Arts in Seattle
[11] Once Seattle became the main supply center for Yukon prospectors, cash from the miners brought back the box houses.
[18] Other Seattle visual artists in this era included Cunningham's husband Roi Partridge and painter and printmaker John Butler.
Over the next few decades Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Irving Anderson, and Paul Horiuchi would establish themselves as nationally and internationally known artists (see the Northwest School).
According to Paul de Barros, in just the single year 1925 Seattle witnessed performances by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, and operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin; Hungarian composer and pianist Ernő Dohnányi; African American lyric tenor Roland Hayes; and Austrian violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler.
[20] By mid-century the thriving jazz scene centering in some two dozen clubs along Jackson Street would produce musicians including Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, and Ernestine Anderson.
When Seattle decided to try to put itself on the map with the futuristic Century 21 Exposition — the 1962 World's Fair — high culture was on the agenda, as well as popular entertainment along the lines of "Gracie Hansen's Paradise International" and "Les Poupees de Paris," an adult-themed puppet show, both of which aspired more to a Gay Nineties naughtiness than to anything artistic.
The Fine Arts Pavilion (later the Exhibition Hall) managed to bring in works by Titian, Van Dyck, and Monet, as well as more contemporary pieces by Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Alexander Calder and by Pacific Northwest artists Tobey, Callahan, and Graves.
[1] Outside of the fair itself, Seattle's bars were filled with the live music that would result just a few years later in the region's first great period as a rock'n'roll mecca.
Writing in 1972, Nard Jones remarked on the Seattle telephone directory having "three solid columns" of art galleries and dealers, representing "an astonishing variety".
One of the key events in this respect was the Seattle Opera's ambitious and successful staging, under its founding general director Glynn Ross, of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Performed in its entirety every summer from 1975 through 1983 back-to-back cycles (first in German, then in English, by 1982, The New York Times reported that Seattle had become a serious rival to Bayreuth.
[29] The popular music scene at the time included such teen-pop bands as the Allies (whose song "Emma Peel" received a good deal of local play, but never broke out nationally) and the Heaters (later "the Heats").
That same era saw the more sophisticated pop of the short-lived Visible Targets and the still-performing Young Fresh Fellows and The Posies; the pop-punk of The Fastbacks; and the outright punk of the Fartz (later Ten Minute Warning).
Conceived in 1980, and incorporated in 1981, Red Sky Poetry Theatre (RSPT) influenced the literary and performance scene in Seattle and the entire West Coast for 25 years.
Seattle burst into the popular consciousness with the grunge rock scene of the early 1990s, when Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Temple of the Dog, and Mudhoney, all reached vast audiences.
The largest of the street fairs feature hundreds of craft and food booths and multiple stages with live entertainment, and draw more than 100,000 people over the course of a weekend; the smallest are strictly neighborhood affairs with a few dozen craft and food booths, barely distinguishable from more prominent neighborhoods' weekly farmers' markets.
As in most large cities, there are numerous other annual events of more limited interest, ranging from book fairs and specialized film festivals to a two-day, 8,000-rider Seattle-to-Portland bicycle ride.
Seattle mourned the loss of one of its best known classical musicians, the Tuba man who was heard by hundreds of thousands in front of sports and arts venues for decades until his death in 2008.
The historic 5th Avenue Theatre, built in 1926, continues to stage Broadway quality musical performances featuring both local talent and international stars.
Such musicians as Jimi Hendrix, Duff McKagan, Nikki Sixx, and Quincy Jones spent their formative years in Seattle.
Other Seattle-area bands of note include Pearl Jam, Sunn O))), Acceptance, Aiden, Alien Crime Syndicate, Antlers, Ayron Jones and The Way, The Beautiful Mothers, the Blakes, The Blood Brothers, Blue Scholars, The Catheters, Charlie Drown, Common Heroes, Dangermart, Daphne Loves Derby (Kent), Death Cab for Cutie (Bellingham), Daylight Basement, The Divorce, Dog Bone Sanctuary, Dolour, Drop Six, Drown Mary, Harvey Danger, Fleet Foxes, Foo Fighters, Gatsby's American Dream, Maktub, Metal Church, Minus the Bear, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Modest Mouse (Issaquah), Mudhoney, The Murder City Devils, MxPx (Bremerton), The Myriad, Pedro the Lion, Point One, Ruby Doe, Schoolyard Heroes, Screaming Trees (originally from Ellensburg), Second Coming, Sky Cries Mary, Sleater-Kinney (Olympia), Slicing Grandpa, Smoosh, Soundgarden, Sunny Day Real Estate, Super Deluxe, Supersuckers, Sweet 75, Trial, Turn to Fall, United State of Electronica, Utterance, Vendetta Red, Vexed, Vindaloo, Visqueen, Zeke and The Zero Points.
In recent decades, Washington State, King County, and Seattle have all allocated a certain percentage of all capital budgets to the arts.
[44] Probably the most visible public sculpture in Seattle is Jonathan Borofsky's 48-foot kinetic sculpture "Hammering Man",[45] outside the Seattle Art Museum; probably the most unusual and popular are several pieces in the Fremont neighborhood, including the Fremont Troll, a bronze statue of Lenin formerly in Slovakia,[46] and Richard Beyer's "Waiting for the Interurban."
Many of the artists in this scene employ "alternative" venues, including cafés, bars and even exterior building walls, newspaper boxes or re-purposed phone booths, as a way of exposing viewers to their artwork.
These tactics often include happenings, performance art, unsanctioned sculpture, wheatpasting, murals, and aerosol—-which at times puts members of the scene at odds with both established (and often safer) Seattle artists and city officials.
However, it is arguably this willingness to find alternative methods of expression that has given the movement its vibrancy and an increasing significance in the art world as a whole.
[49] During the Poet Populist's term he/she has the responsibility of writing one commissioned poem, and promoting the art of poetry through various performances and teaching opportunities.
[52] Past Poet Populist Winners include Barnard Harris, Jr. who won the title in 1999-2000, Bart Baxter (2001–2002), Tara Hardy (2002–2003), Pesha Joyce Gertler (2005–2006), Jourdan Imani Keith (2006–2007), Cody Walker (2007–2008) and Mike Hickey (2008–2009).
[57] More recent Seattle poets of note have included Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, Denise Levertov, Carolyn Kizer, David Wagoner, Barry Lopez, and Steven "Jesse" Bernstein, the last a pioneer of performance poetry.
Among them is Kirby Olson's novel Temping (Seattle: Black Heron Press, 2006) that features a young man working as a temporary secretary who is looking for a little more from life.
