Seattle’s best-dressed weekend will soon be upon us. When the Seattle Art Fair rolls into Lumen Field Event Center on July 25-28, the fashion quotient in Pioneer Square temporarily increases tenfold. Who are these smartly attired art aficionados, and more to the point, where are they the rest of the year?
Seattle Art Fair, for all its pizzazz, presents a conundrum: Seattle is a moneyed city, but is it a cultured city? The two frequently, but not inevitably, go hand in hand. In Seattle’s case, our high-tech economic engine has translated into a lukewarm embrace of high culture. As we near the halfway point of a halting decade after the unrelenting pace that characterized the 2010s, it’s time for civic self-examination and, perhaps, a course correction. What type of art scene can thrive here?
Rewind the clock to 2015, the year that Seattle posted its fastest population growth during the height of the Amazon boom, when 57 people per day were moving to the Emerald City. That same year, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen minted the first Seattle Art Fair through his cultural investment arm Vulcan Arts and Entertainment.
For all his faults, Allen had a surprisingly sharp collector’s eye and a vision that under the Pacific Northwest’s dazzling summer skies, Seattle could become a West Coast destination city for international art collectors. At the time, the San Francisco Art Fair was only five years old and it would be four years before Frieze launched its Los Angeles edition. Could Seattle become as synonymous with art as Art Basel did for the Swiss city and its Miami counterpart?
Nearly a decade later, Allen is dead, Vulcan Arts and Entertainment has folded, and the Seattle Art Fair seems to be in safe, if low-key hands. New York-based Art Market Productions, which had produced the fair since 2015, became the sole organizer in 2022. Now Seattle fits into a stable on a national calendar of art fairs in San Francisco, the Hamptons, New York and Atlanta. The portfolio approach means that Seattle can persist through down years, but that we missed our chance to become a major destination in an increasingly crowded art market (in the last two years there are new art fairs in Atlanta, Seoul and Singapore alone, adding to the 380-plus art fairs globally).
The art fair, then, is an anchor but not the motor driving the ship. Last year’s edition featured relevant touchstones like Dinos Chapman’s tattoo glory hole—a popular roll of the dice in this inked-up town—and eye-catching work by Jeffrey Gibson, whose 2019 show “Like a Hammer'' was a smash hit at SAM (foreshadowing his rise to represent the US at this year’s Venice Biennial). As importantly, the fair—with its mix of out-of-town and regional galleries—galvanizes the local creative scene to put its best foot forward. Greg Lundgren’s Out of Sight exhibitions yielded a new municipally-owned arts space in King Street Station a few years later. The collaboration between the Forest for the Trees collective and creative agency ARTXIV has breathed temporary life into the otherwise dormant mixed-use RailSpur development that might herald a renaissance for the beloved but beleaguered historic district.
Sustaining year-round public engagement with visual art is a different challenge. A decade ago I attended Sónar, the experimental music and digital art festival that has buoyed Barcelona’s global reputation for cutting-edge culture. Local artists warned me not to mistake the fervent energy during Sónar weekend with the state of affairs the rest of the year. A similar cautionary note should apply to Seattle. Art fair weekend is an apotheosis, but how do we set the floor higher the other 361 days?
Pioneer Square’s gallery scene is limping along while Georgetown’s is on the rise—both trends ably chronicled by The Seattle Times’s Margo Vansynghel in recent reporting—but the city is showing the most artistic promise beyond traditional galleries and two-dimensional exhibitions. For example, Tacoma-based Cambodian-American performance artist Anida Yoeu Ali enticed 1,000 people on a dreary March day to the Asian Art Museum for the embodiment of her character The Buddhist Bug. In June, crowds followed her around the city as she and collaborators performed The Red Chador. A clever admixture of Pacific Rim identity politics proved catnip for Seattle audiences.
Next year’s opening of Cannonball Arts in a former Bed, Bath and Beyond is a whopping 66,000-square-foot bet on contemporary programming. But importantly, there will be both highbrow art and more accessible creative endeavors—from wrestling to pogo sticks—that reflect a certain Pacific Northwest quirkiness. A venture of New Rising Sun, the curatorial team that rescued the city-owned Bumbershoot Festival, Cannonball is the most daring development since SAM moved downtown in 2009.
Other shoots of life include Base Camp Studio’s repurposing of the Bergman Luggage Building and the all-too-brief life of Nii Modo in an old Bartell Drugs on 3rd Avenue and XO Seattle’s short-lived occupation of the Coliseum Theatre. But none appear to have the potential heft and staying power of Cannonball.
Most importantly, these new endeavors are not explicitly cultivating the tech wealth that reshaped the region. While new museums like the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco have hosted collector training sessions to teach newly affluent techies how to collect art, that might be a lost cause here. San Francisco is a hotbed of designers; Seattle is dominated by software engineers. Our region simply lacks a predilection toward taste—geek culture triumphs visual culture.
In light of those circumstances, my aspiration is for a rebalancing of Seattle’s demographics. Layoffs may ultimately prove a blessing in disguise to blunt the tech monoculture. I have little doubt that the region will rebound and continue to attract new companies. As civic boosters like Greater Seattle Partners continue to market the region to international businesses looking to set up shop, they would do well to ask not just how many jobs are you bringing, but who are you bringing. Will they stay at home and play videogames, or will they go to an art opening at Cannonball on a Tuesday night? We have plenty of the former; it’s time to begin importing the latter.
