Mission

The Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs promotes the value of arts and culture in and of communities throughout Seattle.

By fostering and investing in the creative contributions of our artist citizens to every facet of the community, we engage the creativity in every resident and build a healthy and vibrant Seattle.

Vision

Arts and culture play a vital role in making Seattle a remarkable place to live, work and visit -a center of creativity in many forms.

The cultural community serves and expresses the soul of the city, alongside its capacity for innovation, its educational resources, its economic vitality, its quality of life, and its spirit of racial and social equity.

Our vision is of a city justly renowned for its cultural dynamism, innovation, opportunity and inclusiveness, where artists thrive and are valued.

How the Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs Addresses the Mayor's Priorities:


Create jobs and opportunity for all

  • Engaging Seattle's creative economy. We partner with Seattle's artists and cultural organizations to enrich the lives of residents and visitors with a dazzling range of opportunities. In 2006, the city invested $1.7 million supporting more than 220 projects, organizations, youth arts training programs, neighborhood festivals and more. Every day in 2006, an average of 12 cultural events was presented with the city's support. Of the audience that participated in these events, almost half received free admission, and over 20 percent were students and youth.

  • Promoting the music industry
    In February 2006, we debuted Seattle OnHold, an innovative program that plays a rotation of tunes by Seattle musicians when callers to the city are placed on hold. In 2006, Seattle Presents, our free lunchtime concert series at City Hall, attracted more than 6,000 people to 35 performances and employed 416 musicians.

  • Advancing cultural tourism. We partner with Seattle's Convention & Visitor's Bureau to promote Seattle as a prime destination to experience arts, history, culture and heritage and to position the region competitively to attract the desirable and sizeable market segment known as cultural travelers. We also sponsor an on-line cultural events calendar.

Build strong families and healthy communities

  • Investing in community-based arts and culture. Seattle offers an extraordinary array of arts and cultural events, many of which take place in the city's diverse neighborhoods. Recognizing that the arts build community, we support creativity at a grassroots level, making small but powerful investments in dozens of festivals and community cultural projects through our Neighborhood and Community Arts Program (NAC) and a new small awards initiative, smART ventures, which seeks to respond to one-time opportunities, spark innovative ideas and widen arts and cultural participation, particularly among diverse or underserved communities.

  • Closing the achievement gap through the arts
    The Office's partnership with Seattle Public Schools promotes the development of arts education for all students. Research shows that learning through the arts increases student engagement and achievement. The Office helped frame policy and arts-education goals for the district's Five-Year Plan adopted in 2005 and convenes an annual arts education.

    Through our Youth Arts Program, we also invest in out-of-school arts training programs for middle- and high-school students with an emphasis on reaching at-risk, underserved and diverse youth.

  • Nurturing public art in neighborhoods
    Our Public Art Roadmap is an education guide designed to help Seattle neighborhood groups plan for new public art in their communities.