The 1 Million - Multiple Species Eradication

The 1 Million - Multiple Species Eradication

February 3, 2022 - April 7, 2022

The 1 Million - Multiple Species Eradication explores bio-/multi-species extinctions and species affected by humanity's mass resource extraction.

Artist Carol Rashawnna Williams created the large scale monoprint installation with seven contributing local/national visual artists: 

• Amaranta Ibarra-Sandys
• Paula Oliver
• Noa Piper
• Sydney Pertl
• Kelly and Hope Bain
• Rosalind Davis Guterson

"We are NO longer talking about animal extinction but entire species eradication, in which the tipping point of resource extraction symptoms, causes and old-world paradigms will either make or break human civilization."

- Carol Rashawnna Williams

While working in relative physical isolation for two years, the seven artists have worked to be in constant contact, learning, growing and exploring these topics together through their various artforms. The shared experiences, fears, hopes, dreams, visions and commitments to Mother Earth of the collective galvanized them to create this work. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the killings of African Americans by police and BIPOC housing displacement and insecurities also shaped the exhibition and artists work. 

Resources

The collective also uncovered new research and awareness of resource extraction, climate change, and sustainable infrastructures.The 1 Million - Multiple Species Eradication seeks to connect our beliefs, ancestral knowledge and the impact humans have on mass extinctions. 

• Click here to read the National Geographic article that inspired Williams.
• Click here for a list of resources and further reading from Williams.

About Carol Rashawnna Williams

Carol Rashawnna Williams is Seattle-based, interdisciplinary artist who makes work that engages audiences in conversations about social, environmental and racial justice. 

Throughout her practice, Williams contends that the only way to shift race relations and understand climate change is through collective imaginings and re-imaginings of equitable relationships to the land, animals and resources. Williams' aesthetic forms fall, swim, fly, drip and grow through various layers of reality, spirituality and data analysis. Her narrative installations reject the tidy, toxic logic of scarcity models, suggesting powerful alternatives in collective storytelling, collective ownership, collective re-valuing of biospecies and collective commitments to sustainable environmental practices over time.

Williams earned the ArtsWa Public Artist Roster (2021), International Masters Book World Wide Art Books (2021), Artists to Know World Wide Books (2021), Rachels Network Catalyst Finalist Award (2020) and the Cornish Fine Art College, Neddy Finalist Award (2020), The Office of Arts and Culture Artist Up Mentorily Scholarship (2021), Residency in Berlin, Germany (2021) and the 4Culture Conductive Garboil Award (2018), an Artist Residency AADK Spain (2018), a 4Culture Artist Community Grant Award (2017) and was accepted to Seattle Office of Arts & Culture's Public Art Boot Camp (2018). 

She is the owner of K-Love 4 Art, co-founder of both Race & Climate Justice Art Collective and ARTifACTS, and the Co-Executive Director at Community Arts Create. She was accepted into both the Environmental Leadership Program, a yearlong national fellowship to support emerging leaders in environmental justice, Interweave, Sustainable Seattle's (S2) support, mentorship and fiscal sponsor for the BIPOC Sustainable Tiny Art House Community Campaign. 

Media

• South Seattle Emerald - Art Exhibit Speaks to Extinction, In Animal Kingdom and Black America

ARTS at King Street Station is free and open Tuesday - Saturday, 10am to 6pm. In accordance with King County's vaccination verification guidance, people ages 12 and older will be required to show proof of full COVID-19 vaccination or a negative test result to enter. Masks are required, regardless of vaccination status. 

The 1 Million - Multiple Species Eradication is organized and presented by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture in partnership with program lead Jenny Ku and the ARTS at King Street Station Advisors. Support for the installation is provided by Benjamin Gale-Schreck and Blake Haygood.

Image: Detail from The 1 Million - Multiple Species Eradication, Carol Rashawnna Williams, with Amaranta Ibarra-Sandys, Paula Oliver, Noa Piper, Sydney Pertl, Kelly and Hope Bain, Rosalind Davis Guterson, Fabric, acrylic, safety pins, 2019-2022

Gallery

A Clearer View: The Last Days of the Alaskan Way Viaduct

February 3, 2022 - April 7, 2022

A Clearer View: The Last Days of the Alaskan Way Viaduct features 11 photographs by Roxann Murray and Eirik Johnson that documented the monumental transformation of Downtown Seattle's waterfront as the Alaskan Way Viaduct was torn down. The Seattle Office of the Waterfront and Civic Projects and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture commissioned photographers Murray and Johnson to document the last days and demolition from the 2019 Goodbye Viaduct celebration to the removal of the final sections, each artist spent months documenting the last days of the iconic elevated roadway that divided the city.  

Murray's work captures the transformation of the Central Waterfront through the people and communities shaped by the highway, while Johnson memorializes the last views and the perspectives that went away with the roadway. Together, Murray and Johnson captured over 100 images of the monumental transformation to Downtown Seattle and the people who lived and worked in the area. The photographs featured in the exhibition were purchased using Seattle Department of Transportation 1% for Art funds (generated by the waterfront and seawall projects) and will be added to the city's Civic Collection. 

Click here to view the rest of the works in this series.

About the Artists

Roxann Murray is an award-winning artist based in Tacoma, Washington. Her images have been used in newspapers, a TV show, a video game, a music video, art books, and a literary arts magazine. A few organizations she has collaborated with are hitRECord, Elephant Nature Park, and the City of Seattle's Office of Arts and Culture. In 2009, she received her B.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences with a certificate of high scholarship from UW Tacoma. Roxann has spent much of her time on the road documenting a variety of places in the United States, including the National Parks. 

The majority of Roxann's photographs focus on pattern and color. She brings attention to hidden beauties such as a plant pushing through cracked concrete or an old rusty truck on the side of a road. Since she was a child, she has had a strong connection with nature and animals. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Roxann developed an affection for trees, fungi, ferns, and the seashore. While photographing people and community, she prefers shooting candidly rather than have the subjects pose; that way, she captures who they really are. Since Roxann is Nakota on her father's side, she tries to view the world through a decolonized perspective and live in a way that she hopes make her ancestors proud.

Eirik Johnson has exhibited his work at institutions including the Aperture Foundation, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. His monographs include Road to Nowhere (self-published), Barrow Cabins (Ice Fog Press), PINE (Minor Matters Books), Sawdust Mountain (Aperture Books), and BORDERLANDS (Twin Palms Publishers). Johnson's work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the International Center of Photography, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. His work is represented by G. Gibson Projects, Seattle, WA. Johnson serves as the Programs Chair at the Photographic Center NW in Seattle. 

Home of Good: A Black Seattle Storyquilt

Opening November 16, 2021

Home of Good: A Black Seattle Storyquilt is a subjective and collective story quilt uplifting narratives of Seattle's traditionally Black Central District in Duwamish Territory. Inspired by the closing of the over 60-year-old Home of Good Barbeque, in 2017, Voices Rising created a series of quilting circles at Washington Hall. The vision of honoring their cultural and healing presence in Seattle quickly became more inclusive.  

"According to the article, the family brought their recipe from their hometown of Tallulah, Louisiana. My father's family came here from Marshall, Texas. Home of Good was the abbreviated nickname of this beloved restaurant and I always brought my grandma a plate to critique while she enjoyed every bite. Wrapped up in this project is above all, Black love and kindness, along with culture, fearlessness, and the struggle for justice. We remember that Dr. King came through here. That the restaurant forever and always looked and felt just like grandma's kitchen. That there was comfort there. Honoring this place became an entry to honoring many spaces of love and struggle and joy. For Black community history, and also for an older Seattle working class commons, for the butch Native lesbian cab driver and vet who asked for Home barbecue for her last birthday. For the hill up Yesler, for what you passed through between Yesler Terrace and Ms. Barbara's smile. This is where my memories move and create more space for themselves. All the work that I do to remember Seattle must include the forgotten, the marginalized.

So I say this quilt also remembers those people, in the Black & Tan, or hustling far from any camera. Family, you are a part of this story. Your story is part of what keeps us warm at night. I thought of my folks and I invited others to think of theirs. And the ones who didn't have kin left, I tried to think of them, too. So many profound people have been left out of Seattle's official narrative. This is a work of restoration. Because we honor these lives we lift them. We praise their courage, their perseverance, the way they shaped this world. In that way, this is a medicine object. It is meant to do good work, healing restorative work, in this world."

- Storme Webber

Home of Good: A Black Seattle Storyquilt
2017
Concept, Project Management, and Curation: Storme Webber
On behalf of Voices Rising: LGBTQ of Color Arts & Culture 
Lead Design: Elizabeth Bete' Morris 
Sewn by: Pacific NW African American Quilters  
Dimensions: 96 x 65 in.
Materials: cotton, silk, and various fabrics. Shadowbox frame, the quilt is sewn to muslin cloth.

Gratitude to Home of Good's funders & supporters:

• James W Ray Foundation
• Seattle Office of Arts & Culture
• 4Culture
• Scandiuzzi-Krebs Potlatch Fund 

Image: Home of Good: A Black Seattle Storyquilt, Storme Webber, cotton, silk, and various fabrics, 2017 

Gallery

Diversity by Design

Opening November 16, 2021

AIA Seattle's Diversity Roundtable's Diversity by Design has exhibited the works of underrepresented architects since 2013. From its early inception, the exhibit has been a traveling display of local and Northwest Regional partners that featured individuals and businesses whose work in architecture reflects the inclusive spirit that has energized the Roundtable since its origins in 1986. While the general intent of Diversity of Design is to offer space to architects of color to showcase their importance in Seattle's built environment, it is also part of a broader sustained effort to shift mindsets of who an architect is and who can be an architect. 

"Despite people of color making up 45% of early-career unlicensed designers, only 10% of licensed architects are people of color. Additionally, people of color are only 12% of architects in leadership roles. Diversity by Design offers an opportunity for these architects to showcase their work, specifically highlighting their community impact or experiences as architects of color in the design of the building. By continuing to promote and share our impact and experiences as underrepresented designers, we hope to encourage not only youth but currently practicing professionals to see people who look like themselves in order to dismantle existing misconceptions about architecture. Shifting the mindsets of those within and outside the community requires time, collaborative effort, and a platform.

We invite you to participate in this exhibit but more importantly to continue to acknowledge and celebrate the works of BIPOC designers, designers of all genders, LGBTQI + designer, designers with disabilities, immigrant designers, and more."

- AIA Seattle's Diversity Roundtable

The Diversity by Design installation consists of video screens showcasing the works of the participating architects, as well as an opportunity to explore the online exhibit via the tablets.

Image: Inclusive Community Design, Seattle Center Key Arena Midtown Commons, DLR Group, 2017

Gallery