vashon Island studio. Upstairs in the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, Eric Eley’s Dispersion Field uses mathematical diagramming to form an imaginary geometric landscape in four panels. The newest addition to the building is Katie Miller’s Cellular Flow, which was installed last month in the remodeled patient care and specialty clinics on the ninth and tenth floors. The work’s 15 translucent privacy screens invite reflection by combining images of Pacific Northwest bodies of water with forms based on human cells.

Next time you find yourself at Harborview, keep an eye out for these artworks and many more. New commissions are headed to the hospital campus in the months and years ahead. The collection is always growing!

Amid the many types of public artworks in King County’s collection—portable and permanent works on the walls, large- and small-scale installations, pieces integrated into buildings, ephemeral experiences and participatory initiatives—one group of artworks is particularly unusual: our signature bridges. Since the late 1990s, 4Culture has partnered with the county’s Road Services Division to include artists on their bridge design teams. This collaborative and creative approach to developing transportation infrastructure elevates the experience of traveling over our region’s waterways, often offering a glimpse into who we are and where we want to go.

Many public art agencies around the country create artworks as part of other kinds of infrastructure projects, like transit stations, recycling centers or water treatment plants. Some also “activate” bridges with artist-designed elements or even residencies and performances, as the City of Seattle’s ARTS office has done with the Fremont Bridge, for example. But 4Culture stands alone nationally in the scope and scale of its bridge commissions.

Whether you’re traveling across a span on foot, by bicycle, or by car, the impact of an artists’ thinking can be subtle or dramatic. Maybe you’re going over the Duwamish River and you notice the large, elaborate gears embedded into the railing of the South Park Bridge; artist Barbara Grygutis took those from the original 1931 bridge and included them in its replacement to signal the location’s history and industrial identity. Visit the historic 1921 Meadowbrook Bridge (which, by the way, featured in Twin Peaks a couple of times) and you’ll see four relief panels by Bruce Myers that speak to the surrounding flora and fauna. For the Novelty Bridge in Duvall, Carolyn Law devised unique color experiences for travelers heading toward or away from the city. In Redmond, Cliff Garten created a series of curved design elements for the York Bridge, echoing the shapes of the river below.

Cross the Snoqualmie River via the Mt. Si Bridge and its bright red color will pop against the surrounding evergreens. Artist Cris Bruch gave some insight into his work, “I thought about the bridge as an event, an experience that should contain some awe and excitement, which has a narrative structure to it.” Indeed, from the nearby plantings he selected to the contrasting green elements he devised for the railing, Bruch’s contributions transform the journey from one end of the bridge to the other, calling attention to its environment and architecture while heightening the moment of one’s suspension over the river.

As time passes, older bridges inevitably require replacement or improvement. In 2013, 4Culture commissioned Leo Berk to create a Bridge Manual for future short-span bridge projects in King County. A few years prior, the county had identified more than 50 bridges between 20 and 110 feet long that needed to be replaced. Berk created a kit of parts that can be used in different combinations on all of these bridges—an effective way to enhance even the most humble of crossings.

Around the world, bridges are celebrated as placemaking icons: the London Tower, the Golden Gate, the Brooklyn Bridge, and countless others, both famous and not. In these beautiful feats of form and function, it’s impossible to distinguish where their engineering ends and their artistry begins. A perfect kind of public art.

Bridges are fundamentally about connecting, about linking one place with another, about opportunity and potential. Like art, they help keep us tethered to the earth, history, and each other.

Rosa Woolsey, the 2023 Equity in Historic Preservation Undergraduate Intern, reflects on her introduction to historic preservation and her internship project, researching culturally significant places for Seattle’s Beacon Hill Council and the Beyond Integrity initiative.

The goal of this project was to identify and explore places on Beacon Hill that are culturally significant to its neighbors and in the context of a historic preservation survey. Through employing ethnographic methods in the context of preservation, we were better able to center the voices and experiences of community members who have been excluded from the work of historic preservation.

The primary challenge, and ultimately, advantage, I had with this internship was that I do not have a background in historic preservation. Rather, I have been trained as a student of anthropology. When I started this position, I was excited to apply my skills to a new realm of cultural work and gain experience in community-based research which is exactly what I was able to do this summer.

In hindsight, my internship unfolded in three parts: background gathering, conducting interviews, and writing. For the first month, I had a lot to learn about preservation: the various acronymed organizations, landmarks preservation standards, how practice differs from local levels all the way up to national standards, as well as how preservation is structured in surprisingly inequitable ways. In line with my anthropological sensibilities, I was surprised and frustrated to learn that cultural significance is a negligible part of historic preservation work. In a way, this made my job a bit easier—it was clear to me that what preservation is in need of is the people-centered mission and ethnographic methods of anthropology.

Although I had a personal connection to Beacon Hill through the Cambodian Buddhist temple, Watt Dhammacakkaram, I also had a lot to learn about the neighborhood’s history and the many communities that make up Beacon Hill. This included getting my feet on the ground and taking an initial tour of the neighborhood with my project advisors so I could get a feel for the geography and energy of the place I would spend all summer learning about. After lots of reading and context gathering, I was introduced to a wealth of community leaders and began to schedule interviews with neighbors who were generous enough to share their time and stories with me.

I am lucky to have been working with a meaningful and relatively straightforward research question: What places in your community do you care about? From there, my job was to listen and to document. This is where my background in anthropology and journalism came through. I learned more about the specifics of conducting oral history interviews and was enthusiastic to expand my skills in interviewing and story-gathering. After about a month of carrying out interviews, transcribing, and reflecting on what themes emerged in my conversations, it was time for me to begin the writing process.

For the last month, I have brought all of this information together into a cohesive narrative, putting the voices of neighbors at the forefront of this storytelling. What I came up with was a document that is both a catalog of eleven culturally significant sites on Beacon Hill as well as a critical response to the inequities of traditional preservation practice in the form of a blended methodology study. Those focus sites are: El Centro de la Raza, the Ponce Torres Family House, the Rasmussen Family House, Day Moon Press, Jefferson Park, Watt Dhammacakkaram, Saint George Catholic Church, MacPherson’s Fruit & Produce, Fou Lee Market & Deli, Comet Lodge Cemetery, and the African American Academy. These places were drawn from a longer list I compiled of 74 sites that are recommended for future research and documentation, which is also included in the report. After finishing my final report, I delivered two presentations, one to the Beacon Hill Council, and another to 4Culture staff/board/advisory committee, Beyond Integrity members, and preservation advocates. I was encouraged by the warm reception and feedback on how this work is significant in the greater scope of where preservation is moving.

Through this process, I learned a lot about Beacon Hill as well as the current state of historic preservation, why it is the way it is, what directions practitioners are trying to move it towards, and how anthropology fits into that work. It was especially good timing for me that the undergraduate intern position was established the same year that I graduated. I am grateful to have come into this opportunity as a recent graduate; the chance to immediately apply the skills in interviewing and writing that I developed in college to a new context has been immensely helpful in coordinating what my next steps are. Through this work, and seeing the need for social scientists in preservation, I have felt affirmed in my background and interest in anthropology and the value of culturally-minded work. As such, I feel a greater sense of direction in looking towards options for graduate school and intend on continuing my studies in anthropology.

About Rosa
Rosa Woolsey graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, Minor in Religion, and Concentration in Global Studies in 2023 from Whitman College, where she served as News Editor and News Reporter for the Whitman Wire campus newspaper. For her senior thesis, she completed an ethnographic research project on Buddhism and cultural identity among the Cambodian American diaspora in the Seattle area. Her academic interests and ambitions are fostered by her Cambodian and mixed-race background. Rosa’s primary focus area within Anthropology includes Asian American cultural hybridity, especially in the contexts of migration, religion, and language. In summer 2023, Rosa was introduced to the world of preservation as an Equity in Historic Preservation Intern for Seattle’s 4Culture, where she carried out a community-centered oral history project documenting culturally significant places on Beacon Hill, one of the city’s most diverse and understudied neighborhoods. In this work, she recognized a mutual goal of cultural sustainability in the work of preservation and in her prior research.

Dig into Rosa’s Culturally Significant Places on Beacon Hill report, also located on our Beyond Integrity page.

4Culture is honored to announce the recipients of the 2023 Arc Artist Fellowship!

The 2023 Fellows are:

Jo Cosme, Multidisciplinary visual artist
Kalei’okalani Matsui, Ha’api’i, dancer, teaching Artist
Alicia Mullikin, Chicana dance artist, beadworker, arts advocate
Tommy Segundo, Native formline artist and educator
Che Sehyun, Future ancient storyteller
Lex Vaughn, News Satirist
Timothy White Eagle, Multidisciplinary visual and performance artist

The Arc Artist Fellowship provides critical – but rare – unrestricted awards of $12,000 to artists residing in King County. This year we received 37 highly competitive applications from King County artists working in dance, music, theatre, media, film, literature, and the visual arts.

“Congratulations to the 2023 Arc Artist Fellows! As we all try to figure out whether this a post-pandemic world, and what exactly that means, I’m so proud this program can serve as an artistic commons. A place where this year’s Fellows can meet, create, collaborate, and perhaps most importantly, be in community together.”

-Brian J. Carter, 4Culture Executive Director

Each year, a new cohort of Arc Fellows are selected, with an eligibility requirement that changes based on feedback from the Fellows. In 2022 and 2023, eligible applicants were Indigenous, Aboriginal, or Native artists of diverse international ancestral lands, who live in King County, the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples.

We seek to lift up the expression of cultural sovereignty of Indigenous makers as culture bearers and as contemporary artists.

Arc Fellows will assist in determining the Arc Eligibility Requirement for next year’s fellowship as well as participate in a public cohort presentation organized by 4Culture and in planning and community engagement for the 2024 program.

The Arc Artist Fellowship will provide the Fellows with portraits and a page on the 4Culture website featuring images and links to explore their work.

Congratulations to Jo, Kalei’okalani, Alicia, Tommy, Che, Lex, and Timothy! Stay tuned to learn more about the 2023 Arc Fellows and how you can connect with their work.

The King County Council is currently considering Doors Open, a proposal from King County Executive Dow Constantine that would increase funding to arts, heritage, science, and historical preservation non-profit organizations through a 0.1 percent sales tax. If approved by the King County Council, tax collection would begin in April 2024. With over 50 years of grant-making experience, 4Culture is the County’s designated agency to distribute funding and implement the program.

Doors Open is the result of a decade long legislative effort to increase funding in Washington State and King County for the cultural sector.

Knowing that increased funding was a possibility, 4Culture worked hard to plan for an equitable Doors Open program. One that meets the growing needs of the cultural sector and aligns with 4Culture’s mission, vision, and values.

Here are some resources about the legislation currently in play and how it may impact you:

Doors Open legislation and additional supporting materials.

Head over to our Data Hub to dig into the community-based research behind our planning:

• 2020 4Culture Strategic Plan/King County Cultural Plan
• 2020 4Culture Cultural Health Study
• 2021 4Culture Cultural Education Study

Advocacy

Inspire Washington is the advocacy organization championing this effort. They have built a broad and powerful statewide coalition to champion advocacy and resource development for Washington’s cultural sector.

Visit DoorsOpenKingCounty.org their advocacy website for the initiative.

Press Coverage

The Seattle Times

The Stranger