Elaborately constructed of aluminum, stainless steel, and glass, Norman Courtney’s Luminaries fuse past and future, old and new.

Bejeweled like 1930s pendants, these functional artworks reference elements of Art Deco design in a nod to the history of the King County International Airport terminal building. They also conjure that era’s space-age imagery. Streamlined forms recall Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, both avant-garde comic strips in their time. But with his contemporary sensibility, Courtney takes the sum of these parts somewhere new and undiscovered. Combining perforated structural bars used in airplane construction with vivid, glowing glass, he creates the effect of timeless celestial spaceships.

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Norman Courtney (1947 – 2017) emerged as a leader in the Northwest glass community in the 1970s, a pioneer of casting techniques. His artwork is known to capture the spirit of a place, like his sconces at Seattle University’s St. Ignatius Chapel or his frieze at the main entrance to the Len Casanova Athletic Center at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR. Courtney also worked in a variety of other materials, creating art for public spaces throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

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King County International Airport

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