Back in 2008, JoEllen Wang was living in Ballard near Interbay, an in-between zone where RVs often parked. She found them charming, nostalgic. To her, in their autonomous freedom to roam, they hinted at the American dream. She started painting little portraits of them.

Over the years, as the region’s affordability issues intensified, the city began to remove RVs from the streets of Wang’s neighborhood. “They’d scrape them up and haul them away,” she says. “But they’d always come back, and they’d just be worse and worse off.” By then, her interest in the RVs had long since become a meditation on the nuances of shelter, choice, and insecurity.

Then the tarps started to appear, strapped to the roofs of deteriorating campers—and Wang started painting them instead. “I couldn’t paint the campers anymore; they were so sad,” she says.

Wang’s current Gallery 4Culture exhibition, Marginalia, includes a variety of her meticulous oil paintings of tarps, both big and small. Their shapes only suggest the mobile dwellings beneath them, resembling anthropomorphized figures teetering on bungie cord legs.

As an architect whose current practice focuses on residential buildings, “structures are part of what I think about and do,” Wang says. “At the time, I was watching my kids build pillow forts in the living room, and I was like, that’s never going to stand up. It’s the same with tarps.”

And yet, every day, people would try again and again to make them stay put. To Wang, the constantly reconfigured, ubiquitous blue sheets were evidence of the human impulse to create a safe space to call your own. They were a sign of life. “They were also just so ridiculous and inept,” she says. “Like, okay, maybe if I put one bungee here and one here, it’ll be fine. Inevitably it’s not fine.”

More and more, Wang found herself thinking about the places where RVs and tarps end up—on the edges of neighborhoods that are neither industrial nor residential, places where blackberries are also inevitably found. Wang questions the term “invasive” and considers blackberries “unfairly villainized,” not unlike RVs and their occupants. She points out that lately these spots are dotted with hulking concrete eco blocks that prevent people from parking on the streets.

“None of this is legal,” she says of the eco blocks and the stationary RVs. “None of this is actually allowed to stay long-term in public parking spaces. But there’s kind of a social norm where one is acceptable and one’s not. It’s a fascinating gray area.”

Each of Wang’s tarp paintings starts with a photo. Whenever she sees a tarp she likes (the more strings and bungies attached to it the better), she’ll take a quick picture. From there, she uses a combination of grid transfer, color-blocking, and projection techniques to render the tarp in hyper-realistic detail, depending on the size of the painting. “I do get kind of sucked in and then I’m like, oh my gosh, how many hours have gone by and I’ve painted two square inches or something.”

In addition to Wang’s paintings, Marginalia also features some of the artist’s work with tarps as the medium rather than the subject. In 2022, she created a temporary installation along the Beacon Hill Greenway, a sloped site beneath high-voltage electrical lines, on the edge of the neighborhood—a place where RVs sometimes park. Inspired by Seattle’s recent proliferation of Eastern Cottontails (which, Wang points out, are not invasive), she created 250 bunnies using tarps for their ears. For their bodies, she vacuum-formed milk jugs that she collected and melted in her toaster oven. Several of the bunnies are now on view, occupying the nooks and crannies of the gallery.

The bunnies allowed Wang to explore her lifelong interest in art that appears in unexpected, everyday places. Lately, she says, she feels increasingly interested in public and guerrilla art—and the tension between them. “I aspire to make artwork that’s relevant in someone’s life.”

At this point, nearly 20 years have passed since Wang first started painting RV studies and she has been obsessing over tarps for well over a decade. Will she continue?

“I would like to move on from them!” she laughs. “It’s a crummy material to work with—it shreds, it doesn’t melt well. I feel like I’ve kind of hit the limit of what I can do with it as a material.”

If she does move on to a new material muse, Wang will be looking for something that, like tarps, can tap into economic, environmental, and social themes all at once. “It’s got to be something underrated and immediately recognizable,” she says.

Marginalia is on view at Gallery 4Culture through Thursday, Dec. 5. A closing reception will be held that night from 6:00 – 8:00pm.

Michael Hong was attempting to recreate a cucumber dish that his mom had been making for him all his life. The dish seemed simple enough, but even with her recipe, and after many attempts, he just couldn’t get it right.

That’s when it hit him: He was missing his mother’s son-maat, the Korean concept of hand-flavor. “It’s this idea that there’s an indescribable flavor that comes from the hand—a lot of times rooted in the love and affection that the person who is cooking has for the person who will eat,” Hong says. Hand-flavor is passed down from generation to generation, often along maternal lines.

The connection to his art-making was an immediate aha! When Hong works with clay, he’s constantly engaged in tactile feedback with the material; he responds to the clay, and the clay responds to him. This, too, was hand-flavor. “I was thinking about this bodily relationship that I have with the clay,” he explains. “The exchange that happens as I interact with it must be my hand-flavor coming out.”

He knew what hand-flavor tasted like, but what did it look like? Hong brought that question into his studio and began to investigate. Over time, the question evolved, and he started to ask himself, where does my hand-flavor come from? The work he was making became an exploration of his own identity and the forces that shaped him.

The results of this research are currently on view in Hong’s Gallery 4Culture exhibition, Oi-ee Moo-chim, which takes its name from the Korean cucumber dish that first set it in motion. The exhibition features a series of abstract self-portraits as well as a series of pots that reference traditional Korean fermentation vessels called hangari. The artworks in the show also incorporate familiar household items that Hong remembers from his youth, like rice bags, pepper flakes, work gloves, and yarn.

Hong grew up in Koreatown, Los Angeles, a three-square-mile neighborhood dense with Korean and Korean American people and traditions. He and his two brothers were raised by their single mother, an immigrant, who worked hard to keep the family afloat.

“I never really see her take a break,” Hong says. “If she does take a break, it’s always with TV on in the background while she’s doing something else. Especially with cooking, she’s always going the long way with the time and work she puts into it. It’s like a way of saying ‘I love you.’”

Reflecting on his mother’s effort offered Hong a way to consider and embrace his own ferocious work ethic. He sees her constant activity as a coping mechanism, a way of escaping the uncertainties of life. “There’s a lot of similarities between being a single mother, raising three kids and me just living with my own uncertainties,” he says.

The self-portraits in Oi-ee Moo-chim began with Hong thinking about the physical space he occupies with his body. They all start at the base with his footprint and build to his 6-foot height by repeating a small pinching motion over and over again. The repetition creates a texture Hong calls “dumpling skin” and they require a ton of labor. “It’s out of that repetition and monotony that I’m trying to visually articulate hand-flavor,” he says.

These works arrived at their shape organically as Hong focused on his dialogue with the clay itself and “let it do its thing.” As he built it up, the forms reflected how his body was moving with the material, working to keep it from collapsing. Twenty of them collapsed along the way. In the finished pieces, he says, “I can see my arm sort of having gone through these openings or how I was trying to balance this piece so that I wouldn’t tip over.” To him, those openings resemble portals or gates for him to pass through as he seeks to understand himself.

With the earlier pieces, his mark makings show more irregularities and more of his physical presence, but the later ones become increasingly consistent and uniform. The older portraits took Hong a long time to make, but he increased his speed with practice. “Now I can probably get one up in two days,” he says, a pace he chalks up to the impatience he inherited from his mother.

The vessels in Oi-ee Moo-chim are inspired by the Korean pots that are used to ferment foods and store all sorts of things. On the outside, they look ordinary, but on the inside, they’re covered in the same dumpling skin as the self-portraits. “They’re an inside-out conversation,” Hong says, pointing out that these pots are meant to nurture or hide whatever’s inside them. “So, what am I hiding?” he wondered.

All sorts of things, it turns out, whether serious, funny, or both. He recalled some of his mom’s “weird rituals,” like hiding soda and junk food from Hong and his brothers by stashing them in the pots where they were unlikely to look. Those rituals inspired him to figure out ways he could similarly repurpose household items in ways that might not exactly make sense. One pot has a tiny video inside that shows Hong making his marks in the clay and plays audio from the reality show Love Island, a series he often listened to while working; it’s an homage to the TV shows his mom always had on in the background. Another pot features smells that recall the kimchi and soybean paste lunches she packed him for school.

As for the quest to find out what his hand-flavor reveals? “I’ve been looking so deep within myself, I think I’m at a point where I don’t know where I am. Am I who I am right now? How much of that is my old self?” Like his towering self-portraits, the answers build on themselves.

Oi-ee Moo-chim is on view at Gallery 4Culture through Oct. 31.

“If you meet an Iranian in the U.S., they’ve either been a political prisoner or are related to somebody who has,” says interdisciplinary artist Audineh Asaf.

Her father came to the United States as a college student in 1977 as Iran was on the cusp of revolution, but another family member was less fortunate: He was imprisoned in Iran in the 1980s for reading an anti-government book. “Obviously, that created a lot of trauma in the family,” Asaf says. “Prison in the U.S. is extremely different from prison in Iran. Torture is a part of what any and every prisoner experiences.”

Asaf’s Gallery 4Culture exhibition, Remember Me, traces back to her formative memories from that time, though it was sparked into being by much more recent political events—events that completely changed the trajectory of her art career.

Until recently, Asaf eschewed making political work, preferring to explore her Iranian American culture and identity by creating sheer beauty, often inspired by nature and the floral motifs of Persian carpets. “I really avoided politics in my art,” she says. “I avoided negative portrayals of Iranians and Iranian culture—because too often people only know and understand Iran and the context of war and terrorism.”

That all changed two years ago, when a young woman named Mahsa Amini was detained, abused, and killed by Iran’s morality police for violating the country’s hijab rules and allowing a small amount of her hair to show around her face. Her death and defiance inspired a massive uprising against human rights violations by Iran’s current regime—led by women and young people.

“I had never in my life seen a woman on the streets of Iran taking her headscarf off,” Asaf says. “I was so deeply moved to not only document these acts of protest, but to amplify the voices that were being silenced and censored by the Iranian government. I felt it was my duty to bring awareness to what was going on.”

Remember Me features 14 mixed-media portraits of Iranian political prisoners, activists, innocent bystanders, and more, including Mahsa Amini. Drawing on the traditions of Persian carpets and American quilting, they are tapestries of hand-dyed and distressed fabric, embossed paper, and acrylic transfers of photographs, with gallery tags that provide the names and stories behind people in the portraits. Despite the heavy meaning behind them, the artworks have a delicacy. “I wanted to show the wear of this life and of imprisonment, things being held together by threads,” Asaf says.

Choosing who to depict in these portraits wasn’t easy. Asaf wanted to represent a variety of people from different backgrounds, who had been involved in different movements for freedom during her lifetime. In the end, she decided to focus on individuals whose stories resonated with her most, exhaustively researching them in order to infuse each portrait with meaningful specificity. (A wall installation features the eyes of 100 additional people.)

To create the artworks in the exhibition, Asaf also tapped into the long history of American quilts and Persian carpets as record-keepers that “reveal a lot about the time that they were created” through their materials and construction.

She also sought to connect with them on a more spiritual level. “Whether they are still alive or not, I try to communicate with them and ask for permission to represent them,” she says. “It’s almost like method acting—like method art-ing. I don’t want to sound too crazy or weird, but I’ll say things to them as I’m creating their portrait, letting them know how much it means to me to represent them, telling them how beautiful they are, thanking them.”

In the course of her research, Asaf discovered the poetry of Mahvash Sabet, a prisoner of conscience currently serving a second prison sentence in Iran for her Baháʼí faith. Asaf was moved by the beauty of Sabet’s words—created in the face of unthinkable suffering—and by how Sabet somehow found a way to write them and smuggle them out of prison: Using a pen she was likely to find. Writing on napkins. Sewing them into the garments of prisoners just before their release. Relaying them a line or two at a time during phone calls with family.

Excerpts of Sabet’s poems appear in three of the works in Remember Me, disguised so that they can only be read up close—a nod to the poems’ subversive origins. Asaf is also offering 100 copies of Sabet’s Prison Poems to gallery visitors for free. She encourages visitors to the gallery to read the book in an area where she’s placed a large Persian rug, which she acquired through a stroke of serendipity. Asaf knew she wanted to place a large rug in the space, but she didn’t have one big enough (her family only had small ones that fit into a suitcase) nor did she have thousands of dollars to buy one. So she reached out to a bunch of local rug shops, and one of them responded.

“I came into the shop and to talk with this very kind man who has owned it for 20, 30 years,” Asaf says. “He told me his sister was executed in 1982 for being Baháʼí. He told me her story and sent me an article a human rights organization had written about her. He ended up essentially gifting me the carpet.” Asaf researched the shop owner’s sister—and she wound up becoming the subject of one the exhibition’s portraits, her image stitched together with transferred photographs of the carpet itself.

“Even though the media isn’t talking about it, these issues persist,” she says. “People are still being persecuted, they’re still being executed, they’re still in prison. I feel as though I’ve finally found my life’s purpose.”

Remember Me is on view through Sept. 26.

4Culture staff will be at several community events in the coming weeks to share information about Doors Open grants, as well as all our grant programs and Public Art calls. We’d love for you to stop by, say hi, and ask us any questions you may have! Here’s where we’ll be: 

September 21, 2024, 12:00–8:00 pm 
Georgetown Steamplant Science Fair 
Georgetown Steam Plant 

September 29, 2024, 11:00 am–2:00 pm 
Skyway Farmers Market
12610 76th Avenue South, Seattle, WA, 98178 

October 2, 2024, 3:00–7:00 pm 
SeaTac Farmers Market 
Matt Griffin YMCA Parking Lot 

October 12, 2024, 9:00 am–3:00 pm 
Federal Way Farmers Market 
1701 S 320th St, Federal Way, WA 98003 

October 2, 2024, 3:00–7:00 pm 
SeaTac Farmers Market 
Matt Griffin YMCA Parking Lot 

October 3, 2024, 5:00-8:00 pm
Museum of Flight
9404 E. Marginal Way South

October 12, 2024, 9:00 am–3:00 pm 
Federal Way Farmers Market 
1701 S 320th St, Federal Way, WA 98003 

 We’re excited to connect with communities and share more about the opportunities available through the 4Cultures Doors Open grants and what’s coming up in 2025. Feel free to swing by any of these events—we look forward to seeing you there! 

In 2021, the King County Council allocated $9.4 million in federal COVID relief funding to 4Culture to distribute to the cultural sector. At the end of last year the final round of this funding was put in motion, with roughly $2.7 million available for King County cultural producers who have experienced COVID-related economic impacts since March 2020. 

Streamlined applications opened in March 2024, and we’re now thrilled to have sent this critical support out to community members across the County. Here are some highlights:

• 693 grants went to cultural producers working in arts, heritage, and preservation.
• Total funding was $2,732,530.
• Awards ranged from $1,040 to $6,120.
• Grantees are from 25 cities and all 9 County Council districts.
• Over half of all applicants were new to applying for 4Culture grants.

We continue to be inspired by every member of King County’s cultural sector! Many thanks to all those who applied, anyone who shared information about this grant with friends and family, the community members who evaluated applications, our Board, and to the King County Executive and Council.  

A long and winding drape is hanging from the ceiling at Gallery 4Culture right now, made from hundreds of origami pieces in whites and peaches, taupes and creams, each of them intricately folded into the same form: a vulva.

“I was really excited about the opportunity to have a show where literally every piece of artwork in the gallery is a vulva,” Hanako O’Leary says about her current exhibition, Kamon. “If you’re going to go to the show, there’s nothing else for you to look at,” she laughs. “You have to look at it.”

For O’Leary, a show full of vulvas was a way of asserting freedom for women, an impulse that began taking shape during a particularly intense time in her own life.

In late 2018, O’Leary learned she was pregnant and decided to have an abortion. “It was in the middle of the Trump presidency,” she says. “There was a lot in the air—more than there was before—about women’s rights to their own bodily autonomy and safety.” She thought how different her life would be if she didn’t have reproductive rights or access to abortion care, and she got angry.

Then her anger set in motion a cascade of insights into what it means to be a woman.

With a longtime interest in mythology and archetypes, Shinto aesthetics, and Japanese storytelling culture (her mother is Japanese), O’Leary came across the story of Izanami, the Shinto goddess of the underworld. “In so many myths, once women go down to the underworld, they don’t come back,” she says. “But some cultures have goddesses like Izanami, who are goddesses of life and death, which makes sense—two sides of the same coin.”

Izanami became inspiration for a new body of work, which started with ceramic “Venus jars” and war masks. But after a while, those forms felt too limited. O’Leary was feeling more than just anger.

“The underworld that we as women possess inside our bodies is way bigger than reproductive rights or Western, capitalist ideas of feminism,” she says. “It’s just so much deeper than that—the strength to live in one’s own body and also the courage and intelligence and everything that it takes to actually live for yourself, to be true to yourself, and to be truly there in support of other women.”

Kamon, which means “family crest,” is the latest installment in O’Leary’s ongoing Izanami series. On view through Aug. 1, the exhibition features the origami tapestry as its centerpiece, surrounded by a variety of ceramic masks, large and small.

Many scholars believe the Izanami story originated in the Setonaikai Islands of Japan, which just happens to be where O’Leary’s mother was born. As a child, O’Leary spent two months there every summer visiting family, but she hadn’t been back since her early 20s. In 2021—then in her mid-30s, roughly the same age her mother was when she was born—she returned to reconnect with her relatives and do some research.

During her time in Japan, she noticed how Eastern and Western cultures each cling to their own versions of patriarchy, how societies create some freedoms as they modernize but also rebuild old barriers in new ways. “I felt really challenged about how to decenter that,” O’Leary says. “At the same time, I was coming to terms with my own queerness and my attraction for women and my lesbianism, and kind of making sense of all that.”

One bit of serendipity sparked the idea for the origami centerpiece. While on the island, O’Leary received a care package from her girlfriend. Inside? An origami vulva. “I was like, oh my God, this is such a cute fold!” she says. “It’s so beautiful.”

Back in Seattle, O’Leary originally imagined that she would fold all the origami herself, then quickly realized she was going to need help to make the tapestry as big as she wanted it to be. She posted a video of herself making one piece on Instagram and asked if anyone would be interested in making more. Then she hosted several origami-making gatherings, inviting people “who identify as daughters” to fold as many as they wanted to fold and then write down their maiden names, or their mothers’ maiden names, or the maiden names of their matrilineal lines as far back as they wished, alongside the places where their mothers’ families were from.

“The idea being that you’re remembering and holding onto these people and also the land that raised them and, in a sense, raised you,” O’Leary says. On Saturday, July 27, she will give an artist talk at 4Culture, which will be followed by an origami workshop. The vulvas folded at that event will get stitched onto the still-growing origami form.

Making the work in Kamon intensified O’Leary’s commitment to women’s courage, power, and freedom. It also deepened her gratitude toward all the women of the past who did their best and made sacrifices with future generations in mind.

“While I inherit that integrity and this sense of care and responsibility, I also want to be able to push back on what those past ideas are and see what’s actually possible for me in this generation and what kind of room I can create for the next one,” she says. “I am a woman—and that means I can be anything. I can express my femininity in any way I choose at any given time.”

O’Leary will give a free artist talk at 4Culture on Saturday, July 27 at 11 a.m., and an origami workshop will follow from noon to 2 p.m. The workshop is intended for those who identify as women or daughters. Register for the workshop here.

Like many holidays, Juneteenth has been known by various names, such as Freedom Day, Liberation Day, and Black Independence Day. While each of these names highlights different aspects of the significance of this day, today it is most widely known by a portmanteau that blends “June” and “nineteenth” into a single, recognizable term.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were finally informed of their emancipation—over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This day is a powerful reminder of the ongoing struggle for true freedom and equity in America. Here, we’d like to offer some points of intentional reflection to accompany the jubilation and promise of Juneteenth:

• Consider the resilience it takes to continue the fight against racial injustice.
• Recognition of progress, but not overlooking the challenges that still exist, reflect on current social justice issues and consider how we can contribute to positive change.
• Consider the two-year delay: why did it take so long for the news of emancipation to reach Galveston? What followed this?
• How can we support and uplift historically marginalized communities through our actions, both personally and professionally?

Celebrating Juneteenth can include participating in local events, supporting Black-owned businesses, or volunteering for organizations that have specific racial equity goals.

Historic Connection to King County

Juneteenth became officially recognized as a holiday for King County employees in 2022. However, its roots in the Pacific Northwest date back to 1890, when the first observation of Juneteenth was held in Kent, sponsored by the Sons of Enterprise. In 1980, Seattle held its first Juneteenth celebration at Seattle Center, sponsored by what became the Central District Chamber of Commerce.

The visibility of Juneteenth grew significantly in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The nationwide protests that followed sparked a renewed focus on racial equity and justice, leading to the declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday in 2021. Since then, Juneteenth’s popularity among all demographics has continued to rise, with increased budgeting and resources dedicated to its celebration and education. 

Local Events

• AFRICATOWN’s Summer of Soul Juneteenth Celebration, June 19, 12:00-8:00 pm at Jimi Hendrix Park
  FREE to the public, but you can make a donation and RSVP here
• Juneteenth Meditation: Liberated Rest by Mo Healing, June 19, 8:00-10:00 am at Inside
  $25, bring a yoga mat, journal, and any other reflection tools and personal items for an ancestor altar
• Celebrate with a visit to NAAM: June 19, 10:00 am-3:00 pm
  FREE admission for the public
• Juneteenth Celebration in Tacoma, June 19, 11:00 am- 5:00 pm at Stewart Heights Park
  FREE to public
• Celebrate Juneteenth with the Rewind: An Online Experience, June 19, 4:00-5:30 pm
  FREE to public, reserve a spot here.
• 3rd Annual Juneteenth Celebration, June 22, 11:00 am- 3:00 pm at Rainier Beach Community Center
  FREE to the public, RSVP here
• 8th Annual Juneteenth Celebration, June 22, 1:30-6:30 pm at Othello Playground
  FREE to public, RSVP here
• 13^th Annual Juneteenth Celebration: Freedom Day, June 22, 10:00 am- 3:00 pm at Morrill Meadows Park in Kent
  FREE to public, free food will be available from 12:00- 2:00 pm
• Black Sunday Juneteenth Celebration in Tacoma, June 23, 2:00-5:00 pm
  FREE to public, RSVP here

Resources

To deepen our understanding of Juneteenth and its significance, we’ve compiled some resources:

• Article from Vox focusing on why we all should be celebrating Juneteenth.
• Take in this Juneteenth Meditation by Adrienne Maree Brown (2020).
• Give a listen to this playlist by Yoli, Juneteenth: Freedom Day.
• Read the transcript of The Emancipation Proclamation.

Juneteenth at 4Culture

This year we are working with Arte Noir to support Black creatives by purchasing art from artist L. Haz for display in our offices. We’ve also purchased Juneteenth greeting cards by local artist Grace A. Washington—the artwork can be found on her website as part of her heritage collection and the cards are available to the public at our offices while supplies last! Lastly, we have some book recommendations from 4Culture staff for further learning to share:

• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
  
• My People Are Rising, Aaron Dixon 
  
• Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
  
• The Forging of a Black Community, Quintard Taylor
• The Anti-Racist Vocab Guide, Maya Ealey

John Feodorov was sitting in the Boise airport after giving a lecture at the University of Idaho when a phrase suddenly came to him: I cannot speak my mother’s language.

“I had no idea what it was, no idea what, if anything, I would do with it—but I liked it,” he says. As it turns out, those words set in motion an all-new body of work for the multi-media artist.

Back home in Seattle, he pulled out a book he’d inherited from his mother—a late 19th- or early 20th-century Pentecostal hymn book, written in Navajo. “Navajo is not a written language,” says Feodorov, who is of mixed Navajo/Diné and European heritage. “The book was used by missionaries when they were trying to Christianize Natives.”

He scanned the book’s pages, adhered them to a wood panel, and started to respond to them with paint—spontaneously.

“I wanted to stop thinking so damn much,” he recalls. After decades of making conceptual work, including installations, performance, and video, he’d recently found himself drawn to the abstract paintings of Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, and feeling jealous. “I just wanted to paint and not, like, have an idea, and then paint that idea. [This process] was a way to trick myself into not being frustrated staring at a blank canvas. It was a way that I could actually talk about something without necessarily thinking about something.”

The wood panel with the hymns became the mixed-media painting “I Cannot Speak My Mother’s Language,” the prototype for Assimilations, a new series now on view at Gallery 4Culture through June 27. Assimilations incorporates found materials from several old religious, reference, and cultural books, collaged into the artworks amid Feodorov’s brush strokes. The paintings hang alongside a series of the artist’s prints titled Ambivalence, which combine personal family photos with stills from old Hollywood Westerns. Together, the artworks in the exhibition examine the complex residual effects of colonization and dislocation.

Feodorov’s mother grew up on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico before being separated from her family and sent to boarding school. She later headed to Long Beach, CA, to work in the shipyard during World War II, married a white man, and moved to the Los Angeles suburbs. She became a Jehovah’s witness when Feodorov was a baby.

“There are aspects of the Native American experience that aren’t really talked about,” he says of the distance assimilation puts between “city Indians” and their roots. “It’s like, I wasn’t raised within the four sacred mountains. I wasn’t raised understanding the geography around me as having mythological significance. I couldn’t become a born-again Navajo, you know?”

This personal experience is not unlike what all immigrants and refugees go through, says Feodorov, who also works as an associate professor at Western Washington University, where he has students with similar experiences to his. They haven’t necessarily been to their families’ homeland and, like Feodorov, don’t speak their parents’ language. “We all have this sense of disconnection,” he says.

Whether in abstract paintings or pop-culture prints, Feodorov aims to create visual interest that seduces the viewer into a deeper conversation about identity and belonging. For him, a familiar image can be the hook that draws people in.

Which explains some of the visual references in his prints. Feodorov loved watching Westerns as a kid, and while he was too young then to articulate the unease he felt watching Indians get shot off their horses, he captures that tension in Ambivalence. His mixed-media painting “My Life As a Suburban Ind’n” started with an image from a 1960s TV comedy called F Troop that was a favorite in Feodorov’s family.

“I still think it’s kind of funny,” he says, explaining the show’s odd appeal. “There were the cavalry and there were the Indians, and all the Indians were [played by] Italians. But the cavalry was ridiculous, and the Indians were ridiculous. No one was smarter than the other.”

Throughout his career, Feodorov has often been called humorous—though that isn’t his goal. “If there is a laugh,” he says, “I hope it’s an uncomfortable one.”

Through its many layers of meaning, the work in Assimilations ultimately reflects the artist’s growing clarity about the value of his perspective, a clarity found over time and through much consideration.

“When I was in my early 20s, just beginning university and interested in art, I had no idea that I had anything to say. I mean, I was very conscious of being Native, but I didn’t think that I was Native enough to have any important insights,” Feodorov says.

“It took me a long time to realize that I actually am the Native experience.”

Heads up! This fall, Western Washington University’s Western Gallery will present a retrospective of John Feodorov’s work, curated by Tacoma Art Museum’s Faith Brower and featuring pieces that date back to the early 1980s.

Whether you’re out at parades and street parties or enjoying a quiet night in, there are so many ways to celebrate Pride Month in King County! Here, 4Culture staff have pulled together some of our favorite ways that the cultural sector is joining in this June: 

What is Pride?

Pride celebrations commemorate a series of demonstrations against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in 1969. At the time, the Stonewall was the only bar for gay men in New York City where dancing was allowed. The resulting Stonewall Riots were not the first or the last demonstration of LGBTQIA2S+ resistance, but they acted as a catalyst for a more formal and unified gay rights movement.

Pride in Seattle

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Seattle Pride! One of their events this year was a youth exhibit, funded by 4Culture, that displayed on June 6 for Pioneer Square Art Walk.

Our Pioneer Square neighbors, Beneath the Streets, offers a Queer Underground History Tour.

Explore MOHAI’s online exhibit, Objects of Pride, which aims to share a collective regional history of Pride. (Hey, we fund them!)

Our friends at HistoryLink include a variety of articles about LGBTQIA2S+ history in Washington State. (Hey, we fund them!)

Things To Watch

Vanishing Seattle’s short documentary on Capitol Hill (17 min, 2021), which we’ll be screening together at our office Pride event on Thursday. (Hey, we funded that!)

There Goes the Gayborhood: Seattle’s Shifting Queer Geographies: This 8-minute film follows the shifting geography of Seattle’s LGBTQIA2S+ community, and how Capitol Hill has changed since the 1970s.

UW’s Seattle Civil Rights & History Project produced this video on the local history of activism.

Things to Read

King County Public Library offers a variety of books and events during Pride.

Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile & Belonging: First published in 2003, one reviewer wrote that, “It offers the first published account of the formation of gay and lesbian political organizations in the city.”

LGBTQ Activism in Seattle History Project: This project of UW’s Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project was written in 2016 and shares a history of activism in our area.

During the pandemic, Maria Phillips used to walk along the beach near her home in West Seattle, picking up litter with her kids—often on Mondays when the sand was dotted with objects left behind from the weekend: masks, water bottles, cigarettes, press-on fingernails.

Beachcombing wasn’t new to her; she’d been cleaning the beaches in Florida for years, whenever she visited her parents there. “I’d bring in all the material,” Phillips says. “My mom wouldn’t let me empty it out in her apartment, so I would go to the stairwell and just lay it all out and organize it, whether it was colors, shapes, sizes. And then I’d photograph it.”

Trained as a metalsmith and jeweler, much of Phillips’ work in her early career revolved around found objects. Then a 2018 residency at Recology, an organization dedicated to waste reduction in Seattle and elsewhere on the West Coast, ignited a kind of ecological awakening in her. Since then, Phillips not only continues to work with Recology as a program manager for their Artists in Residence program, her work has taken on a mission: to engage people in conversation about the consequences of waste, plastic in particular.

“I’m only going to make from what I’m finding or have available,” she remembers telling herself as her environmental consciousness shifted. “I’m not buying supplies anymore.”

Phillips’ current exhibition at Gallery 4Culture, at what point…, presents a new body of work that provokes awareness of objects and the natural world. Much of it was made using material she found while “de-polluting” the surrounding Pioneer Square neighborhood. The exhibition includes roughly 40 “pick-up portraits,” each of which is composed of found items from a specific day’s haul, like a visual diary. Phillips thinks of them as sketches.

“At the beginning, I would just dump everything,” she says, recalling the early part of the process for these pieces. “And then it got to a point where it was interesting to look at the pieces. They started to get a little more curated, a little bit more artful, where it was like, Oh, okay, what objects am I looking at? What colors am I looking at?” Some days she makes colorful, beautiful compositions from garbage. Other days not so much: “This just needs to look ugly, because it is ugly.”

Phillips fixed each of the “pick-up portraits” by melting them between found layers of plastic packaging, like the baggies used for food or clothing ordered online. “There’s a randomness in the heat process—what’s going to melt, what’s not going to melt, what’s going to blend,” she says. “It’s almost like printmaking in a way. You have a sense of what’s going to happen, but there’s always these beautiful accidents, randomness that can take place.” (Visit the gallery and see how close you have to get to these portraits before you start to recognize their components.)

at what point… also includes several larger works, including an installation that resembles a huge cluster of mushrooms growing out of the wall—made from plastic Amazon shipping bags—and a pair of pieces made from balls Phillips found at the park. An unwound baseball drapes delicately on the wall, its recycled plastic and cork core held up by a Styrofoam plinth. Another deconstructed ball (a soccer ball, perhaps) also sits on a block of foam; Phillips’ dog tore off its outer layer, revealing a mass of fine threads.

“It was just beautiful,” Phillips says of the moment she first saw the peeled ball. She took the ball from the dog. “He was so mad! I put it on a shelf and he would just sit there—and I’m like, ‘Sorry, babe, you made art and it’s done.’”

For Phillips, focusing on plastic and waste in her work is not about steeping herself in doom and gloom. It’s about seeking out solutions and becoming part of them. “What’s the positive path? What are the innovations?” she asks. “Rather than going to the very dark side, let’s learn. Let’s turn it around.”

Phillips finds inspiration in the time before plastics, in the early 1900s, when immigrants would collect discarded glass, rags, broken tools, “things that they could repair, repurpose, resell.” She pauses before continuing optimistically: “I think we’re going to get back there.”

She points out how repair can make something more beautiful, like Japanese kintsugi fixing a broken piece of pottery with gold or staples, or the generations-old wooden spoon she fixed in her kitchen.

Phillips is thrilled to be among a growing movement of artists working with discarded materials, coming from so many different angles and backgrounds to help forge pathways to change.

“Let’s get creative,” she says.

Maria Phillips’ exhibition at what point… is on view at Gallery 4Culture through May 30.

Now that 2024 is well underway, we have two housekeeping items for grant recipients as you manage your award:

• Is your organization a recipient of Arts Sustained Support? Have you claimed your 2023 award? If you have not, you must claim your award by this coming June 30. Instructions for how to claim your award can be found online. If you have questions or need assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact Arts Sustained Support program manager Bret Fetzer at .
• All 4Culture grant recipients—both individuals and organizations—need to complete a demographic survey for each year. If you have not completed your 2023 survey, please do so! This data helps us track how well we’re doing in our mission to empower all King County residents to create and experience culture. It’s an invaluable resource for us and we thank you for your time and effort in helping us collect it! You can find the survey in your profile on our application portal. Please contact Jackie Mixon at  if you have any issues.

Thank you for helping us keep these resources in motion from us to you and out to King County! We know managing a grant and all the digital paperwork that comes with it is no small feat.

Hidden on the north side of Lake Union, next to Ivar’s and along the Burke-Gilman Trail, Waterway 15  celebrates the area’s maritime history and the public’s right to access commonly-held waters.

Like a pocket park, Waterway 15 is an artwork in the King County Public Art Collection. It was originally created as part of a 1990s restoration project related to a proposed stormwater pipeline from Green Lake Park to Lake Union. Due to public pressure to have a place to be near and on the water, the project was expanded to include a new waterway access point, with artist Elizabeth Conner and landscape architect Cliff Willwerth creating a design that honors the layers of history this site holds.

A highlight of Waterway 15 is a bench that Conner envisioned as a wooden boat under construction, which was designed and fabricated by Dick Wagner and Carl Lind at the Center for Wooden Boats, an organization dedicated to the tradition of building and sailing wooden boats. Approximately 16 feet long, the “boat bench” was moved to the Center for Wooden Boats’ facility in the fall of 2023 for restoration; it is expected to be reinstalled at Waterway 15 in fall 2024.

Led by woodworking programs manager Ducky Kimball, volunteers with the organization are currently refinishing the wood, completing another cycle of weathering and restoration on a piece first made by their community decades ago. Over the past 30 years, the Wagner family and the Center for Wooden Boats have dedicated innumerable hours to the restoration and cyclical maintenance of the “boat bench” – preserving a jewel of wooden boat technology for generations of visitors.

Conner and Willwerth’s design for Waterway 15 also included native plants, recycled paving materials that referenced the industrialization of the area, an artist-designed pipeline access hatch with a compass rose, and tiles featuring historic photographic images. Fabricated by artist Laura Brodax, these tiles illustrate the history of the site, including some of the first peoples of the area, who have used the lake since time immemorial, and who continue to steward the land we call home. (Pacific Northwest canoe culture will also be celebrated at the Northwest Native Canoe Center, which is currently being designed for the south end of Lake Union, led by the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation.)

At the time of its design in 1992, Waterway 15 provided one of the only public access points to Lake Union; today, there are many access points along the Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop, a trail named in honor of Cheshiahud, one of the leaders of the Duwamish villages located along what is now known as Lake Union. In the mid-1850s, Cheshiahud acted as a guide to early settlers in the area and he continued to live along the lake well into the 1900s.

Waterway 15 honors the waters of Lake Union, the many histories of this area, and the wooden vessels that once made travel possible across this region. With the efforts and expertise of the Center for Wooden Boats community, this artist-designed space will continue to inspire visitors for years to come.

It’s National Poetry Month and 4Culture is celebrating by launching a new phase of Poetry in Public – the poems! Look for poems on King County Metro buses and Sound Transit light rail starting mid-April and read and listen to selected poems online today.

Poems submitted by King County residents were selected by a panel consisting of local poets and literary arts administrators, including Poet Planner Laura Da’, who is leading the creative vision and conceptualized the theme for this iteration of the program. The theme Places of Landing honors the movements, places, and feelings that tell the stories of our days.

Participants were inspired to write short poems by prompts on the 4Culture website and at workshops led by Community Liaisons. These workshops brought community members together to engage in writing activities that interpreted and expanded on the Places of Landing theme and highlighted poetry traditions connected to their Community of Focus. Communities of Focus for the 2023-2025 Poetry in Public program include: African American, Chinese, Filipino, Indigenous, Spanish-Speaking, and Youth. Find inspiration on the website to guide your own poetry on the theme and remember that everyone can be a poet!

Previously known as Poetry on Buses, this long-running program features poems written by King County residents of all ages online, on transit, and in public spaces across King County. 4Culture’s poetry program began more than 30 years ago and has since published the written work of over 1,000 people from across the region. Some of those voices were professional writers, but the majority were ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds. Learn more about the history of this beloved program and how it has evolved since launching in 1992 in our recent blog post, How Poetry Hit the Road: A history of Poetry on Buses, 4Culture’s most popular and populist public art program.

We look forward to celebrating Poetry in Public and the local poetry community in a series of events this summer. Stay tuned for event information by subscribing to our enews and view weekly poetry posts by following us on social media.

In the meantime, help us to connect poems out in the wild with their poets by sharing photos on Instagram and tagging @kc4culture!

Gallery 4Culture has a 45-year history of exhibiting innovative, underrepresented artists and art forms in solo and small-group shows! Panelists Ricky Reyes, Rosaline Dou, Sara Osebold, and Stefan Gonzales reviewed submitted applications and selected 10 King County-based artists for the 2024-2025 season.

Audineh Asaf
September 5–26, 2024
Opening: First Thursday, September 5, 6:00–8:00 pm
In an ongoing commitment to provide voice for the silenced, Audineh Asaf’s paper “quilts” weave together the narratives of individuals who have been directly impacted by social injustices and human rights violations in Iran.

Michael Hong
October 3–31, 2024
Opening: First Thursday, October 3, 6:00–8:00 pm
Michael Hong’s ceramic sculptures embody the complexities of the immigrant experience and the concept of “hand flavor,” directly translated from the Korean term, 손 맛 (sown-maat), which denotes the unique care or skill a cook imbues into their food that is often passed down generationally.

JoEllen Wang
November 7–December 5, 2024
Opening: First Thursday, November 7, 6:00–8:00 pm
Using motifs and materials sourced from marginal spaces, JoEllen Wang examines the overlap of good intentions and systemic failures.

James Hartunian
January 2–30, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, January 2, 6:00–8:00 pm
Through the fabrication of hand-crafted kinetic devices, James Hartunian will recreate a conceptual forest from a machine’s perspective in pursuit of reimagining our natural world.

Ric’kisha Taylor
February 6–27, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, February 6, 6:00–8:00 pm
Ric’kisha Taylor employs craft techniques and lustrous materials to captivate, entice, and divert attention in a series of multimedia works that address her personal experience within the Black American diaspora.

Diana Falchuk
March 6–27, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, March 6, 6:00–8:00 pm
Colorful works on paper and object fragments assembled on mirror highlight the spiritual and material nature of interconnection, solidarity, and collective care–all of which are grounded in Diana Falchuk’s Jewish-Venezuelan-American identity and ancestral traditions.

Hyunjeong Lim
April 3–24, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, April 3, 6:00–8:00 pm
Influenced by her journey from South Korea to the United States, Hyunjeong Lim’s surrealistic landscape paintings blend personal and cultural narratives, inviting us to reflect on our own internal and external wanderings.

Nak Bou
May 1–29, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, May 1, 6:00–8:00 pm
Nak Bou’s intuitive multimedia paintings juxtapose cultural material from his parent’s generation with evocative representations of his own childhood memories. Raised in the Cambodian refugee enclaves of Dallas, Texas and Fresno, California during the late-1980s and 1990s, Bou explores the intersection of heritage and lived experience.

Mel Carter
June 5–26, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, June 5, 6:00–8:00 pm
Mel Carter blends various media into sensory-filled, tactile installations that unearth experiences within heritage and family dynamics, Japanese diaspora, queerness, and explorations in modern witchcraft, rituals, and mythology.

Althea Rao
July 3–31, 2025
Opening: First Thursday, July 3, 6:00–8:00 pm
In an era dominated by synthetic biology and pervasive surveillance, Althea Rao’s work humors the intricate connections between the data we generate and the tangible traces of our existence.

Congratulations to our 2024-2025 artists!

4Culture would like to thank all 140 gallery applicants for their interest in exhibiting with us and the panel for their diligence in making these selections. Artists who were not awarded shows are encouraged to reapply next year. The 2025-2026 Gallery 4Culture season application cycle will open in November 2024 with a deadline of December 11, 2024.

Limited-edition ORCA cards designed by emerging artists Yasiman Ahsani and Rey Daoed are now available at the King Street Center Pass Sales Office, while supplies last!

Developed in partnership with Metro and in celebration of the RapidRide Expansion Program, each artist’s work is distinct and features imagery tied to the contexts, histories, cultures and communities of the forthcoming G and I lines. The RapidRide G Line will connect riders with frequent and reliable service through Madison Valley, First Hill and downtown Seattle. RapidRide I Line will serve riders in the Renton, Kent and Auburn areas.

These are two of three cards in the series created by a cohort of young regional artists who were supported by mentors Angelina Villalobos and Jesse Brown. Jovita Mercado’s card was released in March, aligned with the launch of RapidRide H Line service.