Hire One of These People

The director of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, who excelled at competence and nothing else, recently departed for another job after eight years. He was described upon his hiring as “a respected arts administrator,” and it’s true that this job requires an organized, polished politicker. But with all due respect, the city’s arts guru should be creative. Which means flexible and stimulating. Knowledgeable yet knowledge-seeking. Riding the flow of arts through the city. Full of ideas and connections that break through the pabulum of bureaucratic conferences, public-art clichés, and business-as-usual complacency. A thinker would be nice. This is a person who should be able to say phrases like “best practices” and “cultural tourism” with great conviction in front of city department heads, but would not be caught dead using them anywhere else. This is a notable person, not a career bureaucrat with the right résumé but scant evidence of imagination.

This person already lives here. Mr. Mayor, please interview all three of these people for the job, and then hire one of them. As for a job description, we’ve done the work of writing one for you.

Abigail Guay has shoveled serious shit on behalf of artists she believes in. She’s opinionated, effective, and no-nonsense. For years, she worked for one of the more powerful artists in the world, Jenny Holzer, which sent her behind the scenes and across the globe—making impossible negotiations go smoothly between crazy individualists and institutional sticks-in-the-mud, befriending as colleagues snobs and philistines, high-end dealers and obscure small-town manufacturers.

In Seattle, she built Open Satellite from the ground up, and it’s one of the most complicated art programs around: Artists stay there for months on end to create new works for a gallery, and this experimentation happens in a high-rise tower owned by a Bellevue businessman. Talk about maneuvering. And she knows from philanthropy: Now she’s at Grantmakers in the Arts, a national association of arts funders both public and private. She’s an artist and a writer, too. She dances with the comedy troupe Freedom Dancers, is the voice for arts behind the scenes at

ARCADE architecture and design magazine, and occasionally writes a thoughtful piece for The Stranger (she worked here as an intern in 2006). The woman can handle anything that comes at her, and with aplomb.

Michael Seiwerath transformed Northwest Film Forum from a pack of janky (but well-
intentioned!) volunteers into a full-fledged film organization, oversaw the organization’s complicated move from its old home on 19th Avenue to its current digs on 12th Avenue, and has helped preside over the rise of Lynn Shelton, David Russo, Robinson Devor/Charles Mudede, Webster Crowell, and others as
major film artists in the Northwest (who went on to be major film artists in the world).

He knows art of all kinds. He knows how to run organizations (

The Stranger gave him a Genius Award years ago for his work at NWFF). He knows how to look at a spreadsheet, talk to donors, throw a party, give a care about social justice (after he left his job at NWFF, he went to work for Capitol Hill Housing), and smell the good from the bad. The man has the discernment of a critic, the politics of a bureaucrat (we don’t mean to insult you, Michael—take it as a compliment), and the guts and vision of an artist. The man is smart. The man cares. Artists like him. And he knows how to make things happen.

Yoko Ott is a creativity machine. She’s the sort of person who has five ideas a minute and produces at least four of them in some form by sheer will, inventiveness, and an ability to bring people together. Behind her is a trail of crackling projects.

She organized the fine-arts programming at Bumbershoot back when it was innovative and when audiences and artists alike couldn’t wait to get in (2002–2006)—which gave many young artists their start in the city. As an educator at the newly revitalized Frye Art Museum, she didn’t just give students access to old paintings, she brought in living, highly experimental artists to teach the classes. (She got teenagers to go around the city making geopsychological maps using GPS devices, music, drawing, and video.) While she was curator at the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, she mixed major shows of local artists with international retrospectives—something far beyond the call of duty for a college curator. That’s the thing: She never lets the size of a job dictate its limits, only what she can think up and make happen.