The Spokane Art Center in Spokane, Washington, was a community art school opened in 1938 as part of the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. Its staff included many notable artists, and it was widely considered to be one of the nation's most successful FAP art centers. [1] It closed in 1942. [2]
The Federal Art Project was headed by Holger Cahill from its inception in 1935 to its end in 1943. In addition to supporting impoverished artists, and producing artwork for federal government use, Cahill saw the FAP's mission as maintaining the health of American art generally; to this end, support was given to the creation of community art centers, aimed at providing instruction and education for adults and children, as well as gallery space for local and touring WPA/FAP art exhibitions. Working closely with local officials and arts organizations, regional and state FAP directors located areas where interest and support were strong. Once a municipality was able to provide a location and seed money, FAP would provide three to four times the amount in matching funds, as well as teachers, directors, and other staff. The first center opened in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1935. Open to all, free of charge, with no race restrictions, the centers proved tremendously popular - despite complaints from some Congressmen and editorialists that they were frivolous and wasteful expenditures. Eventually, 103 FAP art centers were established across the nation, in all 48 states, along with many similar, locally-funded programs. [3] [4]
The Spokane Art Center was the fiftieth free community art school established under the Federal Art Project. [2] It came about as the result of meetings between Washington State FAP director R. Bruce Inverarity and members of the Spokane Arts Association (many of whom subsequently became SAC Board members). Despite his ardent opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal programs, local newspaperman and business magnate William H. Cowles donated the use of a spacious, three-storey building, while a fund-drive by Parent-Teacher Associations, businesses, and arts associations produced more-than-adequate startup money, gaining $12,000 in federal funds. [5]
The center officially opened on September 29, 1938, under the directorship of Carl Morris, a Californian who had been hired by Inverarity. [2] The teaching staff included, at various times, artists Robert Engard, [6] Guy Anderson, Clyfford Still, Hilda Grossman, [7] Z. Vanessa Helder, [8] Joseph Solman, [9] Margaret Tomkins, James FitzGerald, [10] Kenneth Downer, and Ruth Egri. [5] FitzGerald eventually took over from Morris as the center's director. [10]
Centrally located at North 106 Monroe Street in downtown Spokane, [5] the center attracted several hundred enrollees for adult and children's classes in painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, metalwork, and ceramics. Lectures on art history were well-attended, and thousands of people viewed exhibitions presented in the Center's gallery. Despite these successes, avant garde-minded staffers at times butted heads with more conservative Spokanites, and Inverarity's plan to open more community art centers statewide raised considerable ire among the Spokane Art Center's backers, who saw it as a diversion of already sparse resources. These controversies, however, were soon overshadowed by changing wartime priorities, and the Center was shut down in November 1942. [2]
In 1952 the name and the basic concept of the Spokane Art Center were revived, in a new location, under the aegis of Washington State University; in 1963 it became the Corbin House Arts and Crafts Center, and in 1970 the Corbin Art Center, operated by Spokane's department of Parks and Recreation. [11]
The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects. It was created not as a cultural activity, but as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The WPA Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression.
Morris Graves was an American painter. He was one of the earliest Modern artists from the Pacific Northwest to achieve national and international acclaim. His style, referred to by some reviewers as Mysticism, used the muted tones of the Northwest environment, Asian aesthetics and philosophy, and a personal iconography of birds, flowers, chalices, and other images to explore the nature of consciousness.
Kenneth Callahan (1905–1986) was an American painter and muralist who served as a catalyst for Northwest artists in the mid-20th century through his own painting, his work as assistant director and curator at the Seattle Art Museum, and his writings about contemporary art. Born in Eastern Washington and largely self-taught as an artist, Callahan was committed to an art that went beyond the merely illustrative. He enrolled at the University of Washington in 1924 but did not stay long. He traveled widely, absorbing influences from the different countries and cultures he experienced. His talent was recognized early; his work was included in the first Whitney Biennial exhibition in 1933 and he went on to a distinguished painting career. Callahan is identified as one of the Northwest Mystics – along with Guy Anderson, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey, who shared a muted palette and strong interest in Asian aesthetics.
Leno Prestini (1906–1963) was an American painter and sculptor who was active from the 1920s through the early 1960s, mainly in the small town of Clayton, Washington. He worked as a professional terra cotta sculptor, creating architectural ornaments, and had many other interests as well. His skillfully rendered paintings, though reflecting contemporary trends such as Surrealism and Social Realism, were at times unique to the point of eccentricity. His work received limited acclaim in his lifetime, but has been the subject of several exhibitions, and has continued to attract attention since his death in 1963.
Guy Anderson was an American artist known primarily for his oil painting who lived most of his life in the Puget Sound region of the United States. His work is in the collections of numerous museums including the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has been called "Perhaps the most powerful artist to emerge from the Northwest School".
Roger Shimomura is an American artist and a retired professor at the University of Kansas, having taught there from 1969 to 2004. His art, showcased across the United States, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Israel, often combines American popular culture, traditional Asian tropes, and stereotypical racial imagery to provoke thought and debate on issues of identity and social perception.
William Lee Cumming was a noted 20th-century American artist, often associated with the Northwest School. A controversial figure - he was a hardcore Stalinist for a long period, was married seven times, and was generally outspoken and opinionated - he eventually came to be respected as an important innovator and highly distinctive stylist in modern art, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.
Helmi Dagmar Juvonen (1903–1985) was an American artist active in Seattle, Washington. Although she worked in a wide variety of media, she is best known for her prints, paintings, and drawings. She is associated with the artists of the Northwest School.
James W. Washington Jr. was an American painter and sculptor who grew into prominence in the Seattle, Washington, art community.
Fox is an unincorporated community in Grant County, Oregon, United States, on U.S. Route 395 south of Long Creek.
Paul Horiuchi was an American painter and collagist. He was born in Oishi, Japan, and studied art from an early age. After immigrating to the United States in his early teens, he spent many years as a railroad worker in the Western U.S. In 1946, he moved to Seattle, Washington, where he eventually switched his focus from painting to collage and came to be associated with the "Northwest School" of artists. In his mid-forties, he was finally able to devote himself to art full-time, his unusual collage style becoming very popular in the 1950s and 60s. He continued creating art at his studio in Seattle until succumbing to Alzheimer's-related health problems in 1999.
Zoë Dusanne was an American art dealer, collector, and promoter who operated the Zoë Dusanne Gallery in Seattle, Washington from 1950 to 1964.
William Ivey was an American abstract expressionist painter, sometimes associated with the Northwest School of artists. After stints in the US Army and studying art in California, he spent most of his career in Seattle, Washington. Seattle Times critic Deloris Tarzan Ament described him as "the Dean of Northwest Painters".
Fay Chong (1912–1973) was a Chinese-American artist and educator, well known for his printmaking and watercolor painting. He was also known for his activities as an arts organizer, arts educator and WPA-era artist. Chong was active in the Pacific Northwest.
Margaret Tomkins (1916–2002) was an American Surrealist / Abstract Expressionist painter. Though born, raised, and educated in Southern California, she spent most of her life in the Pacific Northwest, where she was well known both for her art and her energetic, outspoken art activism. Her Surrealist works of the 1940s earned considerable national attention, and as her work evolved in the 1950s and 1960s, she came to be known as a pioneer in Abstract Expressionism. Tomkins was the driving force behind the first artist-owned gallery in Seattle, Washington. Though friends with many of the artists of the Northwest School, she denied any artistic connection to these "mystic" painters, at times deriding their claims of quasi-magical inspiration from nature as "silly". She was similarly dismissive of any categorization based on her gender.
Z. Vanessa Helder was an American watercolor painter who gained national attention in the 1930s and 40s, mainly for her paintings of scenes in Eastern Washington. She painted with a bold, Precisionist style not commonly associated with watercolor, rendering landscapes, industrial scenes, and houses with a Magic Realist touch that gave them a forlorn, isolated quality, somewhat in the manner of Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper. She spent most of her career in the Pacific Northwest, but was popular in New York art galleries, was a member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and, in 1943, was included in a major exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.
Robert Bruce Inverarity was an American artist, art educator, museum director, author, and anthropologist. He was the Washington State Director of the Federal Arts Project from 1936 to 1939 and the Washington Arts Project from 1939 to 1941, working with many noted Pacific Northwest artists. Fascinated with the Indian tribes of the Northwest from early youth, he amassed a major collection of North Pacific Coast Native art and authored several works on the subject.
Fishtown was an informal artists' community housed in a cluster of old cabins and fishing shacks on the Skagit River delta in Skagit County, Washington, USA, from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s. It was part of the larger Skagit Valley arts community, centered on the town of La Conner, but was rustic and isolated, without electricity or plumbing, and tended to attract younger and more eccentric artists. It was home to several noted painters, poets, and sculptors. Charles Krafft, who went on to international attention and controversy as a ceramicist, was for over ten years the "self-proclaimed Mayor of Fishtown"; another longtime resident was Robert Sund, who, along with several other poets, developed a recognizable Pacific Northwest style of poetry. Scholar, painter, and poet Paul Hansen, who became a professor of Chinese languages and noted translator of early Chinese poetry lived in Fishtown for several years, and best-selling author Tom Robbins was a frequent visitor.
Clement Bernard Haupers (1900–1982) was an American painter, printmaker, arts administrator, and arts educator active from the 1920s to the 1980s. He is best known for his directorship of the Minnesota Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project and for his influence in the Minnesota art community.
Broadway High School, originally known as Seattle High School, opened in Seattle, Washington in 1902. It was the first dedicated high school built in Seattle. After World War II, the school was converted to a vocational training center for returning soldiers, and the high school students were transferred to Lincoln High School and Edison Technical School which shared a campus with Broadway High.
