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Proud Raven, Panting Wolf

Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks

By Emily L. Moore

Among Southeast Alaska’s best-known tourist attractions are its totem parks, showcases for monumental wood sculptures by Tlingit and Haida artists. Although the art form is centuries old, the parks date back only to the waning...

New Deal Art in the Northwest

The WPA and Beyond

By Margaret E. Bullock

From December 1933 to February 1943, as part of a sprawling economic stimulus package, four federal programs hired artists to create public artworks and provide art-making opportunities to millions of Americans. When this initiative abruptly...

The Whale and the Cupcake

Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska

By Julia O'Malley. Foreword by Kim Severson

From fish and fiddleheads to salmonberries and Spam, Alaskan cuisine spans the two extremes of locally abundant wild foods and shelf-stable ingredients produced thousands of miles away. As immigration shapes Anchorage into one of the...

Looking for Betty MacDonald

The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

By Paula Becker

Betty Bard MacDonald (1907–1958), the best-selling author of The Egg and I and the classic Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children’s books, burst onto the literary scene shortly after the end of World War II. Readers embraced her...

Sculpture on a Grand Scale

Jack Christiansen’s Thin Shell Modernism

By Tyler Sprague

The Kingdome, John (“Jack”) Christiansen’s best-known work, was the largest freestanding concrete dome in the world. Built amid public controversy, the multipurpose arena was designed to stand for a thousand years but was demolished in...

Understanding Northwest Coast Indigenous Jewelry

The Art, the Artists, the History

By Alexander Dawkins. Foreword by Corrine Hunt

Indigenous hand-engraved jewelry from the Pacific Northwest Coastis among the most distinctive, innovative, and highly sought-after art being produced in North America today. But these artworks are more than just stunning—every bracelet, ring, and pendant...

Art in Seattle’s Public Spaces

From SoDo to South Lake Union

By James Rupp and Miguel Edwards

From cedar totem poles to high-tech video installations, downtown Seattle sparkles with hundreds of artworks adorning plazas, lobbies, parks, and waterfront piers and paths. This impressive collection, comprising works by artists with regional or international...

Classical Seattle

Maestros, Impresarios, Virtuosi, and Other Music Makers

By Melinda Bargreen

The past 50 years have seen a tremendous arts boom in Seattle, which has given the city not only internationally recognized classical music institutions but also great performance halls to showcase their work and that...

North

Finding Place in Alaska

By Julie Decker

Alaska is part of an international circumpolar North, which makes the United States an Arctic nation. Alaska is a place of Indigenous ingenuity and adaptation, a place where environmental extremes challenge the ways of living....

Gordon Walker

A Poetic Architecture

By Grant Hildebrand

Gordon Walker’s (b. 1939) highly unusual design process has yielded an extensive architecture of extraordinary quality; he is a unique figure in the American architectural movement and in the history of the Pacific Northwest. This...

The Plague and I

By Betty MacDonald

“Getting tuberculosis in the middle of your life is like starting downtown to do a lot of urgent errands and being hit by a bus. When you regain consciousness you remember nothing about the urgent...

Anybody Can Do Anything

By Betty MacDonald

“The best thing about the Depression was the way it reunited our family and gave my sister Mary a real opportunity to prove that anybody can do anything, especially Betty.”

After surviving both the failed chicken...

Onions in the Stew

By Betty MacDonald

“For twelve years we MacDonalds have been living on an island in Puget Sound. There is no getting away from it, life on an island is different from life in the St. Francis Hotel but...

On Sacred Ground

The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature

By Nicholas O’Connell

On Sacred Ground explores the literature of the Northwest, the area that extends from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, and from the forty-ninth parallel to the Siskiyou Mountains. The Northwest exhibits astonishing geographical...

Seattle Style

Fashion/Function

By Clara Berg. Foreword by Luly Yang

Seattle Style: Fashion/Function highlights how elegance and practicality coexisted and converged in Seattle wardrobes, providing new insights into local clothing, ranging from couture, to outdoor gear, to denim. The book features over fifty garments and...

Preston Singletary

Raven and the Box of Daylight

By Miranda Belarde-Lewis and John Drury

The story Raven and the Box of Daylight, which tells how Raven transformed the world and brought light to the people by releasing the stars, moon, and sun, holds great significance to the Tlingit people...

Stirring Up Seattle

Allied Arts in the Civic Landscape

By R. M. Campbell. Photographs by Roger Schreiber

In the 1950s, the city of Seattle began a transformation from an insular, provincial outpost to a vibrant and cosmopolitan cultural center. As veteran Seattle journalist R. M. Campbell illustrates in Stirring Up Seattle: Allied...

Before Seattle Rocked

A City and Its Music

By Kurt E. Armbruster

Seattle is a music town with rich, deep roots that have influenced the culture and identity of its civic life for decades. In a society that appreciates music but is ambivalent toward the profession of...

The Eighth Lively Art

Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, and the Wicked Witch of the West

By Wesley Wehr

As a young artist and musician Wesley Wehr became a friend and often a confidant of many of the painters, poets, and musicians who lived or worked in the Northwest in the 1950s and 1960s....

Reading Portland

The City in Prose

By John Trombold, Peter Donahue

Reading Portland is a literary exploration of the city's past and present. In over eighty selections, Portland is revealed through histories, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, novels, and news reports. This single volume gives voice to...