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Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park

A Place for Art, Environment, and an Open Mind

By Mimi Gardner Gates

The Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, where Alexander Calder’s The Eagle soars over Puget Sound, Roxy Paine’s stainless-steel Split glistens in the rain, and Richard Serra’s Wake beckons visitors to walk within its towering...

Painful Beauty

Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience

By Megan A. Smetzer

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively...

Art of the Northwest Coast

By Aldona Jonaitis

Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often...

Emerald Street

A History of Hip Hop in Seattle

By Daudi Abe. Foreword by Sir Mix-A-Lot

From the first rap battles in Seattle’s Central District to the Grammy stage, hip hop has shaped urban life and the music scene of the Pacific Northwest for more than four decades. In the early...

Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast

By Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Aldona Jonaitis

Inseparable from its communities, Northwest Coast art functions aesthetically and performatively beyond the scope of non-Indigenous scholarship, from demonstrating kinship connections to manifesting spiritual power. Contributors to this volume foreground Indigenous understandings in recognition of...

Haboo

Native American Stories from Puget Sound

By Vi Hilbert, Jill La Pointe, Thom Hess

The stories and legends of the Lushootseed-speaking people of Puget Sound represent an important part of the oral tradition by which one generation hands down beliefs, values, and customs to another. Vi Hilbert grew up...

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...

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...

The Lavender Palette

Gay Culture and the Art of Washington State

By David F. Martin. with an essay by David Chapman

The first study of how gay and lesbian artists influenced and established a regional cultural identity in the first half of the twentieth century, this groundbreaking publication chronicles and contextualizes pioneering gay and lesbian artists...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...