Matthew Richter (born 1968 in New York City) is an American author, producer, performer, and arts entrepreneur living in Seattle, Washington. He is the Interim Executive Director of the Cultural Space Agency, having most recently served for 9 years as the Cultural Space Liaison for the City of Seattle. He is also well known as the founder of Consolidated Works, a contemporary arts center in Seattle.
Richter has been producing alternative contemporary art, performance, film and music since his graduation from Northwestern University in 1990. In 1992, he formed the seminal Rm 608, a gallery for visual and performing arts, in an abandoned storefront on Seattle's Capitol Hill. The "small but influential" (The Stranger) organization served as the launching point for local talents such as David Schmader, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, Kia Sian, and Kristen Kosmas, and over the course of its two-year lifespan presented over 200 world-premiere works of theater and performance art, several of which received continued runs off-Broadway in New York City. On its closing in 1994 (the organization's lifespan was built into its structure, and the closing was anticipated) Richter was quoted in The Seattle Weekly as saying, "Organizations should end, in the same way that performances end, so that the audience can clap, go home, and think about what it meant."
In 1994, he was hired as the Theater Editor of The Stranger, the alternative newsweekly in Seattle. While there, he expanded his interest in writing and published investigative journalism (according to the paper's website, one undercover report earned him personal bodyguard protection following death threats made by the group investigated) and feature-length articles that were reprinted in alternative newsweeklies around the country. He was also published in an American Heritage college geography textbook. He left the newspaper in 1997 but continues to publish sporadically, most recently writing on the issue of nonprofit reform in America.
In 1998, he formed Consolidated Works, a contemporary arts center in Seattle, housed in a renovated 32,000-square-foot (3,000m2) warehouse in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood. Art in America called ConWorks (as it was known for short) "the most dazzling" alternative arts space in the Northwest. Over the course of seven years as its executive director, he grew the organization into one of the region's most prestigious arts presenters, working with teams of curators and producers to fill the facility's theater, cinema, visual art gallery, music hall, lecture stage, and bar. The center flourished, reportedly thanks to Richter's "legendary fundraising skills" and "internationally renowned programming" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer).
In 2002 he was one of twelve individuals invited under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation to contribute as founding members of the National Arts and Technology Network. In 2003 he received the Seattle Mayor's Arts Award on behalf of ConWorks, and also in 2003 was one of 12 recipients nationally of the Safeco Insurance Rudy Award for leadership in the nonprofit sector. A profile of the Seattle arts scene in Art in America referred to Richter as "an arts visionary." A profile in The Stranger referred to him as "freakishly ambitious."
A not-for-profit arts organization, also known as a nonprofit arts organization, usually takes the form of a not-for-profit organization, association, or foundation. Such organizations are formed for the purpose of developing and promoting the work of artists in various visual and performing art forms such as film, sculpture, dance, painting, multimedia, poetry, and performance art.
The Seattle Weekly is an alternative biweekly distributed newspaper in Seattle, Washington, United States. It was founded by Darrell Oldham and David Brewster as The Weekly. Its first issue was published on March 31, 1976. The newspaper published its final print edition on February 27, 2019 and transitioned to web-only content on March 1, 2019.
The Stranger is an alternative biweekly newspaper in Seattle, Washington, U.S. The paper's principal competitor is The Seattle Weekly, owned by Sound Publishing, Inc.
Consolidated Works was a "multi-disciplinary contemporary arts center" located successively in two former warehouses in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, USA, just west of what would be considered the Cascade neighborhood within South Lake Union. It incorporated an art gallery, theater, cinema, and music/dance/lecture hall, as well as studio spaces for artists and a bar and lounge.
Seattle is a significant center for the painting, sculpture, textile and studio glass, alternative, urban art, lowbrow and performing arts. The century-old Seattle Symphony Orchestra is among the world's most recorded orchestras. The Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet, are comparably distinguished. On at least two occasions, Seattle's local popular music scene has burst into the national and even international consciousness, first with a major contribution to garage rock in the mid-1960s, and later as the home of grunge rock in the early 1990s. The city has about twenty live theater venues, and Pioneer Square is one of the country's most prominent art gallery districts.
Robert Storr is an American curator, critic, painter, and writer.
The Bellevue Arts Museum is a museum of contemporary visual art, craft, and design located in Bellevue, Washington, part of the greater Seattle metropolitan area. A nonprofit organization established in 1975, the Bellevue Arts Museum (BAM) provides rotating arts exhibitions to the public. Since 2001, the museum has been located across from Bellevue Square in a three-story building designed by architect Steven Holl.
Zoe Scofield is a choreographer and dancer best known for her work with Juniper Shuey as co-directors of zoe|juniper, a Seattle-based dance and visual art company. Her work is characterized by multi-media, cross-genre works utilizing stage performance, video installation, photography and complex technical elements.
James Sturm is an American cartoonist and co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. Sturm is also the founder of the National Association of Comics Art Educators (NACAE), an organization committed to helping facilitate the teaching of comics in higher education.
Located in Hollywood, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) is a nonprofit exhibition space and archive of the visual arts for the city of Los Angeles, California, United States, currently under the leadership of Sarah Russin.
Bagley Wright was an American real estate developer and philanthropist. He was president of Bagley Wright Investments, was a developer of Seattle's landmark Space Needle and chair of Physio Control Corp. from 1968 until its acquisition by Eli Lilly and Company in 1980. Wright and his wife Virginia were well known art patrons and philanthropists.
The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) is a non-profit organization located in Chinatown in New York City. Founded in 1974, it is one of the earliest Asian American community organizations in the United States. The Arts Centre presents the ongoing developments between contemporary Asian & Asian American art forms and Western art forms through the presentation of performance, exhibitions, and public education. AAAC's permanent collection, which it has accumulated since 1989, contains hundreds of contemporary Asian American art works and traditional/folk art pieces. The organization also has an Artists Archive which documents, preserves, and promotes the presence of Asian American visual culture in the United States since 1945. This includes the East Coast, especially the greater New York area; the West Coast; and some artists in Canada, Hawaii, and overseas. The artists include Asian Americans producing art, Asian artists who are active in the United States, and other Americans who are significantly influenced by Asia. Pan-Asian in outlook, the Arts Centre's understanding of ‘Asia’ encompasses traditions and influences with sources ranging from Afghanistan to Hawaii.
14/48, the self-described “world’s quickest theater festival,” is a speed theatre festival that takes place semiannually in Seattle, Washington. The name of the festival derives from the unique format of creating and presenting 14 world-premiere short plays over the course of two days, or 48 hours.
Hugo House is a non-profit community writing center in Seattle, Washington.
Robert A. "Bob" Roth is an American publisher and art collector who lives in Chicago. He was the founder and publisher of the Chicago Reader, one of the most influential and successful newspapers of its type. He was also one of the founders and the first president of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, located in Chicago. Intuit is the only nonprofit organization in the U.S. dedicated solely to presenting "outsider" art by self-taught artists.
Red Sky Poetry Theatre was the longest running live weekly poetry series and open mic in Seattle history.
Greg Lundgren is a Seattle-based artist, author, filmmaker and entrepreneur.
David Schmader is an American writer known for his solo plays, his writing for the Seattle newsweekly The Stranger, and his annotated screenings of Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. He is the author of the 2016 book Weed: The User's Guide.
Barry Johnson is an American artist and writer.
The National Association of Artists' Organizations (NAAO) was, from 1982 through the early 2000s, a Washington, D.C.-based arts service organization which, at its height, had a constituency of over 700 artists' organizations, arts institutions, artists and arts professionals representing a cross-section of diverse aesthetics, geographic, economic, ethnic and gender-based communities especially inclusive of the creators of emerging and experimental work in the interdisciplinary, literary, media, performing and visual arts. At the apex of its activities, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, NAAO served as a catalyst and co-plaintiff on the Supreme Court case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley having spawned the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression. NAAO's dormancy in the early years of the 21st century led to the formation of Common Field.
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