The 25 Greatest Works of Art Ever Made in Seattle

Alice Wheeler has been taking extraordinary photographs for almost
three decades, and every one is pure Wheeler. She’s most known for her
visions of Nirvana at their most innocent (many, unfortunately, in
black-and-white), but her later works apprehend what didn’t die with
Kurt Cobain: the low-down, pioneer-meets-meth-lab weirdness of
the Northwest behind the corporate facades. Girl with Bowie Shirt,
Hempfest, Seattle has all the Wheeler hallmarks: the genderfucking,
the masking and projection of identity, the nuclear color, the
beautiful landscape harboring histories of wiped-out natives and Green
River killer victims. Above all these, the vital element is the two-way
gaze—one outsider (Wheeler) recognizing another outsider.

Two hundred yellow-and-black-striped canaries flew free—in a
museum. White walls had turned dark and warm by the sooty licks of a
billion candles, wood floors were covered with hand-placed metal
plates, and freestanding glass vitrines held piles of cast wax heads.
The entire place was made strange and symbolic. This ineffable
promenade of installations—people are still murmuring about
it—happened because the Henry Art Gallery, under the direction of
Richard Andrews, removed all typical resistance and gave itself
completely to the artist. The interaction between museum and artist
became a part of the art and a part of the history of the city: It was
the high point of the Henry transforming into its best self, a
contemporary art museum driven by artists.

Straight across the Columbia River Gorge from the Maryhill Museum of
Art—a concrete mansion with peacocks and Rodins and chess sets
from around the world—a perfect skeleton twin of the museum stood
for a single summer. It was made of scaffolding and shiny blue
construction netting. Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo (working under the
name Lead Pencil Studio) conceived and designed it in Seattle, then put
their materials on a truck and assembled their full-sized mirror out
there in the middle of nowhere, on empty land, harnessing the
across-the-gorge doubling of the earth itself. The unlikeliness of this
project invited you to consider the scale of the unlikeliness of
constructing the original concrete mansion in the first place. It was a
home before it was the Maryhill Museum of Art, on a brutally windswept
expanse of deserty nowhereness—well, it was supposed to be a
home. A man made it for his family, but his family refused to move in,
preferring to stay back East. Maryhill Double was rooted in this
specific history, of one lonely Seattle pioneer’s stubbornness despite
lifelong personal and professional failures (too many to list).
Usually, museums are proud places of social and cultural triumph. The
Double tenderly revealed a different story.

The Miss Havisham of the Seattle skyline: Not just bony, ghostly,
and once idealistic, the white arches that appear out of nowhere and
serve no function have gotten more interesting with time. Now they echo
the charred remains of the Twin Towers, which Minoru Yamasaki designed:
It was these white arches that attracted the World Trade Center
commissioners to Yamasaki in the first place.

This is the most radical work of public art in the region: four
white porcelain walls in two toilet stalls at the Greater Tacoma
Convention & Trade Center (one stall in the women’s room, one in
the men’s room, unmarked from the exterior). The porcelain blocks
buckle at the edges as if they’d exhaled and collapsed, and what looks
like white frosting (caulk) seeps in at the seams. On the surface are
breastlike shapes with nipple holes, asking to be sucked or touched or
worse. In a bathroom, where we most aggressively manage bodily
embarrassments, they come back with a cold vengeance. This architecture
doesn’t cooperate in covering up and flushing away, doesn’t do what
architecture usually does (idealize your body, give you a safe and neat
outer shell, manage your waste). This architecture calls out
unidealized you.

Two same-species lovers with long protuberances: Jeffry Mitchell
poses gay love as ridiculously encoded, only discussable via elephants
or elephantine euphemisms, or in childish terms. There are difficult
ideas here (and considered traditions, too, like the Quaker pickle jar
the underlying form is based on), but you come to those later. First
you hit the surface: a forest pile of flowers and berries and vines and
tree branches and pretzels and hidden rabbits and a horseshoe and what
looks like the face of a bear. These are fat fleshy loops made out of
breakable ceramic, coated—but only coated, and only
lightly—in the refinement of pretty white and platinum luster.
Underneath, in the earthenware itself, unperfected finger pinches and
crude little marks are still visible: There’s always the memory of
softness. Instead of irony there is wonder, humor, humility, and a
warmth so intense you may as well call it love. Actually, that’s it: No
other Seattle artist has come close to producing as much sheer love as
Jeffry Mitchell.

Charles Krafft went to war-torn Sarajevo in the 1990s and met with
an arms dealer. He returned home with a cast for an AK-47, which he
filled with porcelain. Out came AK 47, a lovely tribute to the
weapon Krafft calls the “little black dress” of the modern military.
It’s not the only aggressive work of art Krafft has made out of
decorative, domestic materials. He’s made grenades in the style of
Delftware, china from human cremains, and birthday cakes for white
supremacists. “The best weapon [society] has for dealing with dangerous
art,” Arthur C. Danto writes, is “the theory that art, in its very
nature, is innocuous.” Krafft likes to call bullshit on that theory as
often as he can. His art calls out both the potential that art might be
dangerous (and censored, as his has occasionally been) and the tragic
joke that it’s not. Krafft sells plenty of art. Naturally, as the
Northwest’s best iconoclast, he goes without gallery
representation.

It was part of a sprawling exhibition, which only two people (its
organizers) ever saw all of, called 557,087. That was the
population of Seattle at the time. Boundary was made out of
black-and-silver labels attached to telephone poles and street signs.
They read, “Boundary: A section of a city, especially a thickly
populated area inhabited by minority groups often as a result of social
or economic restrictions.” This was only a year after Seattle voted to
end racial housing discrimination, and this “boundary” contained the
Central District, making visible something that was real but
unmarked—and marking it in a cool, bureaucratic tone. Art
tourists seeing it had to have wondered if the residents of the
neighborhood knew the signs were there. Residents who did know
had to wonder: What the fuck? (Did someone put a sign on our back?) And
what did you need with you to cross over this boundary? How would you
know if the boundary was even in the “right” place? It’s an explosive
public work, with staying power: Boundary could be remade today,
if anybody had the guts. Where’s the ghetto now?

Morris Graves was both the jester (see below) and the hippie priest
of the four “Northwest mystic” artists, so dubbed by Life magazine in 1953. This painting, born in Seattle but now living in the
collection of the Museum of Modern Art, really has two creators: The
bird is pure Graves (he’d been bird-watching—and identifying with
birds—since he was a sickly kid), but the web of white lines
enveloping the bird is stolen from fellow mystic Mark Tobey’s “white
writing” technique developed in 1935. Graves ripped Tobey off, no
question—but it’s a transformative theft. Tobey’s
Asian-calligraphy-influenced abstraction was cold, theoretical, and
East Coasty. Graves’s was warm and personal but transcendental, too. A
young World War II soldier who became an art scholar confessed later
that, in battle, it was his memory of Bird Singing in the
Moonlight that comforted him.

This disinvitation was sent to everyone on the Seattle Art Museum
mailing list. It was ignored. They thought it was a joke. According to
the Seattle Times, “They arrived by droves, some formally
dressed, to find the gateway to his house blocked with a table that
held the moldy remains of a banquet 10 days old, complete with tipped
cups and wine stains, soaked with the drizzle from an overhead
sprinkler. A recording of ‘dinner
music’ was interspersed with a
recorded pig fight. Graves stayed out of sight, laughing nonstop.”
Anti-art (finally) had arrived in Seattle.

The feminist artist Mierle Ukeles washed the front steps of museums.
She dusted the art. She called it Maintenance Art, and it
resembled the tasks of every woman at home: Why couldn’t women’s work
be artwork? For an exhibition in Seattle, she assigned Anne Focke, a
founder of the and/or gallery, the task of thinking of her maintenance
of the gallery as art. In doing so, Ukeles unknowingly transferred the
task to one of the only people in the history of Seattle ever to make
administration into a lifelong work of art (it’s ongoing). The work
that and/or was doing at the time is legend, although it’s hard to find
any information about it except from Focke herself—who didn’t
want to talk about it because she hates “best of” lists, to her
credit.

This is the only work in the Olympic Sculpture Park that knows that
the rest of the work in the Olympic Sculpture Park is sedate and/or
dead. It is a giant, locally found nurse log (a dead log) in an
outbuilding made especially for it, with sciencey tools on metal carts
and wall tiles painted with species that live on or near nurse logs and
a mobile shelf of related reference books, addressing art’s aspirations
to educate. (People have talked about spotting a mouse in the log, but
this has not been confirmed.) This artificial environment is managed by
the museum overseers, but only to an extent: Nobody knows exactly what
will happen, or even what is going on in the log right now. The things
growing out of it carry with them the eternal prospect that they’ll
outgrow their building—a seedling busting through the glass one
day would be grand—and start inhaling the unrarefied air of
downtown.

It was a white wheel made of milk-carton paper, 17 feet in diameter
and 32 inches thick at its bulging center, suspended from the ceiling
of Suyama Space. It had a hole in its side, through which was a view of
the structure holding it up: more paper, all paper, graduated
circles of paper spiraling in on themselves—a whole world of
elaborate, hidden, flawless geometry. The wheel, which had been built
in 32 individual wedge-shaped forms, could be pushed into making slow
revolutions; along with this deliberate motion went the steady,
monotonous sound of drips of water falling into buckets on the floor.
Duty Cycle (which alluded to Bruch’s 1980s performances feeding
homeless people in Pioneer Square) was an homage to labor for labor’s
sake, a piece that represented nothing so much as the time the artist
lost in making it, the product of an unglamorous process that
nevertheless added up to something regal and fragile. Duty Cycle was a thing with as little existential logic as a person: anti-heroism
at its best.

Freeway Park is like a craggy mountain on its head; the summit is at
the bottom. You climb down elaborate descending stairs to stand on a
narrow plane with a bracing view. But this isn’t a vista. You face an
ugly metal screen. A thin slice of
waterfall rushes in front of
it, falling from the top of the park. Through the water and the metal,
you can see the subject you came all this way to look at: cars flying
by under an orangey electric light, inside the concrete tunnel of
Interstate 5. It’s as if the park were here first, and then the city
sprung up around it, interrupted it, completed it.

There is no place like the Seattle Central Library, but it is not an
icon and its specialness has nothing to do with uniqueness of form. Its
shape—vaguely like a great hip thrust toward the water—is
odd, but in the way that a machine’s innards are odd: A logic is there
to be discovered, though it immediately escapes you. The main area on
the Fifth Avenue level is a marvel of openness that’s not blank or
empty or simple or romantically American-Western, but contained and
organized, which is emphasized by two major features: a giant and
unadorned concrete shaft in the center of the space and the relentless,
soaring pattern of diamonds composing the building’s glass-and-steel
skin. Getting through the library requires learning its inconvenient
patterns, which then still trip you up at certain places—fine.
Knowledge is Byzantine and laborious. You can’t get around this library
on autopilot. It is not “natural” in its progression, yet the top
public floor, glass to the sky, is landscape poetry.

In 1970, New York native Jacob Lawrence—a national art star
since the 1940s for his series of paintings of the black
migration
northward—came to Seattle to teach at the University of
Washington. The Migration series is Lawrence’s masterpiece. But
here his attention pivoted from the past, and he started painting the
future being built: He saw in Seattle a place full of people who work
with their hands, people united (across race and gender) in labor,
applying ancient tools to the endless-seeming resources of the
Northwest. What they’re building is never quite in view. It’s the act
of building itself that matters. The series is signature Lawrence:
saturated colors, bulky forms, jangling perspectives. Artforum called it “Carpenter Cubism.” Today it’s Obamanian.

The Center on Contemporary Art, now a shell of itself, began
spectacularly in 1982 by turning over an empty Pioneer Square building
to an artist who filled it with no objects at all for six mind-blowing
months. Inside instead were four glowing installations of light (three
of them new) that disrupted the distinction between object and
environment, between light and space, between solid and ephemeral: You
perceived yourself perceiving them. James Turrell is now a household
name—his meditative “Skyspaces” are fixtures at museums around
the country, including the Henry Art Gallery, and he’s sculpting an
entire crater in Arizona—but his 1982 works instantly established
in Seattle a tradition linking modernism, spirituality, and
installation.

This sculpture in Myrtle Edwards Park on the Elliott Bay

waterfront is literal: It is a big, dumb thing you can sit on.
Three cement bases of varying shapes are paired with granite pieces
from a quarry at Skykomish. The pairs are lined up from left to right
(if you’re facing Elliott Bay) as a visual enactment of the title: the
granite adjacent to the cement, then against it, then upon it. Nothing
is memorialized or metaphorized; this monument is present tense all the
way. Most people either laugh at it or miss it. Michael Heizer more
commonly sculpts giant geometric shapes in the middle of Southwestern
deserts, but in this—his first major urban commission, it just so
happens—he is forced to carve out a human space in the slim
border zone between sublime water and mountains and urban core. These
blocks are furniture for meditations about scale.

Nature in paint: Making it as direct as possible is the task, right?
Alden Mason responded—for a few years only, before moving into
another style entirely—with great big canvases that are a mix of
Morris Louis (who stained his canvases in mysterious studio pours and
died before specifically explaining) and Willem de Kooning (who could
make a painting look as though it had a million layers and
colors—and maybe it did). Mason’s abstractions are essentially
living landscapes, bubbling and oozing even now.

You walk into a 90-foot-long (or 60-foot-long, depending on the
iteration) darkened corridor lined on each side by life-size figures:
glowing, ghostlike. They’re video projections. As you walk toward each
figure, you activate the video, and the person-phantom walks toward
you, looks straight at you, then turns and walks away. You’re almost
meeting another human, but it’s a half presence and partly a mirror of
yourself. What inspired this understated marvel of technologically
enabled and disabled interactivity—a hit at Documenta IX and the
1993 Whitney Biennial, now in the collection of the Henry Art
Gallery—was a photograph taken in Seattle around 1930 of a tall
ship on the sea. Tall Ships haunts the lonely, technological
imagination of the Northwest.

It’s a fact: Dan Webb can spring anything out of a block of
material. Nobody else in Seattle can do that. He could make big,
perfect, lasting sculptures forever. But the contrasting fact that he
can’t control time is the never-ending subject of his bittersweet art.
His masterpiece is Little Cuts, made in honor of his brother,
who died of a brain tumor. It’s not an actual carving but a series of
photographs of the process of making a carving. The earliest photos
show a block of wood; then a man’s head carved out of that wood; then,
gradually, that same man’s skull; then a nub; then nothing. Along with
these photographs—40 of them—a Plexiglas box full of the
sawdust is on display: an urn. Dust is agonizing in the midst of such
acts of creation.

The world’s most famous glass artist is actually far more talented
as an organizer. 100,000 Pounds of Ice and Neon was his best
event. He first experimented with embedding neon in ice in 1971, at the
Rhode Island School of Design; he did it again in 1992, on the streets
of downtown Seattle, to coincide with his solo show inside the
brand-new Seattle Art Museum, for a piece called 20,000 Pounds of
Ice and Neon. But the version of the installation he made in 1993
in Tacoma was in another realm: It was indoors, on the skating rink at
the Tacoma Dome, and five times heavier—100,000 pounds of ice and
neon shaped into seven-foot-high orbs and tumbleweeds and slabs like
popsicles for giants. The Tacoma Dome had opened 10 years earlier with
a neon-art controversy that nearly shut down public art in the city,
which happens to be Dale Chihuly’s hometown. He brought neon back and
converted the doubters: In two days, 33,000 people came to see the
installation, dubbed “ice-henge”—for free—in the dark
interior of the dome, where the ice didn’t just melt, but melted,
rolled down to the rink, and froze again into secondary mounds around
the bases of the bent neon tubes before the whole thing disappeared
completely.

No list like this would make any sense without native art, and yet
most everything that passes for the native art of Seattle is actually
art from hundreds of miles north of here. Only in the last few decades
have the Salish-speaking people, the real native people of this
coastal-turned-urban region, begun to reclaim their lost and
undervalued traditions. This mountain-goat-hair robe—the first
such robe to be made in a century—woven and hand dyed with native
plants by Susan Pavel, is not just a robe: It is a she, a feminine
entity with a mission, as one Skokomish spiritual leader says. She
(robe) commemorates the “sacred change” of rediscovering Salish ways
and is meant to inspire future generations. The vertical dashes are
backbones, urging strength even in struggle; the tied ends on the
robe’s fringes are a reminder not to leave things undone. She is a soft
monument.

On Labor Day of 1993, the unknown artist Jason Sprinkle attached a
ball and chain around the ankle of the largest sculpture in Seattle,
Hammering Man, the very well-known sculpture outside Seattle Art
Museum by the very well-known artist Jonathan Borofsky. Sprinkle took
care when he did it. He padded the chain so it wouldn’t damage the
other artist’s work. Seeing this care, Borofsky allowed the
intervention to stay up for a week. It wasn’t just a protest; it was a
proposed collaboration that gave the sculpture tension, made it
work.

There is a great work of art being made right now that will never be
seen, or never be seen by critics, or that will be seen and
overlooked—making this list necessarily incomplete. It is by
someone who hasn’t studied art, or by someone spray-painting the
street, or it is the product of a career artist who decides that it
isn’t any good and has to be destroyed. Despite its ability to be or to
do something that matters, even something very small, it will be melted
down, cut up, painted over, passed by, or shoved into a drawer—it
will join many others like it. I wish I had found it.

To see alternate lists by selected members of Seattle’s art establishment, click here .