Seattle University Art Collection

Guy Irving Anderson (1906-1998)

“I sense a preordained order in the Universe” sums up the artist’s philosophy and aesthetic leading to his association with the “mystic” wing of the Northwest School. Privately tutored by Eustace Ziegler, Anderson gravitated to La Conner in the Skagit Valley where he remained for decades. His paintings were consistently tied to the male figure symbolizing humanity and its ties to ancient and Classical myths such as Adam and Icarus. Unusually large and painted on dark brown tar paper, Anderson’s art was the least widely hailed beyond the region although he was part of an international touring show organized by the United States Information Agency in 1957. He received a scholarship from the Tiffany & Co. Foundation in 1929 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975. A two-part retrospective survey was held at Seattle Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery in 1977.

Bill Baber

The graduate of the University of Washington School of Art focused on ceramics for his degree but over the years has become better known for his expertise in bronze-casting found objects into conglomerations of pedestal-size and large-scale sculptures. With his Seattle debut at 55^th Street Gallery in 1977, Baber went on to numerous gallery, museum and competitive exhibitions throughout the Pacific Northwest. Featured in the Seattle Art Museum Washington Open in 1979, he was also included in various invitationals and juried shows at the Bellevue Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Whatcom Museum, and Center On Contemporary Art, Seattle. Since 2007, he has had annual shows at Gallery IMA in Pioneer Square.

Keith Beckley

Beckley is part of the original stable of artists at the seminal Linda Farris Gallery in Pioneer Square in the 1970s. Along with Dennis Evans, Charles B. Luce, and Jeffrey Bishop, he was featured in New Ideas #1 at Seattle Art Museum. His work was acquired by the museum at that time and praised by art critics in Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Artforum in 1979. As one critic wrote, he “eschews applied coloration altogether and sticks with materials picked up at the corner hardware store: brass and copper wire, string, thread, fake marble, glass (shattered) and Plexiglas.” His art is also in the collection of the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

Jeffrey Bishop

Jeffrey Bishop is one of a number of artists who spent periods of time in Seattle, developing his style and career before his moving to New York permanently in 1994. Before that, he was part of an influential cohort of graduate students at the University of Washington School of Art who became the founding stable of the Linda Farris Gallery. Alternating between sparse installations and intimate abstract watercolors, the artist progressed to large-scale canvases (some eight feet wide) which alluded to maritime symbols, geometric and mathematical designations, all united by cool greens, grays and browns. With several solo exhibitions in New York, he was elected to the American Abstract Artists in 2016 and included in group exhibitions in New York, Ecuador, Germany, Greece and China.

Michael Brophy

The Portland-born and educated artist uses landscape painting to confront environmental dilemmas—often with great wit. With his exceptionally large oils on canvas (ten to 20 feet wide), Brophy has made a career out of drawing attention to the legacies of the powerful timber concerns in the region. His work refers to logging, industrial harvesting, clear-cutting and the housing tracts that follow. Later works prophesy the effects of climate change on the urban environment and renewed dangers of nuclear proliferation. A touring retrospective was organized by Tacoma Art Museum in 2005. Brophy was included in the survey Outward Bound which toured Asia in 1999 and Many Wests: Artists Shape an Idea, organized and toured by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2023.

Francis Celentano (1928-2016)

Celentano is a stark example of younger artists rebelling against postwar Abstract Expressionist artists in his native New York. This is all the more surprising considering his was the first academic study of the New York School while he was an art history graduate student at New York University in 1957. With his 1966 appointment to the University of Washington School of Art, Celentano built on his Fulbright year in Rome and his exposure to the Italian Op art movement there, developing an infinite spectrum of chromatic exploration eventually spraying paint on thin plastic strips and rearranging them. Since his death at 88, attention has mushroomed in Europe.

Drie Chapek

Before completing her studies at University of Kansas, Chapek spent one term at Staffordshire University in Stoke-on-Trent (United Kingdom). Her Seattle debut at Greg Kucera Gallery in 2019 was admired by critics and curators alike. Critical opinion is divided, not on the quality of her expressive gestural oil paintings, but on their meaning. Some see landscapes; others the human figure; yet others connect them to European art history. Regardless, they challenge the viewer to immerse themselves in a swirling world of color and paint that alludes to identifiable objects and places but eludes tangible certainty of content. Besides Seattle, the canvases have been seen in London, Brooklyn, and La Conner, Washington.

Jack Chevalier (1948-2021)

Chevalier’s experiences as a soldier in Vietnam eventually colored all his art and intensified the subtle social and political dimensions of his art. Before that occurred, his mixed-media assemblage paintings of Native American imagery achieved great acclaim in a number of exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle, accompanied by reviews and essays in Artforum, Art in America, Artsmagazine, and the New York Times.  As one critic noted, “The cathartic obscured imagery of Chevalier’s paintings illustrates the need for the clarification of priorities in our hurly-burly whirlwind society.” The more politically explicit works were featured in the 1990 Whatcom Museum touring show, A Different War: Vietnam in Art, with an essay by Lucy R. Lippard.

C. T. Chew

The artist was part of a cohort of printmaking students working with Professor Bill Ritchie at the University of Washington School of Art in the 1970s. Stretching the limits of tradition, Chew pursued videos, installation art, Xerox art, assemblages, computer art and, in Chew’s case, hand-woven rugs executed in Nepal.  With tongue firmly implanted in cheek, he adopted imaginary personalities such as “Ralph Doid, City Planner” and presented commemorative postage stamps, collector purchase plans, spurious autobiographical writings and spoofs of contemporary art and criticism. Seattle Art Museum curator Patterson Sims organized Documents Northwest: C. T. Chew in 1988.

Matthew Conroy

The artist is a full-time mathematics professor at the University of Washington. Truly a polymath, Conroy extends his interest in mathematics and numbers theory to the creation of artworks that involve prints, mail-art, mosaics, sound art, videotapes, chapbooks and life drawings. With his Ph.D. from University of Colorado, Conroy has bypassed the gallery and museum art scene with direct contacts and memberships in international conceptual and avant-garde music groups. The mosaics are composed by altering number sequences and rearranging them into colored plans while the sound-works take individual notes or sounds and multiply their variants to create sound collages. 

Casey Curran

The Edmonds, Washington native graduated from Cornish College of the Arts in 2006. Since then he has actively pursued a sculptural practice that involves imaginary contraptions; kinetic viewer-participation assemblages; artist’s books; immersive installations; and collaborations with performance artists and fashion designers. The collaborations have taken him to Toronto, Vienna, Paris, and New York.  Almost uncategorizable, Curran’s studio investigations have led to invitations to group shows at museums and galleries in Michigan, New York, Arizona, and California. A solo exhibition, Escaping Earth, was at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in 2020. Curran has received awards from PONCHO and Artist Trust, with artist-residencies at Amazon and Sculpture Space in Utica, New York.

Benoit Daures

The artist is a trained French chef who emigrated to the United States in 1975 and settled in Seattle where he first worked under François Kissel at one of Seattle’s first French restaurants, Brasserie Pittsbourg, in Pioneer Square. Since then he has continuously taken pictures using a variety of photographic equipment including a camera lucida box camera and an Apple1 i-phone, all the while specializing in culinary subjects. A retrospective selection of his art was exhibited at Garden House Gallery in Seattle in 2024 and accompanied by a catalogue.

Gloria DeArcangelis

Born in Munich, DeArcangelis received her graduate degree in ceramics at the University of Washington School of Art but quickly switched to realistic paintings, portraits of young men and women, which emulated Renaissance and Mannerist artists with exaggerated light-and-dark areas or chiaroscuro. These found favor in two subsequent shows at a New York gallery, inclusion in the publications New American Paintings #61, and Artweek, and a survey at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville in 2002. Additional recognition came with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and Artist Trust.

Drake Deknatel (1943-2005)

Deknatel is a good example of an artist who matured as an expressionist abstract artist influenced by a former student of Hans Hofmann’s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but one who transitioned to figurative expressionism after moving to Germany permanently in 1994 when he was 51. Before and during his Berlin years, he maintained a studio in Seattle where he conducted life drawing classes and prepared for exhibitions in the US and abroad. His first show in the German capital was in 1994 at Galerie Querformat with his final exhibition at Galerie Michael Schultz in 2003. Other showings of his turbulent colorful canvases happened in Chicago, Vancouver, BC (Canada), and Munich.

Joe Max Emminger

The self-taught artist debuted at Polly Friedlander Gallery in Pioneer Square, Seattle’s historic art district, in 1976. For the next five decades, he showed his acrylic paintings on paper at leading galleries including MIA, Grover/Thurston, and Linda Hodges as well as in Portland. Employing abstracted human figures, birds, dogs and cats, Emminger was invited to group exhibitions at Bellevue and Tacoma art museums, in Montana, Oregon, and to Kobe, Japan. Expanding to prints, ceramics, and collages, his works are in the Tacoma Art Museum and Washington State Arts Commission collections. A retrospective survey, The Long Way Home, was held at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in 2019.

Bill Evans (1938-2020)

Born in Elma, Grays Harbor County, the artist graduated from the University of Washington with an architecture degree. After a year in Europe visiting and sketching landmark buildings, he decided to pursue a career as an architectural illustrator.  Besides his watercolors of buildings and other sites and landscapes, Evans pursued ceramic sculpture seriously at Pottery Northwest where he also taught and specialized in realistic animals and figures. These were shown in solo and group exhibitions at Pottery Northwest, Fountainhead and Sisko galleries. In later years, he taught at Gage Academy of Art.

Dennis Evans

TBD

Trevor Foster

Foster is another successful graduate of the famed ceramics department at the University of Washington School of Art where he studied under Akio Takamori, Doug Jeck and Jamie Walker. After leaving the UW, he worked as a studio assistant to satirical porcelain artist Charles Krafft for ten years before moving to Chiang Mai, Thailand to set up his own studio. His work is heavily influenced by Krafft’s blue-and-white porcelain sculptures and cups—skulls, revolvers, male heads—but has channeled Krafft into his own sensibility. He participated in a residency in porcelain at Arita, Japan, and has been invited to exhibit in five countries, including ________________. A solo exhibition was held at SAC Gallery in Bangkok.

Mark Fuller

Educated at The Evergreen State College and Antioch University, Fuller was part of both the emerging Belltown art scene, showing at William Traver Gallery and in the Pioneer Square historic arts district with the seminal Linda Farris Gallery.  His work was acquired by Seattle Art Museum when he won the coveted Betty Bowen Memorial Award in 1991. With paintings that initially combined figurative and abstract elements, Fuller’s later work, seen in Portland at Laura Russo and Elizabeth Leach galleries, was more turbulent, gestural, and colorful. Prior to the Betty Bowen Award, he received their Special Recognition in 1989.

Rolon Bert Garner (1940-2015)

Although better known as technical assistant to directors Richard E. Fuller at the Seattle Art Museum and Kay Greathouse at the Frye Art Museum, Garner also co-founded the city’s first alternative contemporary art space, and/or, and ran his own gallery Garner/Demombynes in the 1980s. Typically, in 1967 he created a painting to the accompaniment of the Seattle Symphony playing a Bruckner symphony. A 1969 show of 13 paintings at Manolides Gallery heralded the rise of Pioneer Square as an arts district followed by another about which one critic in 1971 noted “there is always a sense of fun, of Garner’s mad kind of humor.”

Lisa Gilley

After her Bachelor of Science degree at Western Washington University in visual communications education, Gilley proceeded to develop her large realistic landscapes, having her Seattle debut at Fountainhead Gallery in 2007 and moving to Woodside/Braseth Gallery in 2015. Tellingly, she has been artist-in-residence at various national parks including Grand Canyon, Zion, and Capitol Reef. Acquired by the Paul G. Allen collection, her work has been exhibited in group shows in Arizona, Alaska, New Mexico, and Texas and featured at the Whatcom Museum and Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. 

Joseph Goldberg (1947-2017)

The painter is most noted for his adaptation of encaustic, or melted-wax-and-pigment, paintings employing pale subtle colors with geological and mineralogical references as well as allusions to indigenous petroglyphs. Although praised for his completely abstract works, Goldberg also sketched and painted landscape scenes based on the forlorn flatlands of eastern Washington where he grew up on a ranch. Briefly attending the University of Washington, he began exhibiting at Seattle galleries before moving permanently to a small studio near Spokane. In the meantime, he received many awards and honors from museums and public art collections. Retrospective surveys were held at the Seattle Art Museum and Museum of Northwest Art.

Peter Gronquist

Born in Portland, Gronquist went to art school at the San Francisco Art Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York before his solo debut in Los Angeles at Gallery 1988 in 2011. Since then, his mixed-media assemblage sculptures have been seen at the Pittsfield (Massachusetts) Museum of Art; in New York; Miami; Bridgehampton, NY; and Chicago, among other venues. Gronquist extended his studio practice into multi-disciplinary objects involving “infinity mirrors,” high-relief abstract paintings, and illusionistic images that challenge viewers’ perception. One-person shows at both the New York and Seattle branches of Winston Wächter Fine Art have attracted considerable critical attention in alternative media such as WhiteHot; Juxtapoz; and Hyperallergic magazines.  

Karen Guzak

Her undergraduate science degree from the University of Colorado equipped Karen Guzak when she explored and became one of the leading practitioners of computer art. Following on her extensive national and international career as a printmaker after a degree from Cornish Institute, Guzak was included in the first surveys of computer art at The Brooklyn Museum and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Mentioned in equally important publications on the topic including Art for the Electronic Age and the Research Journal of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Guzak was honored with exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Hyacinthe Rigaud in Perpignan and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Carcassonne, France. 

Ann Hamilton

Educated at the Yale School of Art, the multi-talented sculptor, printmaker, public artist, and installation artist, has ties to Seattle that began in 1998 at On the Boards, an avant-garde performance space, in collaboration with Meg Stuart. It continued with a group show at the Henry Art Gallery in 2007, Major Works from the True Collection, and a solo exhibition there, the common S E N S E, in 2014. These led to two public art projects, one for the new Seattle Central Library and another with the Waterfront Project. The MacArthur Fellow has received numerous honorary doctorates and is Secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Group exhibitions have included Hamilton in Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain and the US.

Mike Hascall

The graduate of Yale studied with Al Held whose bold black outlines and ambiguous imagery influenced Hascall. With a debut at Rosco Louie Gallery and later exhibits at Linda Farris Gallery, Hascall was part of the growth of Pioneer Square as the center of contemporary art in Seattle. An austere palette omitted decorative tones in favor of black and white and primary colors. In other works, fireplace ash was mixed with pumice and talk into a blend with acrylic paints to create tactile surfaces. Additional exhibits occurred in Denver, Portland and New York. Hascall was featured in two milestone surveys at the Seattle Bumbershoot arts festival, Re-Critical Modernism and Decade of Abstraction 1979-1989.

Randy Hayes

Before he moved to Seattle in 1976, Hayes was a scenic designer for public television in Boston. A native of Mississippi, he attended Memphis College of Art. While co-proprietor of a used bookstore in Seattle, Hayes developed an interest in the history of photography which was to have a formative influence on his subsequent art: paintings closely based on the presence of found and original photography. Included in group shows at  the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, he had solo surveys of his art at Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville and elsewhere. He returned to live in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 2013.

Bill Herberholz

An example of a self-taught urban folk artist, Herberholz specializes in collecting recycled vintage tin containers and signs and transforming them into collage and assemblage sculptures. Advertising lithographs on tin instantly evoke American consumer history and allude to the artist’s childhood. As he noted in an interview, “I look at my tins as poems. They tell a haiku, a story. I’m trying to express a feeling, like a reaching toward something, like a softening. . . an openness.” Popular culture in the form of cartoon and comic-book heroes is a recurring theme. He has been in group exhibitions at the Queen Anne Caffe Vita coffee shop and the cooperative Columbia City Art Gallery.

George Herms

Deemed the godfather of West Coast assemblage art, Herms was influenced by Wallace Berman who “taught me that any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly.” The artist’s found-object conglomerations attracted considerable attention leading to his inclusion in the seminal Museum of Modern Art show, The Art of Assemblage, in 1961 and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Fifty California Artists in 1962. The ensuing six decades exposed the artist’s work in numerous solo surveys and group shows in California, but also in New York and Paris. Three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships were joined by grants from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation;  the Getty Institute; the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome. Herms’s historic prestige was confirmed in the Getty’s 2012 Pacific Standard Time.

Harold Hollingsworth

The artist became part of the second wave of artists at the seminal Linda Farris Gallery in Pioneer Square. A student of R. Allen Jensen at Western Washington University, Hollingsworth was influenced by Jensen’s collage approach, layering, and complicated compositions. Large-scale abstract paintings reference aspects of urban existence such as posters, graffiti, and disappearing architecture although one early critic commented on the “seductive glamour” of his pictures. After Linda Farris closed, the artist exhibited at Esther Claypool and Traver in Seattle as well as at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland and Circa Gallery in Minneapolis. He was invited to Site: Santa Fe in 1997 and has been in numerous group shows including in Chicago and Alaska.

Bill Hoppe

Bill Hoppe is another artist whose formative years were spent in Seattle but who moved to New York for greater acclaim. Nevertheless, the artist’s graduate degree from the University of Washington School of Art prepared him for a long series of geometrically inflected large-scale abstract paintings with thin washes of acrylic. A National Endowment for the Arts drawing fellowship followed milestone exhibits at and/or and Richard Hines Gallery and acquisitions by the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland Art Museums. Purchases for the Washington State Arts Commission and the Washington Art Consortium were preceded by a prize at the 1973 Grand concours international du peinture in Luxembourg. 

Lowell Hovis (1929-2001)—ENTRY TO COME

Allen Jensen (1935-2022)

Jensen was an important figure in the Skagit River Valley group of artists who settled there in the 1960s. He combined his prolific studio work as a sculptor with a long teaching career at Western Washington University where he taught between 1959 and 1997. Hailed by art critic Tom Robbins as making art that was “brutalized, ugly and blatantly erotic,” Jensen admitted he was “continually drawn back to the conditions of significant form and a desire to execute work having the most powerful vision and intellectual resonance possible.” The large-scale assemblage sculptures were featured at Tacoma Art Museum in 1967, at the Richard White Gallery in Seattle in 1971 and numerous other venues.

Steve Jensen

Educated at Cornish College of the Arts, Steve's many public art projects of his painted wood sculptures coincided with exhibitions. Twelve solo art museum exhibitions parallel 40 gallery shows in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Sun Valley and Hong Kong.  Besides the National Nordic Museum and McNay Art Museum, other museum acquisitions were joined by the Orre Nobles Art Collection of the Ballard High School Foundation in 2023.

Fay Jones

The figurative/narrative painter and printmaker moved to Seattle in 1960 and premiered her art at Francine Seders Gallery a decade later. In the ensuing 50 years, she exhibited widely throughout the Pacific Northwest at exhibitions in Tacoma; Portland; Spokane; Boise, Idaho; and Salem, Oregon. With enigmatic male and female figures, animals, and quasi-exotic locales, as one critic put it: Jones “turned the tables on. . . Tobey. . .and . . . Graves. .  .who brought an Asian sensibility to American art in terms of subject matter and technique. [Jones] chronicles in symbol and anecdote the presence of Americans in Asia and the Pacific Rim.” She went on to expand her range of subjects which were seen in the milestone exhibits, Seattle Painting 1925-1985 (Bumbershoot) and Show of Hands: Pacific Northwest Women Artists 1880-2010 (Whatcom Museum). Critic Regina Hackett and novelist Sondra Shulman wrote the 1996 retrospective catalogue for the Boise Art Museum. Two National Endowment for the Arts grants were joined by the Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Achievement and a fellowship from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.  Her largest work is a mural in the Westlake Station of the King County Metro transit tunnel.

Peter Juvonen

“I never attended art school; my inspiration often comes completely from my imagination. My paintings are visual re-interpretations of both the real and surreal.” Born in Turku, Finland, Juvonen exhibited widely in Seattle where one critic in the Seattle Times held that his paintings were “quick, dragged forms against the steady pulse of underlying geometry suggest[ing] music.” With solo shows at the Tacoma Art Museum in 1988 and Nordic Heritage Museum in 2007, the artist also exhibited in Oregon, Texas, and Idaho. Represented in corporate and private collections, Juvonen is part of the Seattle City Light Portable Works Collection and the Washington State Arts Commission.

Andrew Keating

The graduate of Hobart College and the University of Washington School of Art was a student of Jacob Lawrence. Among the first painters in the Belltown neighborhood north of the Pike Place Market, Keating was a central part of the community of artists, writers, studios, restaurants, bookstores and small galleries. His first exhibitions of cartoonish ominous figures were at Traver Gallery, followed by shows at Linda Farris Gallery. He was part of the first artist-design team for the City of Seattle, Viewland/Hoffman Power Substation, which became a national model for collaborative art-in-public-places projects. His uneasy blend of distorted human figures and satirical humor garnered numerous accolades before his move to New York in 1991.

Richard Kehl (1936-2025)

The artist was educated at Kansas City Art Institute. A period in New York immersed him in Abstract Expressionism before being hired at the University of Washington School of Art in 1968 where he taught until his retirement in 19____. Prior to coming to Seattle, his largest work, a 40-foot-wide mural, was displayed at the Vatican Pavilion during the 1965 New York World’s Fair. An extraordinarily prolific career as a graphic designer of magazine and album covers, book illustrations, photography, collages and paintings occurred simultaneously with many students whom he told, “The innocent eye is not about naming things.” A “visual poet” who made “Kehlages,” Kehl created over 20 illustrated books of his own. A retrospective, Precise Mysteries, was organized at SAFECO Insurance Companies in 1993.

Ken Kelly

Born in Arkansas and educated at the University of Georgia and University of Arizona, Ken Kelly’s debut in Seattle was at Cliff Michel Gallery in 1987. Large, thickly painted oils on canvas were referred to by one critic as “swamp gothic,” alluding to the artist’s Southern background of darkened imagery and exaggerated gestures. Subsequent attention at galleries across the nation led to two shows in New York at Littlejohn Contemporary. Reinforced by extensive critical acclaim, Kelly’s works were acquired by art museums in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, and Orange County, California. As his imagery evolved toward stricter geometric divisions, he garnered two awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the 1989 Betty Bowen Memorial Award.

Michael Knutson

Knutson is an example of an artist who made a radical about-face in his style early in his career and, contrary to expectations and trends in the art world, extended the limits of modernist abstraction. Working with the abstract modernist faculty (including Optical Perceptualist Francis Celentano) at the University of Washington School of Art, Knutson went on to Yale to study with realist William Albright. However, upon his return to the Pacific Northwest, he dropped the realism and taught at Reed College from 1982 until his retirement in ____. At first translating Greek myths into highly geometric abstractions, Knutson progressed to non-representational drawings and paintings of hallucinatory mathematical precision and greatly expanded scale. Knutson was in the milestone exhibitions at the Bumbershoot arts festivals, Re-Critical Modernism and Decade of Abstraction 1979-1989. Abstract Art in the Seattle Arts Commission Collection featured his work at the Seattle Center Pavilion. In addition to a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a painting was acquired by the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 2010.

David Kroll

The Vashon Island resident moved to the Pacific Northwest from Chicago in 2002 continuing an extensive career of surrealistic landscapes with birds and still life objects which have attracted considerable attention. Besides his Seattle debut at Grover/Thurston in 1995, Kroll had solo shows in other Seattle galleries as well as in New York, Chicago, Denver, Nashville, and Philadelphia. He was selected for the 1989 Milan Internazionale d’arte contemporanea and was in group exhibitions across the nation. Acquired by the Boise Art Museum and numerous corporations, Kroll’s substantial critical record includes Artforum, Art in America, International Contemporary Art, and Art and Antiques. A monograph by Linda Tesner and James Yood appeared in 2016.

Cheryl Laemmle

The Minneapolis native is another example of an artist who spent time in Seattle and moved to New York to pursue ambitious career goals. Despite important shows at Linda Farris and Greg Kucera galleries, acclaim for her melancholy surrealist paintings of animals, decoys, and still lifes grew out of the ferment of the East Village art scene in the 1980s. Her studies with quasi-surrealist painter Robert Helm at Washington State University have gone unremarked but were influential on her expansive style executed in large, exquisitely brushed oil paintings. Showered with awards—Vera List, National Endowment for the Arts, Venice Biennale—Laemmle received a retrospective survey at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 1989. She was only 42. 

Carolyn Law

Carolyn Law was part of the cohort of former students of Bill Ritchie at the University of Washington School of Art who went on to form the original stable of the Linda Farris Gallery and, in the process, participate in the formation of Pioneer Square in Seattle as the first contemporary art district. Her sparse installations and austere prints were shows at Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the Smithsonian Institution American Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. Largely colorless, using found or store-bought materials, her art morphed into projects for the Seattle City Light Broad Street Substation, the Factoria Transfer Station and Novelty Hill Bridge, among others.

John Lesperance

Self-styled as an outsider or folk artist, Lesperance began his career as an artist in his late 30s, after a stint as a real estate broker, devoid of any formal instruction or tutoring. With numerous exhibitions since his 1996 debut at Lead Gallery, the artist explored assemblages, totems, abstract paintings, totems, and garden ornament sculptures. With genres rather than subjective motives determining his style, Lesperance admitted that “my work seldom springs from an intentional, well-thought-out plan,” but claims his creative process is still intuitive. Regardless, the wide range of undertakings suggests a desire to examine an entire scope of approaches, all filtered through the implementation of found objects, metal-casting, welding, painting, and altered imaginary traffic signs with humorous texts.

Charles Luce

Luce is another example of an artist who spent formative years in Seattle before moving permanently to New York. As part of the original stable at the city’s first contemporary art gallery, Linda Farris in the nascent historic arts district Pioneer Square, Luce was one of four Farris artists in the seminal Seattle Art Museum exhibition, New Ideas #1, curated by Charles Cowles in 1979. Charles Luce’s abstract creations have honored him with the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. They are included among the collections of the Library of Congress, the U.S. State Department, the Seattle Art Museum and the Marvin & Ruth Sachner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. They have also been seen in group exhibitions in Japan, Germany, France and South Africa.

Spike Mafford

Spike Mafford is a pseudonym, an anagram of the artist’s father’s name, Mike Spafford. Educated at Pomona College, the artist was born in Mexico where he spent much of his childhood and visited extensively as an adult. Specializing in large-scale color photographs, the artist has exhibited widely through the Pacific Northwest and Mexico. Subjects include landscapes, urban and village scenes, all using various technical approaches. Besides his Seattle debut, Images of Mexico, at Galleria Potatohead in 1989, Mafford was included in two milestone surveys, Images of Seattle 1925-1985 at Jackson Street Gallery and Seattle Photography 1931-1991 at the City of Seattle Bumbershoot arts festival. Recipient of a Seattle Arts Commission Mayor’s Arts Award, he also received the 1997 Ernst Hass Award and an award at the 1994 Bellevue Art Museum Pacific Northwest Annual.

Cameron Martin

The Seattle native began his career in Seattle after studying at Brown University and the Whitney Art Museum Independent Study Program before moving to New York permanently. His Seattle debut was at Howard House in 1999 and continued, returning from New York, at James Harris Gallery in 2014, 2017, and 2024. Martin’s paintings began as abstracted landscapes and have evolved into layered geometric canvases, what Art in America called his “tragicomic abstraction.” Besides New York, he had solo exhibitions in Dallas, Washington, DC, Tokyo and Salzburg, with a solo survey at Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. Group exhibitions featured him in Milan, Zürich and Deurle, Belgium. The 2004 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial included his work and he was invited to In Monet’s Garden at the Musée Marmottan in Paris.

Alden Mason (1919-2013)

Like classmates Wendell Brazeau and Spencer Moseley, Alden Mason was invited to teach at the University of Washington School of Art after his 1947 MFA degree was completed. Until his retirement in 1981, Mason retained a full-time prolific studio career that led to exhibits across the nation, in Canada, and, most significantly, New York. Never locked into one style, his art developed steadily over the next 60 years and vacillated between figurative expressionism and abstract modernism. Debuting while still a student at the university’s Henry Art Gallery, he followed at Seattle’s first modern art gallery, Zoe Dusanne, in 1957, and moved to the city’s second modern art gallery, Gordon Woodside, in 1962. Subsequent exhibitions occurred in Los Angeles and Vancouver, British Columbia, before an invitation in 1973 from Allan Stone Gallery in New York to show his Burpee Garden paintings, immediately acclaimed by critics as the next iteration of the Color Field School with their thin washes of acrylic paint in pools and overlapping blobby areas.  Numerous gallery and museum exhibitions occurred during his lifetime along with significant historical art surveys and public art commissions. A posthumous retrospective was held in 2015 at Wright Exhibition Space in Seattle. 

Robert McCauley

Adept at co-existing in two seemingly contradictory art worlds—conceptual art and commercial wildlife art—Mount Vernon, Washington-born Robert McCauley has developed a national career respected by both serious art critics and wildlife art collectors. He was featured in Western Visions at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming but also written about by Artforum critic James Yood in the catalogue for his Rockford Art Museum retrospective. Educated at Western Washington University and Washington State University under Gaylen Hansen, the Skagit Valley resident combines framing texts with improbable pictures of bears, dogs, and deer, described by one critic as “a mournful and self-aware distance from the American past.” American Fiction, another retrospective, was held at Museum of Northwest Art in 2018.

Stephen McClelland

After attending Indiana University and Cranbrook Academy of Art, McClelland received his graduate degree from the University of Washington School of Art. Building on the School’s long tradition of abstract modernism, the artist’s paintings combine geometry and natural imagery. To one critic writing in Art in America, they “seem to be a metaphorical confrontation between planned geometric structures and uncultivated, sprawling growth.” Numerous exhibitions in Portland and Seattle include a survey at Seattle Pacific University in 1980. Besides various corporate, public and museum collections including Microsoft, a painting is at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering on the UW campus.  

Gene Gentry McMahon

Receiving her MFA at the University of Washington School of Art at age 35, Gene McMahon made up for lost time with a raft of exhibitions featuring her paintings and prints widely hailed by art critics and noted by museum curators, collectors, and those interested in art that reflected feminist issues. In McMahon’s art such themes were often affectionately parodied or satirized. With identifiable figures alluding to celebrities and others, the artist was influenced by political caricature and other artists with sociocritical intentions. While exhibiting sporadically over a 50-year period and becoming involved in various public art murals, McMahon expanded her purview of subjects into male-female relationships, consumer culture, race, and the fate of female politicians.

Nancy Mee

The University of Washington School of Art graduate was part of the cohort of students of Professor Bill Ritchie who not only followed his encouragement to expand the limits of printmaking but whom, after graduating, formed the first stable of Linda Farris Gallery, one of the leading galleries in the nascent historic arts district, Pioneer Square. Mee returned to Seattle after studying under the legendary printmaker Stanley William Hayter in Paris and, while completing her BFA, had a part-time job at the Health Sciences Library. Poring over the medical journals with photographs of young girls with spinal diseases, Mee found her first important theme: the depiction through alterations of the X-rays of the ailing adolescent girls. Her Linda Farris debut in 1980 launched a career that would continue for over 50 years and include solo exhibitions across the nation.

Her other key theme was the imagery of Classical Greek and Roman statues of women sandblasted onto glass which elicited invitations to group shows in New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Boston and Milwaukee and France. A monograph, Femina Lucida: The Art of Nancy Mee, accompanied a full-scale retrospective at Museum of Northwest Arts in 2026.

Jacques Moitoret

The artist studied at University of Washington School of Art and the École des beaux arts in Avignon, France. Realistic in style but with ingenious surrealistic wrinkles, the artist has developed an underground following partly due to his portraits of celebrity art-world figures including Max Ernst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Salvador Dalí.  An important debut in the early days of Pioneer Square, Seattle’s historic arts district, at Main Street Gallery spurred one critic to comment there was “more than enough to view—and terrorize your mind.” Before exhibitions at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art in New York and the Flint Institute of Arts, a Seattle Times critic described his 1992 exhibition as “a kinky blend of 19^th-century historical paintings and surrealism, rendered with hallucinatory crispness.”

Linda Okazaki

The artist was educated at Washington State University where he also was hired to teach. Her paintings and watercolors of figurative fantasy scenes were exhibited at Francine Seders Gallery between 1981 and 1992 and she was invited to group exhibitions at the Seattle and Tacoma art museums, the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture and Linda Hodges Gallery. The latter exhibit, Little Romances/Little Fictions, was reviewed in the Canadian art magazine Vanguard in 1984. Previously, critic Lucy R. Lippard singled out Okazaki in an important article in Art in America, “Northwest Passage,” in 1976. Bainbridge Island Museum of Art organized Into the Light, a larger retrospective in 2023.

Julie Paschkis

The artist attended Cornell University before transferring to the Rochester Institute of Technology School for American Craftsmen in 1980. Since then, Julie Paschkis has juggled several careers at once: visual artist making paintings; public artist creating mosaic murals and prints; award-winning children’s book illustrator; and designer of fabrics, rugs, and pillows. Her art in public places projects have included work for  Sound Transit; Oregon Health Center; Mayo Clinic; and the King County Library System. Paschkis’s paintings, which have strong folk art and naïve influences, have been seen in Portland and Texas as well as her long association with MIA and Grover/Thurston galleries in Pioneer Square followed by and a solo museum show at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in 2014.

Camille Patha (1938-2023)

The Seattle native completed her graduate degree at University of Washington School of Art in 1965. Signing her first paintings with her initials, she circumvented the prejudice against women artists and won numerous awards, leading to her Seattle debut at Gail Chase and Polly Friedlander galleries in 1972. Honored with her first retrospective in 1979 at Bellevue Art Museum, Patha’s oeuvre spanned illusionistic landscapes, animal imagery, surrealistic scenes of Northwest locales and large-scale gestural abstractions. Exhibits at Gordon Woodside and Foster/White galleries drew the attention of curators who invited her to group exhibitions in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, British Columbia, and the Osaka World’s Fair. She was included in the milestone survey, Seattle Painting 1925-1985, at Seattle’s Bumbershoot arts festival and feted at the Tacoma Art Exhibition in the final year of her life. A full-scale monograph, Camille Patha: Geography of Desire, by Matthew Kangas appeared in 2006 with a preface by Judy Chicago.

Eugene Pizzuto (1925-2004)

A graduate of University of Wisconsin and Cranbrook Academy of Art, Pizzuto taught at the University of Washington School of Art between 1960 and 1991. Classically trained in representational figurative and landscape imagery, the artist drew inspiration from travels to Rome as well as Mount Rainier and Grand Coulee Dam. Bellevue Art Museum featured a survey of his works on paper in 1985 followed by exhibits at Seattle galleries including Lisa Harris in 1989 and 1991. While rooted in strict observation, the drawings and paintings were vigorously executed with rapid gestures and vivid compositions that undercut the traditional subjects he favored.

Seth Polanski

Polanski was studying art history at Cornish College of the Arts when he developed an interest in printmaking and began his dual career: visual artist and legal authority on creative and intellectual property. He also assisted former University of Washington School of Art printmaker Bill Ritchie in the making of a video about the art of intaglio (embossed) printmaking. Acquired by various private collections, Polanski was included in Martin of Tours: The Art of St. Martin’s Abbey, a survey of the ecclesiastic institution’s art collection which was on view at the Tacoma Art Museum in 1986 and in Olympia, near the Abbey, the following year.

Joe Reno

Educated in New York at the Art Students League under Vaclav Vytlacil and Edwin Dickinson after a stint in Germany in the US Army, the artist has ever since maintained a studio in his family home in Ballard. Combining realistic training with vigorous brushwork, his thickly brushed oil paintings join watercolors, drawings, prints, monotypes, photographs, videotapes, musical compositions and sculptures. Retrospectives were held in 1983 at Jackson Street Gallery (Self-Portraits) and Kirkland Arts Center (Works on Paper) in 2000. The special commission of a beachscape is in the Orre Nobles Art Collection of the Ballard High School Foundation. Another milestone survey that included Reno was Eccentric Satellites at the City of Seattle Bumbershoot arts festival in 1986.

Bill Ritchie

A pioneer in the expansion of printmaking into electronic processes including video art graduated from Central Washington University and received a graduate degree from San Jose State College in 1966. Appointed professor of art at University of Washington School of Art in 1966 where he taught until 1985, his significance involves not only his own art which was nationally and internationally exhibited but the cohort of students who followed his innovative paths and formed the core of contemporary art in Seattle in the mid-1970s (C. T. Chew, Carolyn Law, Sherry Markovitz, Peter Millett, Norie Sato and Nancy Mee). Critic Ron Glowen noted in 1980 that Ritchie “maintains a belief in the traditional role of the art object as a tangible vehicle for informing the viewer.”

Kathy Ross

The artist has her studio on Harstine Island in Puget Sound south of Seattle. Long-time member of Northwest Designer Craftsmen, Ross specializes in adapting tin to create elaborate colored and reconfigured assemblage sculptures which she exhibits at craft and design fairs including Bellevue Arts Museum Arts Fair and La Quinta Arts Festival in California. She makes linoleum block prints which connect to the imagery of her sculptures. The multifaceted objects allude to maps, books, skulls, skeletons, food and shelter, “broken jewelry,” fish and squid. One long series involved horses. As one curator explained, “The tension between connection and separation; and the mix of personal and political in her art” typifies her studio practice. Besides numerous group shows in galleries and art fairs, she received an extensive survey of her art, Serious Fun, at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in 2024.

Brad Rude

After attending Central Washington University, Brad Rude went to Maryland Institute College of Art where he studied painting, drawing and, crucially, bronze sculpture. Known for his small- and large-scale constructions of bronze-cast wild animals with smaller animals often perched atop them, Rude also painted large-scale animal landscapes. A deep devotion to the wild environment defines his content, treated in many different ways from straightforward realistic depictions to fanciful visions of animals in strange settings. As a result, his work has attracted two types of collectors and curators: wildlife art enthusiasts who have acquired his work in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming, and those who see his unusual approach to animal imagery as deftly painted and exquisitely patinated.  Critics have admired him in Artweek, Sculpture, World Sculpture News, and Southwest Art. Museum exhibitions and acquisitions include the Buffalo Bill Historical Center; National Museum of Wildlife Art; Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture; Whatcom Museum and Yellowstone Art Museum.

Hib Sabin

The artist was educated at University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and University of Pittsburgh where he studied art and art history. After many years as a painter, he switched to sculpture in 1991 and embarked on a highly successful career as an artist, whose themes are the relationships between humans and animals, the connection of human to a spiritual world, and an interest in shamanism and animistic mythology. Symbols of these ideas take the form of wild animals including wolves, owls, ravens, bears, and eagles. Besides numerous exhibitions in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont and Washington State, a comprehensive monograph, Hib Sabin: Other Side of Silence, The Far Side of Time, was published by Unicorn in 2019. Five other publications were issued by Stonington Gallery in Seattle.     

André Gene Samson

The 1986 cum laude graduate of Cornish College of the Arts majored in painting and drawing. While at Cornish he was listed as the art department representative in Who’s Who in American Universities and Colleges. Earlier studies in calligraphy were at Oregon School of Arts and Crafts. Samson was included in the commemorative exhibition of his high school, Bush School of Seattle, Legacy in the Arts 1924 to 2000. As his art developed using mathematical systems, number patterns, and color-coding, he was published in Escapements: Typewritten Tales from Post-Digital Worlds. Two important surveys featured his art: Rational Systems, at Portland Community College and Sequence and Semaphore at the Museum of Art, Washington State University.

Elizabeth Sandvig (1937-2007)

The Seattle native spent much of her youth in Mexico City where her mother was a librarian at the US Embassy. Educated at Pomona College and Radcliffe, Sandvig moved to Seattle when her husband, artist Michael Spafford, accepted a teaching job at the University of Washington School of Art. Over her long career, with periods of time spent back in Mexico City and Rome, Italy, Sandvig explored monotypes, sculptures, and most importantly paintings often executed with oil sticks as well as brushes. The effect was a coarsening of surface that exuded bright colors with emphatic compositions of animals, plants and people. Besides numerous solo and group exhibitions at Francine Seders Gallery, Sandvig was featured in the watershed survey Show of Hands: Northwest Women Artists 1880-2010 at Whatcom Museum in 2010.  I Surprise Myself: The Art of Elizabeth Sandvig, by Regina Hackett appeared in 2007. That same year, she received the Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

Peter Santino

The artist is another example of an artist who spent formative years in Seattle developing an avant-garde style—words painted on clear plastic mounted on large metal ovals—who then moved on to New York in 1982. While showing in Pioneer Square, first at Rosco Louie and then at Linda Farris galleries, Santino elicited a considerable range of opinion among the city’s burgeoning community of art critics. Each construction had a provocative slogan such as “Death of Formalism,” “Death of Minimalism,” or “Problems in American Democracy.” True to form, after his East Village gallery debut, he was invited to exhibit in Geneva, Vienna, Florence, the Netherlands, Germany and Japan.

Stephanie Schulz

Educated at the University of Washington School of Art, Schulz also received a Master of Health Administration degree at the UW. Her art involves found objects, often with medical allusions. Her solo debut was at Frock Shop Boutique Gallery in 2012. Since then, she has exhibited in group exhibitions at True Love, Javasti Café, and Retrofit Home, all in Seattle. Her work is included in over 50 private collections in the Pacific Northwest as well as at the University of Washington Medical Center.

Scott Smith

The graduate of the Burnley School of Professional Art and Design in Seattle developed a simultaneous career as a fine artist and corporate illustrator, graphic designer, and product director, working at Weyerhaeuser Co. for 15 years. At the same time, he exhibited his paintings of animals, male and female figures, and birds, often in situations of comic distress. Best known for his multiples, Seattle Art Museum acquired one of his artist’s books. In 2022, the Kresge Foundation Art Gallery at University of Olivet in Michigan organized A Curious Backyard Community, a retrospective survey

Michael Spafford (1935-2022)

The artist was born in Palm Springs, California and educated as an art historian at Pomona College under Peter Selz and Harvard University with Sydney Freedberg before becoming a painter while living in Mexico City. Hired at the University of Washington School of Art in 1963, he remained an influential instructor until retirement in 1994. While a dedicated academic, Spafford was a determined and prolific artist focusing on a mixture of Classical Greek and Roman myths as well as Aztec and Mayan tales. Working on an exceptionally large scale, he completed a number of public-art murals. The Rome Prize of the American Academy in 1967 brought him to Italy for further study and travel to Greece with an additional stay in Greece in 2000. Major surveys occurred at the Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Northwest Art, Bellevue Art Museum and Dartmouth College. A monograph by Bruce Guenther appeared in 2018.

Julie Speidel (1941-2025)

The prominent sculptor of pedestal works, large-scale outdoor monuments and prints began as a jewelry artist after her studies at University of Washington, University of Grenoble, and Cornish Institute. At the encouragement of art dealer Linda Farris, Speidel turned to welding and fabricating abstract modular bronze and metal sculptures that were noted by critics and collected by individuals, art museums and corporations. Her Pioneer Square debut with Farris was followed by numerous exhibitions in Idaho, California, Colorado and New York, where her final exhibition in 2017 was praised by critic Donald B. Kuspit in Artforum. Besides over 60 commissions and museum acquisitions, Speidel was invited to be in A Concise History of Northwest Art at Tacoma Art Museum and Art in Architecture at Whatcom Museum, among many other surveys. A full-scale monograph, Julie Speidel: The Center Holds, by Matthew Kangas was published in association with Tacoma Art Museum in 2018.

Pat Steir (1938-2026)

Pat Steir was among the most acclaimed American painters of the past five decades. She was known for her extension of abstract painting into a variant of Helen Frankenthaler’s pouring and pooling of paint rather than brushing it. Besides dozens of solo shows within the US, she exhibited widely in Europe where her work was featured at the Tate Gallery in London and collected by the Louvre. Historically related to feminist paintings and literature, Steir’s earliest work had strong conceptual overtones until she transitioned to what she calls her “dripped, splashed and poured” works many of which are very large-scale tying her to the heroic aspects of Abstract Expressionism, a fact noted by many of the hundreds of art critics who have discussed her work. Other museum acquisitions of her work include the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In the Pacific Northwest, her art was seen at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland and Ochi Fine Art in Ketchum, Idaho.  President Obama gave her the National Medal of the Arts in 2017.

Joe Tilson (1928-2023)

Following his 1979 retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, British artist and co-founder of Pop Art, had a single exhibition of his work in Seattle at Erica Williams/Anne Johnson Gallery. Although noted by one critic as “yet another example of the powerful impact American art has had on parallel developments abroad,” it might be more accurate to credit British artists—friends of Tilson’s from the Royal College of Art, David Hockney and Peter Blake (and Richard Hamilton)—with predating the American Pop artists such as Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein. Appointed a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts, Tilson was nevertheless, according to Artforum, “influenced by the bright promise of American advertising, with its punchy colors, bold logos and exuberant sensibility.” A retrospective was organized by Marlborough Gallery in the final year of his life.

Gerard Tsutakawa

The artist apprenticed with his sculptor father, George Tsutakawa, the nation’s leading bronze-fountain sculptor. Assisting his parent, Gerard learned fabrication techniques and inherited an abstracted imagery of nature, water, and environmental topics relating to his Japanese heritage and an affinity to Pacific Rim cultures. On his own, with his gallery debut at Cicada in 1978, the younger Tsutakawa simultaneously pursued large-scale free-standing bronze sculptures and fountains alongside periodic series of pedestal-scale abstract sculptures shown nationwide. While public and private commissions occurred in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York, and abroad in China and Japan, he was featured in important museum surveys including Shapes at Museum of Northwest Art, Masterworks: Pacific Northwest Arts & Crafts Now at Bellevue Art Museum; and the milestone Seattle Sculpture 1927-1987 at the City of Seattle Bumbershoot arts festival.  

Liza von Rosenstiel

With an undergraduate degree from Rhode Island School of Design, von Rosenstiel launched her art career in Seattle at Davidson Galleries in 1983 and continued showing there through 2000. She was also invited to participate in group exhibitions in San Francisco, San Diego and Münster, Germany. Von Rosenstiel received awards from the California Arts Council and Artist Trust. Developing imagery of animals, the human figure, and the natural world, the artist expanded her studio practice into painted assemblages. Fifteen paintings and constructions were acquired by the Washington State Arts Commission for various educational institutions including primary, secondary and higher education sites.

Christopher John Watts

The British-born artist was influenced by the English Systems Group (1969-1976) who valued “constructivist, non-figurative and mathematically driven art.” Originally chairing the Fine Arts department at Cornish Institute, he was promoted to Washington State University in 1988 where he taught until his 2015 retirement. A 1983 exhibit at Traver Sutton Gallery of numerically structured grid drawings tied individual colors to numbers. Two group shows in New York led to invitations from museums in the United Kingdom, British Columbia, and Mondrianhuis in the Netherlands. He was featured in a milestone exhibition, Decade of Abstraction 1979-1989, held at Seattle’s Bumbershoot arts festival in 1989.

Hugh Webb

The graduate of University of Oregon and University of Utah taught for many years at Portland Community College and was Visiting Artist at Ohio State University in 1983. Besides frequent one-person exhibitions throughout the Pacific Northwest including University of Oregon Museum of Art, Whatcom Museum of Art, and Washington State University Museum of Art, Webb’s work was also seen in solo shows in Cleveland and New Orleans. A group show at Linda Farris Gallery was an early exposure in Seattle while group exhibitions included his art in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Wyoming. His landscapes and multi-media works are in museums and public art collections in Washington State, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.   

Bill Whipple

The University of Washington graduate is known for his variant of untutored urban and rural folk art, what one critic referred to as “faux folk” and another accused of “cheap charm.” Not surprisingly, his art found great reception in the region’s many art in public places programs. Nevertheless, his career began in 1976 at the avant-garde alternative space, and/or, continuing at the quasi-underground Rosco Louie, eventually assimilating into mainstream galleries Traver Sutton and Esther Claypool. Whipple’s art evokes a manufactured Americana, a combination of dad’s workshop and an elf’s whimsical toy factory. Noted for its kinetic, viewer-activated qualities, it is often made of unpainted wood and found objects meant to resemble functional tools.