It’s Capitol Hill Art Walk tonight, and The Stranger is hosting our very first Capitol Hill Art Walk event, from 6–8 pm. For one night we’ve transformed our offices into a gallery to celebrate some of the best original photography in town, curated by our photo director, Billie Winter.
We are pleased to present a remounting of work from Brandon Bye’s More Paint, including new photos that were not exhibited at Vermillion earlier this year. When Bye was laid off from Amazon in 2023, he immediately bought a ticket to Buenos Aires so he could get far away from Seattle. While there, he became enamored of the graffiti sprawling across the city. He returned to Seattle with fresh eyes and began tracking our own graffiti, using street art as a means of becoming intimate with parts of the city he’d never truly seen—the neighborhoods of South Seattle in particular.
The resulting photographs, produced from 2023–2025, are both beautiful and uneasy; by turning his gaze on graffiti, Bye also captures portraits of an unhoused population who take shelter in interstitial spaces.
Bye’s lens is not voyeuristic, however. His pictures reiterate that these are Seattleites too, and his unflinching documentation—while technically precise and vibrant with color and life—raises a question about selective viewing, and how we train our eyes to see the world.
In addition to Bye’s work, we are featuring some of our favorite photography that’s been shot for The Stranger over the last year, plus two video pieces: Pacific Northwest Ballet principal Lucien Postlewaite (featured in our Spring Arts issue) dancing in our office, and videos from the Liminal Spaces piece that ran in our most recent print issue.
While you’re out, swing by some of our art walk neighbors: Color Shift: Judy Chia Hui Hsu at Vermillion Art Gallery and Bar, FREE FOR ALL at The Factory, and Fragments (featuring JP Farquar, John Behr, and Whitney Allison) at Steve Gilbert Studio.
This open house also marks the first day of EverOut Seattle’s very first neighborhood week.
The Stranger office is located on Capitol Hill at 1101 E Pike St. — the entrance is located on 11th Ave E between the Gemini Room and Chophouse Row.