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Art in the Allen School

UW Artists

Jeffrey Bishop

Jeffrey Bishop is a Brooklyn-based artist who studied at Tufts University (BFA, 1973), at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and at the University of Washington (MFA, 1977). Bishop also taught painting at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle from 1980 to 1988.

Bishop typically begins with digitized prints on paper or canvas, painting over them with various shapes, colors, and textures, creating abstract floating and interacting forms. Many of his works have a biological basis. Highly influenced by the death of his father from Alzheimer’s disease in 1997, Bishop has used brain scans that showed the progression of the disease as the basis of many of his works.

Two of Bishop’s oil, ink and acrylics on paper can be seen at the base of the Silverberg Stair on the 5th floor of the Allen Center: Untitled-05 #1 (2005) and Untitled-07 #10 (2007). His works are included in a number of corporate and private collections, and have been shown at the Seattle Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.

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Wendell Brazeau

Wendell Brazeau grew up in the “art-impoverished” city of Spokane, Washington, where he was born in 1910. He moved to Seattle in 1928 to enroll in the University of Washington, graduating with a BFA in art in 1933. Brazeau worked a number of odd jobs afterwards, including a stint at Boeing during the war drawing 3-D perspectives from engineers’ plans. Following the war he returned to UW to complete his MFA, and remained there as a faculty member in the Art Department until his death in 1974.

Brazeau exhibited frequently in the northwest and California. His work, influenced by his studies and experience with illustration, was often geometrical with repeated shapes and bright colors. He was also influenced by the European painters of the time; e.g., many of his abstract paintings have a Klee-like quality, and his figures are often drawn in a cubist style using simple lines or curves.

Brazeau’s paintings can be found in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. The Seattle Art Museum held a solo exhibition of Brazeau’s work in 1957.

One of Brazeau’s colorful works, the 1949 oil painting Three Wise Men, can be found on the 6th floor of the Allen Center. This painting was included in the 1974 exhibition “Art of the Pacific Northwest: From the 1930s to the Present” organized by the National Collection of Art of the Smithsonian Institution. It was also chosen for the 1976 Brazeau retrospective organized by the Washington State University Museum of Art. His 1958 painting The Sculptor can be found on the 3rd floor of the Gates Center.

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Books

Kenneth Callahan

Born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington, Kenneth Callahan grew up in Montana and later attended high school in Seattle. He entered the University of Washington in 1924, but soon realized that university life wasn’t for him. He left with several friends to drive to San Francisco in a beat-up Model T, which broke down before they arrived and had to be sold for $2.50.

Callahan traveled widely and was influenced by the work he saw in Mexico and Europe. His early work was representational, e.g., paintings of ships and dock workers (he spent some time as a ship steward) and cityscapes. Later, his work become abstract with strong broad brush strokes, but all was heavily influenced by nature: mountains and rocks, beaches and the sea, and horses and insects were common subjects.

Recognized early as a talent, his paintings were included in the first Whitney Biennial Exposition in 1933, the same year that he was hired by the new Seattle Art Museum. He became curator of the museum four years later — a position he held until 1953. Over time, he became one of the best known Northwest painters and is considered — along with Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and Guy Anderson — one of the four “Northwest Masters.” Callahan painted actively until his death in Seattle in 1986. His works can be found in numerous museums and collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Phillips Gallery and the Hirshorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago.

We have two wonderful late 1970s examples of Callahan’s work on the 6th floor of the Allen Center: the nature painting called “Menagerie” (right above) with the abstract “Shore Dance” to its left.

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Books

Chuck Close

Chuck Close is one of the world’s leading modern artists. His art focuses on portraits of himself and his family and friends, often produced at a very large scale. Close typically begins with a photograph of a face, creating a painting or print through a complex grid-based reconstruction of the image that he accomplishes by hand through one of many techniques that are unique to Close’s work. His paintings are even more impressive, given that Close had to relearn how to use his hands following a 1988 spinal infection that left him a quadriplegic.

Close was born in Monroe, Washington in 1940. He graduated from the University of Washington (BFA, art) in 1962 and from Yale (MFA, art) in 1964. He was the 1997 UW Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus – the highest university honor for one of its graduates. Close’s work is included in the collections of numerous museums, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Tate Gallery (London). The New York Museum of Modern Art held a special exhibit of Close’s paintings and prints in 1998; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held an exhibit on Close’s prints in 2004.

We have two examples of Chuck Close’s prints in the Gates Commons of the Allen Center. Emma is a remarkable 113-color Japanese-style woodcut that Close produced in collaboration with Japanese woodcut artist Yasu Shibata. Production of the Emma print took over eighteen months to complete. Also in the Gates commons is an etching of Close’s daughter, Georgia, made completely from impressions of Close’s fingerprint. Close’s prints and printmaking techniques are described in the book Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration.

Images © Pace Editions, Inc., New York

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Books

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 Allison Collins

Seattle artist Allison Collins is known for her landscapes that are layered with paint and meaning and 

woven with deeply saturated hues of red, gold, and deep greens and blues. Exhibiting a textural lushness and untethered to any exact places, her work imparts 

the emotion of traveling through open spaces, fields, sky, and vast expanses. 

Collins was born in 1949 and received her Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees from the University of Washington and Master of Fine Arts from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. She has received numerous awards, including a Whitney Museum of American Art Fellowship. Her work appears in collections across the United States and was selected by the U.S. Department of State to feature in the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, Romania as part of the 

Art in Embassies Program. Her painting Coming Back, which the Allen School acquired in 2020, is displayed in the Charles & Lisa Simonyi Undergraduate Commons on the 1st floor of the Bill & Melinda Gates Center.

Imogen Cunningham

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1883, Imogen Cunningham became one of the major photographers of the last century. Imogen studied chemistry at the University of Washington, where she wrote a 1907 thesis on the chemical process of photography. One of her first photographs was a 1906 nude self-portrait, taken on an isolated spot on the UW campus with a 4″ x 5″ mail-order camera.

After graduation, Imogen worked for Seattle photographer Edward Curtis, who documented the American Indian culture. She established her own studio in 1910, becoming one of the very first professional woman photographers. She encouraged other women to join her, publishing an article in 1913 titled Photography as a Profession for Women.

In 1917, Imogen moved to San Francisco with her husband, artist Roi Partridge. There, she met Edward Westin and other photographers and artists. In 1932, Imogen, Ansel Adams, Edward Westin, and others, founded Group f/64, which promoted photography and helped to establish photography as an art form. After several of her photographs of dancer Martha Graham were published by Vanity Fair in the early 30s, the magazine employed her to photograph many celebrities and political figures of the time.

Imogen became widely known for her portraits, flower images, and nudes. She worked as a photographer until her death at the age of ninety-three in 1976.

We have four Imogen Cunningham photographs on the 6th floor of the Allen Center. These are gelatin silver “Estate Prints,” printed by her son Ron after her death. The prints include Portrait of the Artist Frida Kahlo (1931), a flower still-life False Hellebore (1926), and Dance 3 (1926), a photograph of three dance students at Cornish School on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Our most recent addition is the 1933 Self-portrait with Korona View Camera.

Photographs © The Imogen Cunningham Trust.

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Books

Video

  • Portrait of Imogen, by Meg Partridge, nominated for best short documentary, 1988 Academy Awards.

Mabel Lisle Ducasse

Born in Colorado in 1895, Mabel Lisle Ducasse studied art at Central Washington College, the Art Students League in New York, and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Afterwards, she attended UW and received her BFA in 1923. In 1924 she received a Masters of Fine Art degree from UW – the first MFA degree ever granted in the U.S. While in Seattle, Ducasse’s paintings won numerous prizes in local juried art competitions. She moved to Providence, Rhode Island in 1926 when her husband took a position at Brown University, and she become a well-known artist, writer, and art critic in the New England area. She was particularly known for pastel portraits such as the one shown here, which can be seen in the Gates Center reception area.

Joe Max Emminger

The paintings of self-taught artist Joe Max Emminger are based on simple scenes, simple lines, and bold colors. Emminger’s work depicts family, pets, and his favorite Northwest landmarks, such as Greenlake, Pike Place Market, and Lopez Island. His paintings are both humerous and touching.

Born and raised in Seattle, Emminger dropped out of high school and joined the army. Realizing later the importance of education, he finished his high school diploma and eventually enrolled at the University of Washington, where he received a BA in Communication in 1973. While a part-time student, Emminger discovered art and taught himself through reading at the UW art library. Painting became a central part of his life and Emminger has painted every day ever since.

We have two Emminger paintings in the Allen Center: Greenlake Sunday Afternoon (shown above) can be seen on the 4th floor, while Blue Baby is relaxing one floor below.

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Karen Ganz

The work of Seattle artist Karen Ganz is influenced by 1920s cartoon and comic strip characters. She works often with large canvases and collage, using ink drawings overlaid with bright colors. Her paintings and drawings invoke a sense of nostalgia, humor, and concern for the predicament of the “common man.”

Ganz was born in Riverside, California in 1963. She received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and an MA (1987) and MFA (1988) from the University of Iowa. She was a member of the faculty of the UW School of Art from 1988 until 1995.

Ganz’s work has been shown in over 40 exhibitions and is part of a number of public collections. Most visible is her 110-foot 13-piece painting that sits above the North Satellite subway entrance at SeaTac airport. You can find her ink and watercolor drawing, salute#5, on the 3rd floor of the Allen Center.

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Fay Jones

Fay Jones is one of the Northwest’s most recognizable artists. Her imaginative paintings can be seen around the city in public and private collections and in numerous public spaces (e.g., the mural in the Westlake light rail station). Her work has also been featured on posters for city-wide events, such as Bumbershoot and Earshot Jazz.

Born in 1936 in Boston, Massachusetts, Jones attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received a BFA in 1957. There, she met her husband, painter Robert Jones; the two moved to Seattle when he received a teaching position at the University of Washington in 1960.

Jones work has been featured in over 100 solo and group exhibitions, and is included in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Boise Museum of Art. In 1997, the Boise Museum of Art held a 20-year retrospective on Jones’ work.

Jones large colorful acrylic painting The Conversation (top left) appears on the second floor of the Gates Center. Her 1994 etching Lotus-Eaters (top right) and her 1995 monoprint Gray Rabbit (right) can be seen on the 4th and 3rd floors of the Allen Center.

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Books

Robert C. Jones

Robert C. Jones was born in West Hartford, CT, in 1930. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving a BFA (1953) and an MS (1959). In 1963, Jones moved to Seattle with his wife, painter Fay Jones, to join the faculty of the University of Washington School of Art. He retired in 2001.

Jones’ large abstract oil paintings often invoke a sense of background landscape, with foreground figures and shapes drawn as simple curves. His canvases are heavily layered. White and black are often primary, with vivid colors providing the impression of light and shade.

Robert Jones’ work has been included in over 40 solo and group exhibitions, and is part of a number of public and corporate collections. His paintings have been shown at the Tacoma Art Museum, the Bellevue Art Museum, the Museum of Northwest Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Art. He was the recipient of a 2003/2004 Flintridge Foundation award for westcoast artists “whose work demonstrates high artistic merit and a distinctive voice for 20 or more years. Jones died in 2018 at the age of 88.”

Jones’ dynamic abstract oil paintings, Time Enough and Space and Garden, can be seen on the 5th floor of the Allen Center and the 2nd floor of the Gates Center.

Links

Books

  • Robert C. Jones, by John Boylan. University of Washington Press, January 2000.

John-Franklin Koenig

John-Franklin Koenig was an international artist, better known in Europe and Japan than in his native country. Born in Seattle in 1924, he grew up in the Wallingford neighborhood and became interested in art at a young age — particularly the Asian art he found at the Seattle Art Museum. Koenig was drafted into the army in 1943 and fought in Europe until the end of the war. Waiting to return to the U.S., he took a course at the university for American soldiers in Biarritz and fell in love with France and French.

Returning to the U.S. after the war, Koenig enrolled at the UW where he studied French and French literature. He studied design and art during that period as well, and discovered the Seattle art scene of Toby, Graves, and Anderson. On finishing his degree in 1948, John moved to Paris where he would live for the following 30 years. (From 1980 on he spent part of each year in Seattle in his Captial Hill home — a former Hare Krishna temple.) In Paris, he began working on collage and later paintings, inspired by European artists, and also by Oriental works he saw on nearly a dozen trips to Japan. Along with Jean-Marc Arnaud, he opened the Galerie Arnaud in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris.

In 1986, John Koenig received the Gold Medal of the City of Paris and was later made a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. In 1989, the Paris Arts Center held a retrospective of his work. His paintings and collages have been shown in nearly 150 solo exhibitions around the world and are part of collections in a number of international museums: e.g., the Musè d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Musè National d’Art Modern (Paris); the National Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Western Art (Tokyo); the Musè des Beaux-Arts and Musè d’Art Contemporain (Montreal); the Musè de L’état (Luxembourg); and the Seattle Art Museum.

Koenig returned to Seattle in 2006, where he died in January 2008 at the age of 83. The Museum of Northwest Art in Bellingham, WA held a retrospective of his work shortly after his death.

On display on the second floor of the Allen Center are two of Koenig’s works on paper, an early (1962) collage/painting and a more recent (1991) monotype/collage.

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Books

Jacob Lawrence

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917, Jacob Lawrence emerged as one of America’s leading figurative artists and the first to document the history of African Americans through widely-viewed and influential artworks. Lawrence and his family moved to Harlem in 1924, where he experienced the vibrancy of black intellectual, cultural, and artistic life in what was seen as the Harlem Renaissance. He became well known at the young age of 21 for his “Toussant L’Ouverture Series” (1937), a 41-painting collection that depicts the successful Haitian slave rebellion. At the age of 24, he became the first African American whose work was included in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Lawrence considered himself both an artist and educator and used his art to tell stories about black history — stories that were overlooked in the typical “American History” taught in schools. For example, Lawrence produced a 40-panel series on “The Life of Harriet Tubman” (1940), who in the 1800s helped hundreds of slaves find passage to freedom in the North through the Underground Railroad. His 60-painting “Migration Series” (1941) traces the mass movement of African Americans from the South to the North following World War I. These series use both images and detailed titles to create a narrative history of the event.

In 1970, Lawrence and his wife, painter Gwendolyn Knight, moved to Seattle when Lawrence accepted an appointment as Professor in the School of Art at the University of Washington. He retired in 1980 and continued to serve as Emeritus Professor until his death in 2000 at the age of 83.

The 6th floor of the Allen Center exhibits a spectacular two-piece Jacob Lawrence print — New York in Transit. This 1998 screen print provided the design for Lawrence’s 36-foot-long mosaic mural of that name in the Times Square and 42nd Street Subway Station in New York City. Due to the strong 6th floor lighting that could harm the bright colors in the print, we obtained permission to create a 2x-scale photo reproduction, which is displayed outside of the Gates Commons. The original print is on loan to the Henry Art Gallery.

Lawrence’s 1985 lithograph, Man on a Scaffold, welcomes visitors to the CSE reception area. The Chair’s conference room (CSE 110) houses a three-piece Lawrence etching, The Builder’s Suite.

Finally, we are extremely excited to have installed in the Allen Center the 22-piece Jacob Lawrence print series The Legend of John Brown, which is on loan from the Washington State Arts Commission. These prints depict the history of abolitionist John Brown, who prior to the civil war, sought to end slavery in the U.S. through an armed uprising. Caught in 1859, Brown was tried and hung for treason. In 1941, Lawrence painted a series of twenty two gouache paintings depicting the John Brown history. He produced print versions in 1977 when the original paintings, held by the Detroit Institute of Art, had become too fragile for display. The prints can be seen from the 2nd and 3rd floor bridges in the Microsoft Atrium of the Allen Center.

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Margie Livingston

Margie Livingston’s paintings create geometric three-dimensional spaces of air and light. Motivated by nature and trees in particular, Livingston chooses branches and leaves that she brings into her studio as the subjects for her work. Hanging those branches from the ceiling, she then builds a string grid around them to help define the containing space. Her paintings provide a perspective on both the objects and the way that light travels around them in the grid.

Livingston was born in Vancouver, Washington, and studied painting at the University of Washington where she received an MFA in 1999. In 2001 she spent a year in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar studying early German romantic painters. Livingston received the first UW School of Art Annual Alumni Award in 2004 and the Betty Bowen Annual Memorial Award from the Seattle Art Museum in 2006.

Two of Livingston’s 2006 “Structure” paintings can be seen on the fifth floor of the Allen Center.

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Norman Lundin

Norman Lundin was born in Los Angeles in 1938 and grew up in Chicago. Following his BA (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1961) and MFA (University of Cincinnati, 1963), he spent a year studying in Oslo, Norway, on a Fulbright Grant. Lundin joined the School of Art at the University of Washington in 1964 and has been a faculty member since that time.

Lundin’s paintings are concerned with light, space, perspective, and impression. He works in several styles, including realistic still lifes, landscapes, and figure drawings. Many of his paintings depict empty spaces with strong structural elements, often from simple objects, such as tables or bottles. The painting show here, Studio Morning: Yellow Cup, which hangs on the 4th floor of the Allen Center, demonstrates Lundin’s technical skill and artistic sensibility. It integrates two styles and perspectives — the still life and the landscape, the void interior and the city skyline — providing a unique sense of place and time.

Lundin’s work is part of numerous corporate and museum collections. In addition to more than 60 solo exhibitions, his paintings have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Frye Art Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum, among others.

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James Martin

The son and grandson of railroad men, James Martin was born in Everett, Washington in 1928. Martin dropped out of Ballard High School, but finally returned to finish his diploma and later entered the University of Washington, where he received a BA in Creative Writing in 1953.

Not succeeding as a writer, Martin worked several jobs to support himself and became an art framer for several Seattle galleries, which gave him first-hand access to many great paintings. He was heavily influenced both by European masters, such as Chagall, Picasso, and Matisse, and by the Northwest masters, Tobey, Graves, Anderson, and Callahan. In fact, Tobey was one of the first to buy some of Martin’s early paintings, which he saw at the Seligman gallery in the University District.

While Martin began as a Northwest-style painter, he soon adapted his own style of fantastic, comical, perhaps warped characters. His work was highly successful, however Martin, somewhat of a recluse, was never a strong promoter. Many of his works are signed James Martin D.D.R., for “Donald Duck Ranch,” the name he’s given to his self-built house and studio in Edmonds, Washington.

Martin’s small gouache on paper, Curtainesque, appears on the 6th floor of the Allen Center in the Habib Conference Room. In his notes, Martin describes this as “a painting of Elizabethan characters wearing John Phillip Sousa’s jacket.”

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Books

Alden Mason

Nationally-recognized artist Alden Mason was born in Everett, Washington (1919) and grew up in the beautiful natural surroundings of the Skagit Valley. Alden attended UW, majoring in zoology until he turned to art. Mason received a BFA in 1942, an MFA in 1947, and joined the faculty of the School of Art in 1949. He retired from the art department in 1981 and continued to paint actively until his death in 2013.

Alden’s paintings have moved from highly abstract to figurative, and now in his mid 80s, back to abstract. Originally working with large bright color blotches of oil, he was forced to switch to acrylic due to an allergic reaction to the toxic fumes of oil paints. With acrylic, he uses both stick figures and thick strokes to convey aspects of nature and his life and experience. His forms are at once playful, primitive, and mischievous. Mason’s work reflects both his country roots and his appreciation for primitive cultures. For example, well into his 70s, Mason traveled to New Guinea to live among native tribes (he still proudly displays in his Ballard studio an arrow he pulled from a tribesman struck in an inter-tribal war).

Mason’s paintings have been shown at over 100 exhibitions. They are included the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Gallery, the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Boise Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum. The new Seattle Opera House (McCaw Hall) displays his enormous 4-piece mural on the main floor in the Impromptu Cafe.

Alden’s painting Red Bird Pyramid looks over the 3rd floor of the Allen Center while Summer Dance is displayed on the 3rd floor of the Gates Center.

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Stephen McClelland

Born in Amarillo Texas, Seattle artist Stephen McClelland received a BFA from Indiana University in 1968 and an MFA from the University of Washington in 1975. He has served as a guest instructor at the University of Washington, Cornish Institute, and other local colleges and universities. McClelland uses playful figures, geometric shapes, and vibrant colors to bring life and humor to his large abstract paintings and drawings. His paintings can be found in many Northwest corporate and public collections, including Microsoft, Safeco, Rainier Bank, and the City of Seattle.

McClelland’s lively painting, The Statuary in Certaldo, appears in the Allen Center at the base of the Silverberg Landing.

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Johsel Namkung

Photographer Johsel Namkung was Born in Gwangju, Korea in 1919 where he grew up with a love for both art and music. He studied voice at The Tokyo Conservatory in Japan, and in fact, won the All-Japan Music Contest in 1940. Following the war, Johsel and his wife Mineko came to Seattle when they received scholarships to the University of Washington School of Music.

After receiving a Masters in Music at UW, Namkung worked for Northwest Airlines, who hired him because he spoke fluent Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. But in 1956, his love for photography caused him to leave Northwest to study photography and print making full time. His studies included apprenticeships, work in commercial studios, and a week-long workshop with Ansel Adams in 1958. Namkung was a member of the Seattle arts community and was close friends with artists George Tsutakawa, Mark Tobey, and Kenneth Callahan, among others.

Namkung worked for 25 years as a medical photographer at the UW Medical Center, a job that gave him plenty of free time for his nature photography. The UW’s Henry Art Gallery has held several solo exhibitions of Namkung’s nature photographs (1966 and 1973). The Seattle Art Museum held its first Namkung show in 1978, and another in the summer of 2006 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Namkung’s photos are in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Oakland Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Henry Gallery. The Allen Center and Gates Center hold two photographs from the 2006 Seattle Art Museum exhibit: on the 2nd floor of the Allen Center and the 2nd floor of the Gates Center. Namkung brought the photos to the Allen Center himself in his VW Microbus.

Johsel Namkung died in 2013 at the age of 94.

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Ambrose Patterson

Painter Ambrose Patterson was born in 1877 in Daylesford, Victoria, Australia. After studying art briefly in Melbourne, Patterson left for Paris in 1898. There, he became part of the Paris arts scene and exhibted at the first Salon d’Automne exhibitions. The 1905 Salon — at which Matisse and the Fauves stunned the art world — included five of Patterson’s paintings. His work was shown in galleries in Paris, London, and Brussles as well.

Patterson returned to Australia in 1909, leaving again in 1916 on a ship bound for New York. When his ship stopped in Hawaii on route, Patterson fell in love with its natural beauty and stayed for over a year, becoming a successful painter of Hawaiian mountains and landscape. Following a year in San Francisco, he moved to Seattle to work as a freelance artist — perhaps the first modern artist to arrive in Seattle. In 1919, University of Washington President Henry Suzzallo invited Patterson to establish the UW School of Painting and Design. Patterson married painter and former student Viola Hansen in 1922, and the two became major figures in northwest arts. Patterson taught until his retirement in 1947 and continued to paint and exhibit until his death in 1966.

During his career, Patterson’s work was shown at galleries and museums around the country, including the Chicago Institute, the San Francisco Arts Association, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Seattle Fine Arts Society (predecessor to the Seattle Art Museum) held a solo exhibition of his work in 1921, and the Seattle Art Museum held solo shows in 1934, 1947, and 1956, as well as a retrospective in 1961.

Patterson’s paintings can be found in the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and at several Australian museums, including the National Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney) and the Australia Portrait Gallery (Canberra). On the 5th floor of the Allen Center is Patterson’s painting, Waves, which was part of the 42nd Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists held at the Seattle Art Museum in 1956. A 1940s impressionist painting of his studio is on the 2nd floor of the Gates Center.

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Books

  • Jane Alexander, Portrait of an Artist: Ambrose Patterson (1877 – 1996) From the Latin Quarter to the pot pourri of Palamadom, Jimaringle Publications, Melbourne, Australia (out of print).

Viola Hansen Patterson

Viola Hansen, born in Seattle in 1898, attended UW and graduated in 1921 with a degree in librarianship. She also studied art at UW, married artist and School of Art Professor Ambrose Patterson in 1922, and completed a BFA at UW in 1925. The Pattersons traveled the world as artists, including a number of stays in Paris where Viola studied and was highly influenced by the impressionist movement and its followers (in fact, she was the first woman born in Seattle to study art in Paris) . Ambrose and Viola are seen as among the first to bring modern art to the Seattle arts scene. Viola had a large number of exhibitions of both paintings and sculpture in Washington, Oregon, and New York, including regular showing in the Seattle Art Museum’s annual exhibition, where her works won numerous awards. She received an MFA from UW and became a Professor in the UW School of Art in 1947.

Viola Patterson died in 1984 at the age of 86 in the longtime home that she had shared with Ambrose Patterson in Laurelhurst.

Her 1955 still life painting can be seen in the student services suite on the first floor of the Gates Center.

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Mary Randlett

The photographs of Seattle photographer Mary Randlett have helped to define the unique qualities of the Northwest’s natural beauty and light. Born in 1924 in Seattle, Randlett was inspired at an early age by the beauty of Puget Sound and the islands. She attended Queen Anne High School and although never finishing, entered Whitman College where she received a B.A. in political science in 1947. But her focus was always on serious photography.

In addition to her nature photographs, Randlett become an important portrait photographer who was uniquely responsible for documenting the artists who created the northwest school, such as Morris Graves, who was a friend of her mother, Mark Tobey, and Kenneth Calahan. She went on to photograph hundreds of artists and writers as well. Randlett took the last photos of poet Theodore Roethke (UW Professor and Pulitzer Prize Winner) before his death. Her Roethke photos were included in a poetry book published by University of Washington Press, which established a close connection to the publisher that led to her work on over three dozen books.

Randlett’s photographs are included in over forty permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. An exhibit of her landscape photographs was shown at the Tacoma Art Museum in 2007. Randlett’s huge body of works are housed in the special collections of UW’s Allen Library.

On the 6th floor of the Allen Center we have six of Mary Randlett’s portraits of UW-affiliated artists whose work is also in the building. The artists are: Alden Mason (shown above, right), Kenneth Calahan, George Tsutakawa, John-Franklin Koeing, Johsel Namkung, and Jacob Lawrence (show above, left). All except the Lawrence photo are from the book Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art, by Doris Tarzan Ament, which highlights 20 northwest artists.

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George Rodriguez

Seattle-based ceramic artist George Rodriguez was born and grew up in El Paso, Texas. He received a 2006 BFA in Ceramics from the University of Texas, El Paso, moving afterwards to Seattle to attend the University of Washington, where he received an MFA in Ceramics in 2009. Rodriguez’s Mexican heritage has influenced much of his work, while a 2010 Bonderman Travel Fellowship from U.W. allowed him to travel to 26 countries over 8 months and experience many other cultures and civilizations.

We are proud to have ceramic works by Rodriguez in both buildings. In the Allen Center, four of his amusing monkeys (clockwise from upper left, Lesul, Louie, Barbary, and LongTail) adorn the seating area at the top of the stairs outside of the Gates Commons. The Singh Gallery in the Gates Center houses the spectacular 12-piece “Zodiac Series – alebrijes” — Rodriguez’s reinterpretation of the Chinese Zodiac animals, using familiar animals from South and Central America. “Alebrijes” refers to a type of traditional Mexican folk art — typically imaginary animals painted with bright colors. A common feature of Rodriguez’s works is the use of small molded ceramic flowers or other simple shapes to adorn his figures, creating texture, depth, and complexity on the surface, and giving each piece its own personality.

George Rodriguez received the 2019 Emerging Artist Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), the 2016 Museum of Northwest Art’s Luminaries’ Patti Warashina Award for Emerging Artists, and a 2015 Fellowship from Artist Trust. He has had recent shows at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (2018), the Museum of Northwest Artists (2019), and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.

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Roger Shimomura

Roger Shimomura uses painting to explore the relationships and contrasts between Japanese and American cultures. A major theme is the discrimination experienced in the U.S. by Roger (a third-generation American) and other Japanese- and Asian-Americans.

Born in Seattle in 1939, Roger and his family were forced into a Japanese internment camp during WWII, first in Puyallup, WA and then in Idaho, where as a 3-year old, he was surrounded by guards and high-security fences. Following the war, he completed school in Seattle and studied commercial design at the University of Washington, receiving a BA in 1961. He received an MFA in painting at Syracuse University in 1969 and joined the faculty of the University of Kansas, rising to become a University Distinguished Professor in 1994. The experience of life as an Asian-American in Kansas led him to paint about culture, discrimination, and ethnic stereotypes.

Shimomura has had over 100 solo and 200 group exhibitions in the US, Canada, and Japan. His work is included in both private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). His personal papers are being collected by the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

On display on the second floor of the Allen Center is a series of six Shimomura lithographs, called Mistaken Identities. These images are motivated by photographs and paintings from different sources dating from the time of the Japanese internments during World War II.

Links

Julie Speidel

The work of Seattle sculptor Julie Speidel is heavily influenced by ancient forms and monuments. As a teenager, she lived in the British Isles and was fascinated by the pre-historic ruins she saw in England, Ireland, and Scotland, including the stone monoliths at Newgrange and Stonehenge. Her work in both bronze and stone reflects the primitive nature of these structures and others she found on wide travels throughout Europe and Asia.

Speidel was born in 1941 in Seattle, Washington. She studied in Seattle at the University of Washington and the Cornish Institute, and in France at the University of Grenoble. Her work can be found in museums, corporate collections, and at three U.S. embassies. Her 24-foot sculpture Tregaseal adorns the lawn of the Federal Courthouse at 5th and Madison in downtown Seattle.

Julie Speidel’s 78-inch bronze scupture, Byblos, stands guard over the Allen Center at the north end of the Alberg Terrace (6th floor).

Links

Akio Takamori

Akio Takamori’s ceramic sculptures evoke an eerie sense of reality and presence. Often drawn from childhood memories of small-village life in Japan, his standing and sleeping figures depict ordinary people going about their day-to-day existence. Another body of Akio’s work consists of ceramic vessels, often painted with erotic images.

Takamori was born in 1950 in Nobeoka, Miyazaki, Japan. He studied art at Masashino Art College, Tokyo, before moving to the U.S. in 1974. He received a BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1976 and an MFA at Alfred University in New York in 1978. Since 1993 he has been a faculty member in the University of Washington School of Art.

Examples of Akio’s work can be found in the Carnegie Institute Art Museum (Pittsburgh), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the Kansas City Art Institute, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Tacoma Art Museum, among others. In 2006, the Arizona State University Art Museum created a touring “mid-career survey” of Akio’s work, Between Clouds of Memory. The exhibit was shown at the Tacoma Art Museum in 2006; the UW’s Henry Art Gallery presented Akio Takamori: The Laughing Monks that same year.

Akio passed away from cancer in January 2017. The Seattle Times published this wonderful obituary following his death.

We are proud to have two of Akio Takamori’s works in the Allen Center. His Boy in Yellow Sweater stands calmly in the CSE reception area on the first floor, while his Young Woman in White Dress (made specially for the Allen Center) greets people on the Silverberg Stair.

Links

Books

George Tsutakawa

Seattle artist and sculptor George Tsutakawa is most widely know for his fountain sculptures that can be seen around Seattle, across the country, and in Canada and Japan. He was a fine painter as well and won many honors, including awards from the Governor of Washington, the University of Washington, the City of Seattle, and the Emperor of Japan. He had solo exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, the Bellevue Art Museum, and UW’s Henry Art Gallery, among others.

Born on Capitol Hill in Seattle in 1910, Tsutakawa went to live with his grandmother in Japan at the age of 7. There he learned Japanese culture, calligraphy, and arts. At the age of 17, his father “banished” him back to Seattle, disappointed that George wanted to become an artist rather than a businessman. He finished high school in Seattle, entering the University of Washington in 1932. Tsutakawa’s talent was quickly recognized, and the Seattle Art Museum’s Northwest Annual included his work when he was only a college freshman. He received a BFA (1937) and MFA (1950), and was a Professor in the School of Art from 1947 until his retirement in 1976, teaching in the School of Architecture as well. In 1997, Tsutakawa died in his home in Seattle at the age of 87. His son, Gerard Tsutakawa, has followed in his footsteps to become a well-known sculptor in his own right, and is responsible for “The Mitt” — the sculpture in front of Seattle’s Safeco Field.

We have two fine examples of Tsutakawa’s watercolors in the Allen Center: Hurricane Ridge (1981), which can be seen on the 6th floor, and Beach Images (1950), which is on the 5th floor.

Links

Books

  • George Tsutakawa, by Martha Kingsbury. University of Washington Press, 1970.
  • Iridescent Light, by Deloris Tarzan Ament and Mary Randlett. University of Washington Press, 2002.

Art Wolfe

Seattle wildlife photographer Art Wolfe has published over 50 books of his stunning photographs of natural landscapes, animals, and endangered species. Wolf’s artistic photographic compositions have been included in hundreds of magazines. He’s been honored with an Alfred Eisenstaed Magazine Photography Award (2000), with the North American Nature Photography Association’s Outstanding Nature Photographer of the Year Award (1998), and was named 1996 Photographer of the Year by Photo Media Magazine. The National Audobon Society presented Wolfe with its first Rachael Carson Award in 1998. The son of commercial artists in Seattle, Washington, Art Wolfe graduated from the University of Washington in 1975 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a minor in Art Education.

Below are the Art Wolfe photographs that appear in the Allen Center. Text with each photo is drawn from Edge of the Earth, Corner of the Sky, © 2003 Artwolfe.com/WildlandsPress. All images © 2003 Art Wolfe.

Point Lobos State Reserve
California, USA

A palette of color and detail that would make an artist jealous awaits the beachcomber along the shores of California’s Point Lobos State Reserve. Here a mixture of shells, rocks and dried seaweed combine to create a rainbow of hues that serves as a counterpoint to the graceful lines of the exposed coastal shelf. Low-hanging clouds mute the sun and provide the perfect light for capturing the subtleties of color. The name of this state reserve derives from the offshore rocks at Punta de los Lobos Marinos (“Point of the Sea Wolves”), where the sound of the local sea lions carries inland. The beaches and forested headlands of this park are spectacularly beautiful. The reserve protects rich flora and fauna of both land and sea, as well as geological formations and archaeological sites. It is located on the central coast of California in Monterey County, just south of Carmel.

Hasselblad Xpan, Hasselblad Xpan 4/45mm lens, f/22 at 1/8 second, Fujichrome Velvia film, Gitzo G1325 tripod

Lava Flow
Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii, USA

Few Landscapes on Earth demonstrate the dynamics of land formation as clearly and dramatically as the “Big Island” of Hawaii. Through time, the continual island-building process has created Mauna Loa, from base to summit the largest volcano on Earth, and Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano. Magma escapes from the Earth’s interior, flows to the ocean’s edge and quickly solidifies upon falling into the tumultuous waters of the seas. The superheated lava often explodes on entering the cool ocean waters.

Canon EOS-IN, Canon EF 70-200mm lens, f/22 at 1 second, Fujichrome Velvia film, Gitzo G1325 tripod

Amethyst Lake
Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada

Moisture-laden clouds hang heavy over the Northern Rockies of Canada’s Jasper National Park. In fall, marginal weather often prevails as storms coming in off the North Pacific stack up against the high mountains. A single shaft of sunlight penetrates a gap in the cloud cover and illuminates one of the peaks. Lichen-covered rocks protruding from Amethyst Lakes’ waters direct you to the mountain backdrop. Amethyst Lake lies in Alberta’s beautiful Tonquin Valley, above tree line in the heart of the park. Wildflower meadows and mountain caribou make this spot one of the most sublime anywhere. The lake’s spectacular purple-blue waters give it its name.

Canon EOS-IN, Canon EF 17-35mm lens, f/22 at 2 seconds, 2-stop graduated neutral density filter, Fujichrome Velvia film, Gitzo G1228 tripod

Hoh Rainforest
Olympic National Park, Washington, USA

Along the western valleys of Washington’s Olympic National Park, temperate rain forests receive as much as 425 centimeters (12-14 feet) of rain a year. A mild climate combined with high moisture levels creates an environment where lichen, mosses, and ferns thrive, carpeting the ground and enveloping the trees. The visual result is a landscape that resembles a fairyland: one might expect an elf to pop out at any moment. This setting is in the Hall of Mosses Trail, a delightful path through a jungle-like forest near the end of the Hoh River Road. The heavy overcast allows the subtleties of the various shades of greens and earth tones to be more evident. This rain forest is choked with broadleaf maples, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, western red cedar, Douglas fir, red alder, vine maple, ferns and lichen. About 95 percent of Olympic National Park was designated wilderness in 1988 to help protect the spectacular ecosystems in this special place. The glaciers of Mount Olympus flow into the Hoh River. In ancient times the rich river valley was inhabited by Pacific Northwest Coast Indians. The Hoh Rain Forest is a designated World Heritage Site.

Pentax 67II, Pentax SMCP 67 45mm lens, f/32 at 8 seconds, Fujichrome Velvia film, Gitzo G1548 tripod

The Sentinel
Glacier National Park, Montana

Glacier National Park is prime mountain goat habitat and the day I hiked the trail this one miraculously appeared. He was kind enough to stand motionless for several moments allowing me to capture him and this spectacular view of Hidden Lake near Logan Pass.

Text with each above photo is drawn from Edge of the Earth, Corner of the Sky, © 2003 Artwolfe.com/WildlandsPress. All images © 2003 by Art Wolfe.

Links

Books