Children’s Touchstone with Eagles

James Washington

Bailey Gatzert Elementary School

A phoenix, a fawn, a scapegoat, eagles—a series of animals surrounds a central touchstone in this work outside Bailey Gatzert Elementary School. Celebrated artist James Washington, Jr. created Children’s Touchstone with Eagles specifically for the site in Seattle’s Central District, only a few blocks from his own home and studio. In it he depicted creatures from legend and myth as a way to support the spiritual and emotional development of the school’s young students—to inspire in them a hope for the future. The touchstone, he said, is a source of energy for all who touch it. 

Washington is particularly well known for his stone sculptures depicting creatures and creation. "I wait until intuition moves me, and then I begin,” he once told Regina Hackett, longtime art critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “I have to know the animal or individual before I can sculpt him. Not just know his features but feel them. I have to be him. Not until I get to the point where I am the animal can I release the spiritual force into the inanimate material and animate it.” 

Children’s Touchstone with Eagles was commissioned as part of the Honors Program, which recognizes visual artists who have made significant contributions to our region through the sustained production of high-quality artwork. 

Washington (1911 – 2000), was born in Mississippi, one of six children in a religious Baptist family (his father was a minister) and began painting in his teens. In 1943 his work with the Civil Service brough him to the Pacific Northwest, where he studied with Mark Tobey and became part of the modern art community known as the Northwest School. Washington began working with volcanic stone as his primary medium in 1956, following a poignant encounter with the material on the streets of Mexico during a 1951 trip to meet Diego Rivera. His art career spanned more than 50 years, throughout which time he also curated art exhibitions at Mount Zion Baptist Church. In 1992, his Central District home and studio were designated cultural landmarks by the City of Seattle. Washington’s artwork has been widely exhibited and is contained in some 600 private and public collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, and the Seattle Art Museum.