Arts
Studio Sessions: Ling Chun
The Seattle-based artist brings playful color to ceramics and neon while exploring memory, transformation, and life between cultures.
For Ling Chun, creating begins with something sensed before it can be named. Working with clay, glass, light, and sometimes synthetic hair, the Hong Kong-born artist gives physical form to things that words cannot always hold. “For me, the magnitude of making goes far beyond the object that is eventually produced,” Chun says. “The object…
The Magic of PAX Is Stronger Than Ever
PAX West draws more than 100,000 people to Seattle each year. Co-founder Jerry Holkins reflects on what the gaming convention set out to change, how its community has grown and why gathering face to face still matters.
Access to game news as it was happening was difficult back in the day. Even with the advent of the internet, communication between game publishers and journalists was still a very elite affair. I used to fake credentials—via fax machine!—to attend the Electronic Entertainment Expo, mostly just known as E3. It was simultaneously as loud…
Your Guide to Bumbershoot 2026
Navigate Seattle’s wildest end-of-summer weekend with 20 picks spanning Death Cab for Cutie, Blood Orange, wrestling, skateboarding and—obviously—movies made in 48 hours.
Four years after Bumbershoot returned with its quirkiness revivified, Seattleites broadly acknowledge the two-day multimedia extravaganza as a welcome finale to the summer festival season. Fests like Bumbershoot are designed around a choose-your-own-adventure model, but if you’re the kind of person who looked at this year’s sprawling lineup—featuring multiple bands, artists, and exhibits happening at…
Studio Sessions: Gabi Nirino
Working with textiles to explore ideas connected to nature, community, and womanhood, Buenos Aires-born Gabi Nirino never stops experimenting with her medium.
Gabi Nirino carries bag of materials with her almost everywhere she goes. Cloth, thread, yarn, textile scraps, collected fibers—the pieces inside are a network of inspiration waiting for her hands. “You can work with textiles anywhere—on the floor, on a plane—which is why I always carry a project in my bag,” Nirino says. “It’s like…
This Art Show Refuses to Sit Still
Gallery B612 in Pioneer Square brings together designers, musicians and performance artists for a one-night celebration of the feminine experience.
On August 28, some of the art at Gallery B612 will walk right past you. Paintings will reappear on garments, while fabric sculptures become part of a performance. Art & Fashion: Claiming My Space in This World takes its name from a painting by Ruby Lindner featured in SHE: Narrative Work on the Feminine Experience,…
The 2026 Washington State Book Award Finalists Are Here
Your fall reading list just got 41 books longer.
The 2026 Washington State Book Award finalists are in, and readers may want to clear some space on the nightstand. Judges selected 41 titles from 308 books written by Washington authors and published in 2025. The finalists span fiction, memoir, nonfiction, poetry, picture books, books for young readers, and young adult literature. Seattle is well…
Giving Black Artists Their Flowers
Now in its fifth year, Black & Loud Fest is building community, expanding the region’s sound, and making sure recognition doesn’t come too late.
Categorically, throughout the entire history of music and American culture, Black artists have not received the love and credit they deserve. When recognition does come, it is not until decades after their passing. From Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Seattle’s Tina Bell to contemporary pioneers like Fishbone, Black-fronted bands in the Pacific Northwest and beyond have…
Studio Sessions: Periko The Artist
The Mexican-born, Seattle-based artist paints vibrant figures that refuse to settle into fixed identities.
Can a painting ever contain an entire person? The works of Gerardo Peña, also known as Periko The Artist, leave room for their subjects to move and change, resisting the idea that any of us can be reduced to a single image or expression. Peña’s colorful, surreal figures capture something less fixed than a likeness,…
When Art and Tech Align
Xispa brings artists and technologists together in South Lake Union for residencies, experiments, and unexpected collaborations.
Discover xispa, Seattle’s new art and tech innovation lab in South Lake Union blending the PNW arts community with the city’s tech workforce. Step inside.
Let Him Cook: Matt Broussard’s Rise From Restaurant Chef to Social Media Star
With a forthcoming cookbook and a Capitol Hill restaurant, the Seattle chef is taking his laid-back approach beyond the screen.
Matt Broussard doesn’t know how to describe his food. The chef’s forthcoming cookbook, Now We’re Cooking, has everything from his grandma’s dolmades—grape leaves stuffed with lamb and rice cooked in duck fat—to cantaloupe gazpacho and seared tuna steaks coated in fennel furikake. It’s a culinary hodgepodge that defies categorization, but Broussard defies categorization himself. “I…
Studio Sessions: Liz Tran
After 26 years in Seattle, artist Liz Tran returned to Oregon, but her impact on our city’s art scene will always remain.
Liz Tran’s work blooms with color, energy, and emotion. Bright drips and drops, petal-like shapes—in Tran’s skillful hands, canvas, paint, and fabric burst into dynamic studies of nature, transformation, life. Born and raised in Oregon, Tran spent the past 26 years in Seattle, returning to her hometown, Eugene, to be closer to her family—and the…
Earth, Wind & Fire Keeps the Groove Going
Ahead of the band’s Seattle return with Lionel Richie, Grammy Award-winning drummer, percussionist, singer, and songwriter Ralph Johnson talks performing, enduring songs, and his new memoir.
Through the years, Earth, Wind & Fire drummer Ralph Johnson has stepped onstage in Seattle more times than he can count, but it was far from love at first sight. “I was born and raised in Los Angeles, so we had nothing but sunshine and 70-degree weather,” Johnson says. “When I went to Seattle for the…
A Landmark Year: Rare National Archives Documents Come to Seattle
MOHAI marks the nation’s 250th anniversary with a free exhibit featuring a draft of the Constitution and other records from America’s early history.
The United States celebrated its 250th anniversary earlier this month, and to mark that milestone, Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry is welcoming Freedom Plane National Tour: Documents That Forged a Nation, a traveling exhibit from the National Archives. As one of only eight host venues, MOHAI is the final stop on the national tour…
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