Kimberly Trowbridge, Backyard Peony, 2021, Oil on Paper on Panel, 20 x 16 x 2 in

Kimberly Trowbridge is a painter, an installation artist, a performer, and a lecturer on color theory. She received her MFA from the University of Washington (2006). Her first solo museum show at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (2021) was developed during her time as Creative Fellow at Bloedel Reserve (2018-2020), a 150-acre garden amid an old growth forest.

Trowbridge recently completed a Facebook Open Arts commission (2021), and was Artist in Residence at Jentel Artist Residency, in Wyoming. She is a two-time Neddy Award Finalist (2014, 2016), and an Artist Trust GAP Grant recipient (2014). She is the Director of the Modern Color Atelier, a multi-year painting program at Gage Academy of Art, Seattle. She has led plein-air painting tours in Spain, Portugal, and Twisp, WA.

Chris Theiss, Heads Up, 2026, Porcelain, underglaze, sgraffito, 5 x 4.25 x 4 in

Chris Theiss began drawing in childhood, developing what he describes as a "super power" through constant practice and patience. Initially studying illustration in college with the aim of becoming a professional illustrator, his artistic direction shifted during his second year when he discovered ceramics. This led him to the technique of sgraffito, in which a layer of slip is carved away to reveal the clay beneath, allowing him to merge drawing with three-dimensional form.

Through hand-built ceramics, Theiss developed what he describes as "three-dimensional drawings," combining interior and exterior space in sculptural form. His work is informed by early influences from illustrated books, comics, and natural science encyclopedias, which fostered his identity as a visual storyteller.

Over time, his subject matter has evolved, with a recent focus on the human eye as a central motif-an element he finds layered, reflective, and psychologically resonant. Working primarily in black and white, he uses limitation of palette to sharpen attention to light, perspective, and form. While his work is often recognized for technical precision, Theiss emphasizes discipline, curiosity, and the pursuit of joy and original thought as the core of his practice.

Maggy Rozycki Hiltner, Treehouses 2, 2019, hand-stitched and found embroidery, linen, 25 x 16 x 1 in

Maggy Rozycki Hiltner is a full-time studio artist and living in Red Lodge, Montana. For over 30 years now, she has been collaging found embroidery and quilts with her hand-stitched imagery, giving these abandoned textiles new meaning and relevance. Her work has been published and exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, and she was a recipient of the Montana Arts Council Artist's Innovation Award. 'I've tasked myself with questioning the artifacts of my culture by changing their context and content. Working with handmade remnants of the past, I repurpose them to comment on the present, and I employ a multitude of anonymous assistants. I try to celebrate and elevate their abandoned handwork. I search antique shops, thrift stores and yard sales for embroidered linens and quilts, collecting the brightly colored flowers, foliage, animals, and patterns that appear in my work. What I cannot find I hand-stitch and mix in with the collected embroidery. I use the familiarity of the stitch along with seemingly lighthearted and cheerful designs to convey more serious subject matter. I often use humor to tell my stories, and very rarely is everything quite what it seems.'

Joan Stuart Ross, Another Frontier, 2026, Acrylic, oil, ink, collage on canvas, 36 x 36 x 1.5 in

Joan Stuart Ross creates work inspired by exploratory imagery and the invention of color through relationships, connections, juxtapositions, and dynamic arrangements. Her practice searches for a sense of life force, energy, and meaning by using color and shape as carriers of value, depth, and visual intensity. Through metaphorical form, she incorporates complementary and analogous color structures, along with symbols and glyphs that suggest an underlying, vital current.

Her paintings, prints, and drawings draw on natural and structural sources of growth, including poplar trees, hydrangea blossoms, oyster shells, grids, and implied text. Across media, she builds compositions through color, mark, rhythm, repetition, pattern, and disruption, creating visual fields that oscillate between order and variation. Ross's work reflects an expansive visual language shaped by observation, abstraction, and a continuous search for energetic connection within form and structure.

Leo Osborne, Swansong, 2020, bronze, 14 x 24 x 24 in

Leo Osborne has been an artist for a lifetime, with a practice that began in Boston and Cape Cod and later evolved in Maine, where he first developed his sculptural work. He is a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society, a Master Signature Artist of the Society of Animal Artists, and a member of the International Artists for Conservation.

Now living on Guemes Island, Osborne has participated in the MONA Annual Auction since relocating there in 1993. His multidisciplinary practice includes wood sculpture, limited-edition bronze casting, and unique paintings on gold leaf with acrylics. In addition to visual art, he writes poetry and stories, extending his creative expression into language. Across media, his work reflects a sustained commitment to form, material, and narrative over decades of artistic practice.

Linda Okazaki, Spring Bouquet, 2020, pastel on tan rag paper, 34.5 x 26.75 x 1.50 in

Linda Okazaki's recent work emerges from an evolving dialogue between painting and landscape. Following her exhibitions Realms of Influence and Familiar Places at the Grover Gallery, her practice shifted outward from the studio toward the surrounding environment. Together with her husband, Ray Weber, she began transforming their garden into a cultivated space designed as a living palette for painting.

This project is informed by the garden at Giverny and the work of Claude Monet, as well as the symbolic botanical studies of Hilma af Klint. Okazaki also draws on her earlier academic work in art history and color theory, including the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose exploration of color as a perceptual experience continues to inform her approach.

Plants are selected and arranged according to chromatic relationships and perceptual dynamics, allowing seasonal change, light, and atmosphere to continuously reshape the visual field. Observing from her studio and within the garden itself, Okazaki uses this shifting environment as both subject and source for painting, where experience, perception, and color theory converge into an ongoing visual inquiry.

Alan Newberg, World on Fire: Guernica, Gaza, Ukraine, Somolia, California, 2025, Black walnut wood, 72 x 36 x 30 in

Alan Newberg describes art as both a way of thinking and a way of doing-an evolving process of responding to moments in life that demand attention. For him, each artwork emerges through hundreds or even thousands of decisions, gradually giving form to feeling. In this sense, process itself becomes content, with finished works carrying traces of their own making across time and space.

Working across sculpture in steel, clay, wax, cast metal, and carved wood, Newberg finds that material directly shapes meaning. Steel tends toward abstraction and precision, while clay and wax invite more fluid, representational forms. Wood, by contrast, offers a sensuous and responsive material encounter, especially in its subtractive carving process, where the form must be discovered within the block.

In World on Fire, carved from a six-foot black walnut log, an unexpected pocket of decay transformed the work's direction. What began as an abstract composition of shifting, plank-like forms became charged with narrative when the eroded cavity evoked imagery reminiscent of Picasso's Guernica. This encounter redirected the piece into a response to contemporary turmoil, revealing how chance, material resistance, and perception converge to generate meaning in his practice.

Devin River, Hive, 2025 Reclaimed, dyed, and commercial fabrics, batting, thread, 116 x 94 x .5 in

Devin River's practice transforms discarded and secondhand materials into works that affirm dignity, value, and presence. Working primarily with scavenged textiles, loose threads, and reclaimed fabric, River reclaims what is often overlooked or discarded, responding to a world in which excess production leads to waste. Through labor-intensive processes of cutting, sewing, and recomposition, these materials are elevated into intricate textile works that emphasize care, attention, and renewal.

River describes this practice as an antidote to internalized worthlessness shaped by systems of environmental, economic, and colonial harm. By transforming discarded materials, the work asserts the inherent value of both material and self, inviting viewers to recognize their own worth.

The studio practice moves between two modes: precise, patterned constructions that provide structure and calm, and more improvisational processes that embrace unpredictability. This tension creates a dynamic rhythm between control and spontaneity.

In the series The Bugs, River reworks traditional starburst quilt motifs, fragmenting and reassembling them into new visual forms using reclaimed textiles, sometimes hand-dyed, often sourced from free piles or donated materials.

Dan Friday, Feather A6, year, hand-sculpted glass, Approximately 13"

Dan Friday is a member of the Lummi Nation and a Skagit Valley based artist. He has spent the last 30 years creating works primarily in glass. The themes and images of Friday's work are often drawn from his Coast Salish heritage and are solidified in the world of glass art. Dan has taught at the University of Washington, Evergreen State Collage, Pilchuck Glass School, Pendland School of Craft, Chrysler Museum, and the Haystack Craft Center. In 2017 Dan started the Native Youth outreach Program at the Pilchuck Glass School.

He has had residencies at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA, the Burke Museum in Seattle, WA, the Corning Museum NY, Pendland Craft School NC, Chrysler Museum Norfolk Va, Torunga Wai Wai Gisborne New Zealand, TeAtinga Wai Kato New Zealand, and the Dream Community in Tai Pei, Taiwan. Friday has been awarded the BIMA Award from Bainbridge Museum of Art, Bill Holm Grant, the People's choice award from the Bellevue Art Museum, The James Earl Fraser Award from the Prix De West at the National Western Museum, an Artist Trust Fellowship, and the Discovery Fellowship through (SWAIA) the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts. Dan was a contestant on the Netflix show Blown Away. His work can be seen on Fridayglass.com, many Museums and in private collections around the world.

Hart James, Orcas Ravine, 2025, oil and charcoal on canvas, 36 x 36 x 2 in

Hart James explores the relationship between the individual and the Earth as a shared, interconnected home. Working within the lineage of the Northwest Mystics, she extends that tradition into a contemporary abstract language. Her paintings evoke the energy of natural systems-the movement of water, the flow of air, and the presence of geological forms that anchor the landscape beneath us.

Working primarily in oil and charcoal, James uses abstraction to translate sensory and elemental experiences into visual form. Each work becomes an attempt to re-establish a sense of symbiosis between human presence and the natural world. Rather than depicting specific landscapes, her paintings suggest underlying forces and rhythms, inviting viewers to experience nature as a dynamic, living system that includes and surrounds them.

Aaron Loveitt, Traverse, 2026, Forged Steel, 11 x 48 x 2.5 in

Aaron Loveitt lives and works on Blanchard Mountain in Bow. His work is inspired by a deep reverence for the Pacific Northwest landscape, as well as exploration into the raw nature of metal, glass and other mediums. His sculptures become symbolic intersections of material, process and points of understanding around the phenomenon of this region's time and place. The geographic features of a region's landscape become the unique signature of that place. In turn, the sculpted steel of this work looks to express the energetic script drawn from my inspiration walking the North Cascade mountain ridge lines.

Kendra Larson, Night Garden, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24 in

Kendra Larson is a Portland-based artist whose work focuses on the ephemerality of Pacific Northwest landscapes and the evolving relationship between people and the natural world. Her paintings engage historical ideas of landscape while subtly addressing environmental awareness and contemporary ecological connection.

Larson's recent work explores the hidden life of forests, drawing on research from authors such as Peter Wohlleben and Suzanne Simard. These influences inform her interest in trees as communicative, intelligent systems, where interconnection and resilience mirror human experience. Working in color-rich, atmospheric compositions, she transforms real places and trees into expressive fields of emotion and perception.

Deeply rooted in the Pacific Northwest, Larson's practice continues the lineage of the Northwest Mystics and the Group of Seven, treating landscape as a site of spiritual inquiry and psychological reflection. Her paintings merge ecological awareness with elements of magical realism, inviting viewers to experience the forest as both sanctuary and mirror, and to reconsider their relationship with the natural world through wonder, empathy, and care.

Steve Jensen, Sapphire Bay, 2026, oil on vintage nautical chart, mounted to recycled aluminum, 20.5 x 20.5 x 1 in

Steve Jensen uses the image of the boat as a symbol of passage-voyage, transition, and the journey into the unknown. Rooted in a family history of Norwegian fishermen and boat builders, the motif carries both personal inheritance and cultural memory. Jensen reflects on how this lineage contrasts with contemporary realities, noting that it now feels easier to make a living as an artist than as a fisherman, a shift he reads as a troubling sign of environmental decline in marine ecosystems.

His work is also deeply shaped by personal loss. After the deaths of his parents and his longtime partner, Jensen created boats to carry their ashes to sea in acts resembling contemporary Viking funerals. These gestures transform mourning into ritual, linking grief to water, passage, and release. His father's suicide, his mother's illness, and his partner's death from alcoholism inform the emotional weight behind these works.

Through sculpture and ritual action, Jensen seeks to transmute profound personal tragedy into forms of beauty and remembrance, using the boat as both vessel and metaphor for continuity, loss, and transformation.

Jan Hoy, Rhythm Squared, 2024, clay with iron oxide finish, 8 x 10 x 10 in

Jan Hoy works from small, hand-built water-based clay forms that serve as the foundation for her larger sculptural practice. Finished with iron oxide, these intimate tabletop pieces often become prototypes for expanded works intended for outdoor and public spaces. Hoy translates the patterns and structures of the small sculptures into larger scales, adapting them to new materials and environments.

Her larger works are fabricated in materials such as Corten steel, mild steel with painted finishes, or stainless steel, each choice altering the character and presence of the form. This shift in scale and medium transforms the original clay studies into durable public sculptures, many of which are installed throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Hoy values the collaborative process of public art production, working with fabricators, engineers, and communities to bring each piece into being. For her, the transition from small studio objects to large-scale installations is both technically and creatively rewarding, offering the opportunity to share her sculptural language with a wider public.

Karen Hackenberg, Unnatural Disasters (triptych), 2025, Archival pigment on stretched canvas w/frame, 25 x 80 x 1.5 in

Karen Hackenberg's (B.F.A., RISD) paintings were featured in MoNA's 2024 Surge exhibition as well as in her solo exhibition, Sea Change: The Art of Karen Hackenberg, at Tacoma Art Museum. Her paintings' "green" sensibility has earned a place in museums and private collections, including Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and Washington State Art Collection. She exhibits her work internationally, and is represented by Patricia Rovzar, Seattle, and Rebecca Hossack, London, UK. Karen uses humor and beauty to light a candle in the darkness of our eco-disaster weary minds. In her wry post-pop Unnatural Disasters paintings series, she interprets the effects of climate change such as recurrent large-scale fires, destructive superstorms, droughts, floods, melting glaciers, habitat loss, and species extinctions.

Chuck Gumpert, Urban Relic 2600, 2024, oil & mixed media, 40 x 50 x 1.5 in

Chuck Gumpert is a Seattle-area artist whose practice spans bold abstraction, impressionistic landscape, and figurative work developed over more than two decades of professional exhibitions throughout Washington, Oregon, and California. His work has attracted national and international collectors and has been featured in interior design and architectural projects across the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Gumpert's paintings are built through layered combinations of oil, acrylic, ink, graphite, and collage. These materials interact in complex surfaces that generate organic forms, gestural marks, and shifting spatial illusions. He describes his process as one of "intentional happy accidents," where chance and control coexist to create texture, depth, and atmospheric energy.

His work often evokes memory, place, and emotional resonance, inviting viewers to form their own interpretations. Rather than presenting fixed narratives, Gumpert sees each painting as a culmination of lived experience and imagination, offering a visual field where personal stories can emerge through engagement with color, form, and layered material.

Christopher Mathie, Crabstraction, 2026, Acrylic, 18 x 48 x 1.75 in

Mathie's acrylic paintings are filled with energetic movement, fluid emotion, and bold confident brushwork, as the artist builds up layer after layer of textural paint to achieve complicated coloration and highly activated tactile surfaces. Deconstructing his subjects to their most important lines and organic forms, Mathie's intriguing canvases invite viewers to engage very personally with his painterly attributes. Mathie conveys a realm that exists somewhere between reality and imagination. The Washington-state artist is widely recognized in the Pacific Northwest with over three-decades of exhibition history. His paintings have been exhibited nationally and are included in private and corporate collections nationally and internationally.

Erik Geschke, Exchange, 2026, Polymerized gypsum, fiberglass, wood, aluminum, graphite, 18 x 22 x 3 in

Erik Geschke creates mixed-media work that explores personal and social narratives through oblique, often ambiguous imagery. His practice draws on recognizable subjects-humans, animals, environments, and cultural artifacts-but recontextualizes them to create tension between familiarity and disruption. Through shifts in material, imagery, and titling, he introduces an uneasy coexistence of humor and unease, where comedy and tragedy overlap.

Geschke's influences range widely across art history, political propaganda, and popular culture, shaping both the conceptual and formal dimensions of his work. His intention is to first draw viewers in through recognition, then challenge perception through satire, absurdity, and contradiction.

In his recent series Subterfuge, he investigates themes of modernity, hierarchy, and artifice. Referencing human physiology, industrial design, and historical art forms, he reconstructs familiar fragments of the world while withholding their full context. Through manipulation of scale, material transformation, and strategic ambiguity, Geschke disrupts perception and invites viewers to reconsider the systems and assumptions that shape everyday visual experience.

Joyce Gehl, Moondance, 2022, mixed media resin, 24 x 24 x 2 in

Joyce Gehl is an artist living and working on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands, whose practice is shaped by the quiet complexity of the Pacific Northwest landscape. Her work explores emotional and imaginative relationships with nature, focusing on how it feels to be immersed in forests, shorelines, shifting light, and interconnected ecosystems.

Gehl begins with photographs taken outdoors, which she uses as the foundation for digitally composed landscapes. Through layering, blending, and iterative refinement, these images evolve into hybrid compositions that bridge observation and imagination. The works are then translated into painting and finished with resin, creating luminous, dimensional surfaces.

Her process builds multiple transparent layers in which painted marks appear suspended, producing depth and a sense of movement. Up close, the imagery breaks into mosaics of individual gestures, reflecting the living systems that inspire her work. The final resin surface subtly reflects the viewer and surrounding environment, integrating them into the composition.

Gehl's paintings invite contemplation on interconnection, emphasizing that humans are not separate from nature but part of its unfolding presence.

Meg Holgate, Nightflower, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 32 x 1.5 in

Meg Holgate creates paintings inspired by the transient, shifting qualities of the Pacific Northwest environment. Her work explores the fleeting and conditional nature of landscape, shaped by filmy light, atmospheric color, and an opalescent sense of place. Forms in her paintings often seem to emerge from or dissolve back into the landscape, reflecting a world in constant transformation.

Working with large, soft-haired brushes, Holgate applies veils of color that blend and accumulate to shape space, perception, and emotional resonance. Her compositions layer clouds, islands, water, and botanical forms into shifting structures that balance chaos and stillness. Rather than fixed representation, she aims for states of awe and ambiguity, where landscape becomes a field of perception rather than a static image.

Holgate views nature as an interconnected, time-sensitive system and a source of continual inspiration. Through painting, she engages with cycles of change, honoring the ebb and flow of life while exploring new possibilities for seeing and experiencing the natural world.

Kathleen Faulkner, The View from Here, 2020, oil pastel, 28 x 35 x 1 in

WINNER OF 2026 VISIONARY AWARD

Kathleen Faulkner creates work centered on the environment as it exists in the present moment, with a particular focus on the Pacific Northwest. Her practice reflects on ecological change, noting the visible impact of overconsumption on landscapes, wildlife, and biosystems. She acknowledges the loss of abundance compared to the past while remaining attentive to what still exists today.

Faulkner's work acts as a form of observation and record-keeping, tracking the shifting conditions of a specific region and its living systems. Rather than idealizing or reconstructing nature, she focuses on presence-what remains, what is changing, and what may be lost in the future. Her perspective is grounded in both mourning and attentiveness, holding space for the tension between past abundance and an uncertain ecological future.

Julie Sevilla Drake, Amuse Bouche, 2022, Quilt: Hand-dyed Cotton Fabrics, 30 x 27 in

Julie Sevilla Drake approaches her work as an expression of how to love the world. Her life, shaped by friendship, travel, and time spent in wild places, informs an artistic practice grounded in direct experience of landscape and movement through it. She works across mediums, but her quilts become a primary space for translating memory, observation, and emotional response into visual form.

After extensive time hiking and backpacking through forests, mountains, and remote regions, Sevilla Drake returns to the studio with impressions of place that are distilled into color, shape, line, and texture. Her work embraces what she describes as the "mess, mayhem, mischief, and mystery" of existence, using these forces as creative material rather than obstacles.

Through quilting, she constructs layered visual fields that reflect both external landscapes and internal states. Her practice becomes a way of witnessing and affirming the world's complexity, offering viewers an invitation to see and feel through the lens of attention, affection, and lived experience.

Julie Devine, Skagit Sky, 2025, Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 x 1.5 in

Julie Devine's work explores heightened spiritual awareness and emotional states experienced within wilderness landscapes. Her paintings are rooted in direct encounters with nature, where she seeks to translate sensory and contemplative experiences into visual form.

Using expressive brushwork and palette knife techniques, Devine builds shifting fields of color that move between warmth and coolness, creating dynamic atmospheric tension. These variations in color temperature contribute to a sense of movement and transformation across the surface.

Her work often suggests animism in the natural world, where landscape feels alive, responsive, and imbued with presence. Through this approach, she aims to convey joy, dissolution of self, and immersion in something larger than the individual. The result is an experiential painting practice that emphasizes emotion, energy, and the spiritual dimensions of landscape.

Linda Davidson, 03 23 22, 2022, Oil on linen on panel, 24 x 24 x 1.5 in

Linda Davidson has been working since around 2021 on a series of paintings focused on a short stretch of ravine along Thornton Creek in Seattle. Her work reflects sustained observation of a landscape that, like herself, is constantly changing.

Over time, both the ravine and the artist have proven mutable, shaped by shifting seasons, weather events, and ecological change-heavy rains, snow, drought, and the continual fall of leaves, branches, and trees. Working in direct response to these conditions, Davidson records moments of perception as they unfold, often under physically demanding circumstances of heat, cold, and distraction.

The resulting paintings form a cumulative study of place and time. Together, they act as a visual record of ongoing transformation, reflecting both the instability of the natural environment and the act of attentive looking within it.

Epiphany Couch, Touch Water, 2025, Hand-pieced fine-art paper photo quilt, cotton, driftwood, 12 x 12 x 1 in

Epiphany Couch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores generational knowledge, storytelling, and our relationships with the natural and spiritual worlds. Working across photography, beadwork, weaving, and collage, she reinterprets traditional forms to create images, installations, and sculptural works that engage ancestral knowledge and invite new ways of understanding. Her practice is rooted in unconventional collaboration-across time, between generations, and with the natural world-recognizing these relationships as vital to sustaining memory, culture, and identity. Couch's work transforms personal and collective histories into heirloom-like objects that hold space for reflection, care, and healing. Drawing from family stories, archival research, her own dreams, and her childhood in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington), she creates work that is both intimate and expansive, blurring the line between artifact and art. As a spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/mixed European artist, Couch centers cultural knowledge and community connection in both her process and presentation. In 2024, she was a commissioned artist for Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places, a featured artist in the Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial, and a Ford Family Foundation's Oregon Visual Artist Studios at MASS MoCA resident. In 2025, she was selected as the Indigenous Visiting Teaching Artist for the Residency at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, a GLEAN Program Artist-in-Residence, and the recipient of an Oregon Arts Commission Career Opportunity Grant and a Precipice Fund Grant. Her work has been acquired for public and private collections and exhibited in museums, galleries, and art fairs across the United States. Her first museum solo show is forthcoming in May 2026 at the Tacoma Art Museum. Couch lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Lanny Bergner, Primordial Vessel, 2013, stainless steel mesh, coated copper wire, 27.5" x 11" x 11"

Lanny Bergner is a mixed-media sculptor based on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes, whose practice has centered since the early 1980s on industrial metal mesh as a sculptural medium. Working with stainless steel and copper mesh, he cuts, flame-paints, and hand-forms the material using torches, pliers, and stitched wire seams, transforming it into semi-transparent, biomorphic, and geometric structures that range from small basket-like forms to large-scale installations.

Bergner's process emphasizes both precision and material transformation. The mesh is shaped into bas-relief surfaces and three-dimensional constructions that suggest living systems and natural forces. His imagery draws from plant biology, marine life, cellular structures, geology, and cosmological forms, creating works that hover between the organic and the industrial.

A graduate of the University of Washington (BFA) and Tyler School of Art and Architecture (MFA), Bergner's work is held in major collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Northwest Art, and the Seattle Art Museum. Internationally exhibited and widely taught, his practice explores the intersection of natural systems, craft, and industrial material, revealing intricate structures where nature and fabrication converge.

Juan Alonso-Rodriguez, Indigo Flow #15, 2023, acrylic on unprimed canvas, 36 x 36 x 2 in

Juan Alonso-Rodriguez's work is driven by imagination and experimentation across changing subjects, media, and techniques. Born in Cuba, his early experience of displacement, learning a new language, and growing up separated from immediate family has had a lasting impact on his artistic perspective. Themes of outsider identity and the political forces that shape belonging often emerge in his work, sometimes subtly, sometimes more directly.

His practice explores the human condition-fragility, connection, isolation, love, and the self-inflicted harm humanity causes to itself and the environment. He draws inspiration from balance and symmetry, architecture, science, natural growth and decay, and the tension between organic and constructed landscapes.

In recent years, Alonso-Rodriguez has worked across both studio practice and public art, using collaboration to challenge assumptions about how art is created and received. He values the balance between solitary reflection and collective engagement, seeing art as a means to support social well-being while also expressing personal inquiry.

Richard Royal, Obelisk III, 2016, Solid Glass, 5" x 5" x 9"

Richard Royal's professional life has been a commitment to creativity in blown art glass, and for over 30 years has stretched the limits of large glass sculpture. Richard is a faculty member of the Pilchuck Glass School and was the first Artist in Residence at the Waterford Crystal Factory in 1998 and 1999.

A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts grant, Richard has recently been associated with the Corning Museum of Glass, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Ohio State University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His work is shown in numerous museum, public and private collections, including the IBM Collection, the Safeco Collection and the Westinghouse Collection.

Helmi Juvonen, Eagle, 1950s, block print, 14" x 17"

Helmi Dagmar Juvonen (1903-1985) was a Seattle-based artist known for her sensitive depictions of Native American culture across the Pacific Northwest. Working at a time when opportunities for women artists were limited, she persisted through poverty and mental illness, continuing to make art throughout her life.

Over two decades, Juvonen developed relationships with Indigenous communities including the Lummi Nation, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Yakama Nation, and Makah Tribe. She was able to observe and participate in cultural and ceremonial life, which deeply informed her drawings and artistic record of emotion, ritual, and presence.

In 1953, she attended Treaty Day ceremonial dances in La Conner, and she produced hundreds of drawings of Native American artifacts held at the Washington State Museum. Her work is recognized for its observational intensity and its attempt to preserve cultural memory through drawing, blending documentary attention with expressive sensitivity.

Charles Laurens Heald, Not Forgetting April Showers, 1996, Acrylic on Canvas, 44 x 34

Jeffry Mitchell, Small Hulu Vase with Friends, 2023, painted wood, 6.25 x 4.25 x 3.125 in

Jeffry Mitchell approaches artmaking as an instinctive and devotional act, rooted in lived experience and shaped by influences that move fluidly between craft, graphic design, fine art, social practice, and spirituality. His work includes drawings, posters, illustrations, ceramics, furniture-like objects, and decorative forms that blur distinctions between art and craft, the precious and the everyday.

Mitchell's visual language is deeply informed by his biography: growing up in a large working-class family that moved frequently across the American West, learning domestic crafts from his mother and grandmother, and later studying calligraphy and ceramics while living in Japan. These experiences continue to shape his interest in labor, ornament, storytelling, and the tension between popular culture and elite aesthetics.

Working in the studio becomes a contemplative process through which memories, grief, humor, affection, and longing are quietly transformed into objects. Mitchell describes his works as offerings-like valentines or votives-made in the hope of expressing and receiving love.