Topic: Visual Arts
Z. Vanessa Helder was one of Washington state's most distinguished artists of the early twentieth century. Born into a pioneer family, she became the state's leading practitioner of Precisionism, a st...
Norie Sato (b. 1949) is a Seattle artist who worked in a Pioneer Square studio for several decades beginning in the 1970s. The proximity to and views of Elliott Bay played a role in her creative proce...
For more than 50 years, some of the world's most spectacular fireworks came from a collection of sheds on a hill in Columbia City, home to a pharmaceutical chemist with a genius for pyrotechnics, a ta...
Bill Holm was curator emeritus of Northwest Indian art at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, a professor emeritus of art and anthropology at the University of Washington, and ...
The Northwest Artist Paul Horiuchi is renowned for the Zen-like spontaneity of his collage paintings, along with an abstract expressionist command of flat space. The layered paintings carry overtones ...
The Italian Room at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) brings sixteenth-century Italy to life in downtown Seattle. The wood-paneled room was built more than 400 years ago for a wealthy family in Chiavenna, ...
The painter William Ivey began his art career at a young age, with art instruction at the Cornish School in Seattle. Ivey's interest in pursuing art as a profession was interrupted by World War II. Af...
A pioneer in the field of photojournalism, Frank Jacobs covered events big and small throughout the Pacific Northwest, but specialized in transportation disasters such as ship and train wrecks. Althou...
Bill James, a Lummi textile and basket weaver, environmental activist, and tribal historian, absorbed the artistic and cultural traditions of his tribe as a means to both revitalize Coast Salish weavi...
Northwest artist Clayton James has worked with many types of media: he has painted landscapes, made furniture, and sculpted in clay, wood, and concrete. Not originally from the Northwest, he was atten...
Most Northwesterners have encountered the work of artist Fay Jones at one time or other: Her paintings and prints can be found on the walls of local museums, restaurants, and hospitals; her images hav...
After moving to Seattle in 1960 to teach at the University of Washington School of Art, Robert C. Jones established himself as one of the Northwest's most prominent abstract painters. A superb coloris...
Helmi Juvonen is an enigmatic figure in Northwest art history. Diagnosed as manic depressive in 1930, she had a life-long obsession with Mark Tobey (1890-1976), whom she met while attending Cornish Co...
The painter Leo Kenney, born in Spokane, came with his family to Seattle in the 1930s. Seattle Art Museum director Dr. Richard Fuller gave him a solo show at the museum in 1949 -- when he was just 24 ...
For a time the carvings of artist Donald Wells Keys loomed over the Seattle skyline and around the Pacific Northwest. A 22-foot-tall Hoonah Raven inspired by Northwest Coast Indian art stood in front ...
Artist John-Franklin Koenig, a Seattle native who first experienced Europe during World War II through the cockpit of a tank, lived, worked, and studied in France after the war's end. Later a resident...
A visionary designer, artist, inventor, teacher, builder, lecturer, and businessman -- Seattle's Gideon Kramer was a true renaissance man. Long fascinated by the relationship between materials, techno...
In this original essay, historian Vicki Halper writes about Dick and Jane Lang, who married in 1966 and over the ensuing 16 years -- until Dick's death in 1982 -- filled their home on Lake Washington ...
Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight, two of the country's preeminent visual artists, moved to Seattle in 1971 when he accepted a teaching position in University of Washington's art department. The two...
J. Hans Lehmann, M.D. was the only son of middle class Jewish parents in the northern German town of Barsinghausen. He escaped Europe with most of his family on the eve of World War II and established...
Sculptor Phillip Levine's work can be viewed all over the Northwest. In Western Washington alone, he has 30 sculptures that stand in public places, including Dancer with Flat Hat at the University of ...
The sculptor and painter Alonzo Victor Lewis began his career in the early twentieth century modeling portraits and monumental statues in bronze, first in Tacoma, and later in Seattle after relocating...
This is an excerpt from an article by novelist Tom Robbins on the lightshows of the 1960s. It appeared in Seattle magazine in 1967, and is reprinted with permission of Tom Robbins.
The first lightshow in the Seattle area occurred on November 5, 1966, when KRAB radio (one of the first community-based FM radio stations in the country) held a benefit concert in Kirkland. It was thi...