Arts in Seattle
is a significant center for the painting, sculpture, textile and studio glass, alternative, urban art, lowbrow and performing arts. The century-old Seattle Symphony Orchestra is among the world's most recorded orchestras. The Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet, are comparably distinguished. On at least two occasions, Seattle's local popular music scene has burst into the national and even international consciousness, first with a major contribution to garage rock in the mid-1960s, and later as the home of grunge rock in the early 1990s. The city has about twenty live theater venues, and Pioneer Square is one of the country's most prominent art gallery districts.
19th century
The entertainments in Seattle in its first decade were typical of similar frontier towns. The first established place of entertainment was Henry Yesler's one-story x hall, which hosted monologuists, Swiss bellringers, phrenologists and the like. The first professional play in the city was an 1871 production of Uncle Tom's Cabin; numerous Tom Shows would play Seattle in the following years, including one with an entirely African American cast. The first local theater company was the short-lived John Jack Theatrical Company, whose performances in the late 1870s received generally unfavorable reviews.By the 1880s, Seattle was receiving touring opera companies, as well as trained animal acts and the like. Among the actors who visited in the 1890s were Henry Irving, Maurice and Lionel Barrymore, Sidney Drew and Mrs. John Drew, Harry Langdon, W.C. Fields, Eddie Foy, and Sarah Bernhardt. Less reputably, the "restricted district" below Yesler Way became home to many box houses: half antecedent of vaudeville, half bawdyhouse.
The Ladies Musical Club, founded 1891, quickly became an institution. Active members had to pass an audition. Well into the 20th century it would play a prominent part role in Seattle culture, and still exists as of 2023.
The Panic of 1893 nearly destroyed Seattle theater. Immediately before the Yukon Gold Rush brought new wealth to Seattle late in the decade, only the Seattle Theater and the Third Avenue Theater survived, both booked by New York-based Klaw & Erlanger, and neither getting any of K&E's choicer acts. Even the box house operators had left for greener pastures. Once Seattle became the main supply center for Yukon prospectors, cash from the miners brought back the box houses.
Early 20th century
Success in the Gold Rush era made several box house entrepreneurs think of grander things. John Considine and Alexander Pantages pioneered vaudeville circuits; John Cort became a leading impresario of legitimate theater, at one time controlling more quality theaters around the country than anyone else in America. It would be many decades before Seattle ever again had a comparable impact on American arts and entertainment to what it had in these years.Seattle theater around 1910 included stock shows at the Alhambra and at Pantages' Lois Theater, and vaudeville at Pantages' Crystal and Pantages theaters and at Considine's Orpheum and Star. Cort and others presented various "quality" entertainment at the Moore and Grand Opera House. In addition, the Dream Theater presented silent films with pipe organ accompaniment. The Metropolitan Theatre opened in the Metropolitan Tract in 1911. Owned by New York-based K&E, it was the grandest theater Seattle had seen up to that time. But the 1912 economic downturn led to a marked decrease in this activity.
Although Seattle in the early 20th century was more of a center for variety shows and vaudeville than for the high arts, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1903. Nor was the SSO alone: there were two separate Seattle Musical Arts societies, a Schubert Society, and a Seattle Choral Symphony. The Ladies Musical Club was particularly prominent in bringing world-class performers to Seattle; a pinnacle among their programming was a 1908 concert where Fritz Kreisler and Harold Bauer performed Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, Brahms' Paganini Variations, Schubert's Moments Musicaux, and Schumann's Fantasiestücke.
The Cornish School—later the Cornish Institute and now Cornish College of the Arts, an accredited college with courses in the sciences and humanities as well—was founded in 1914 by Nellie Cornish, a member of the Ladies Musical Club. Initially a music school, but later equally known for dance, theater, and visual arts, it thrived for decades under her leadership; although its quality slackened after her death, it eventually recovered and remains an important arts education institution to this day.
With no art museums at this time, Seattle played a less prominent role in the visual arts, although Seattle-based Edward S. Curtis and his onetime assistant Imogen Cunningham were important in establishing photography as an art form. Other Seattle visual artists in this era included Cunningham's husband Roi Partridge and painter and printmaker John Butler. Caroline Mytinger became known in Seattle for her paintings of natives from the Solomon Islands.
Emergence of Seattle as an arts center
Seattle first began to be a visual arts center in the 1920s. Australian painter Ambrose Patterson arrived in 1919. Over the next few decades Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Irving Anderson, and Paul Horiuchi would establish themselves as nationally and internationally known artists.While few, if any, figures in the "high" performing arts were based in Seattle in this era, the city was definitely on the national and international arts touring circuit. According to Paul de Barros, in just the single year 1925 Seattle witnessed performances by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, and operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin; Hungarian composer and pianist Ernő Dohnányi; African American lyric tenor Roland Hayes; and Austrian violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler.
Seattle had an active jazz scene dating largely from speakeasies during Prohibition, when Mildred Bailey launched her career singing in Seattle. By mid-century the thriving jazz scene centering in some two dozen clubs along Jackson Street would produce musicians including Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, and Ernestine Anderson. The Brothers Four, one of the collegiate folk groups of the late 1950s and early 1960s, were also from Seattle.
Century 21 Exposition
When Seattle decided to try to put itself on the map with the futuristic Century 21 Exposition — the 1962 World's Fair — high culture was on the agenda, as well as popular entertainment along the lines of "Gracie Hansen's Paradise International" and "Les Poupees de Paris," an adult-themed puppet show, both of which aspired more to a Gay Nineties naughtiness than to anything artistic. The Opera House on the grounds of the center was rebuilt for the occasion ; performers at the fair included Igor Stravinsky, Benny Goodman, and Victor Borge; the Seattle Symphony brought in opera singers and staged Aida. The Fine Arts Pavilion managed to bring in works by Titian, Van Dyck, and Monet, as well as more contemporary pieces by Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Alexander Calder and by Pacific Northwest artists Tobey, Callahan, and Graves. There was also a significant exhibition of Asian art and Northwest Coast Indian art. The exposition also commissioned a massive abstract mural by Horiuchi, which still forms the backdrop to the stage at Seattle Center's Mural Amphitheater.Outside of the fair itself, Seattle's bars were filled with the live music that would result just a few years later in the region's first great period as a rock'n'roll mecca.
After the World's Fair
To retire the US$35,000 debt from the Symphony's production of Aida, Seattle arts patrons founded PONCHO. The resulting gala auction was such a success that it also provided $50,000 to help establish the Seattle Opera, and $16,000 to other organizations. PONCHO would go on to raise over $33 million for the arts over the next several decades.Robert Nesbitt writes in the liner notes to the compilation album Wheedle's Groove that in 1972 the city had "a minimum of twenty live music clubs specializing in funk and soul," and that doesn't count other popular music genres. That collection of live music clubs would shrink drastically beginning in the mid-1970s, first with the rise of disco music and recorded dance music in general, and then with Seattle's slightly rundown center becoming a financial district of new skyscrapers.
Writing in 1972, Nard Jones remarked on the Seattle telephone directory having "three solid columns" of art galleries and dealers, representing "an astonishing variety". Of these he singled out the Richard White Gallery and the avant-garde Manolides Gallery and the Woodside Gallery in the Broadway district of Capitol Hill.
The 1980s
It wasn't until the 1980s that Seattle began to be generally recognized as an important performing arts locale. One of the key events in this respect was the Seattle Opera's ambitious and successful staging, under its founding general director Glynn Ross, of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Performed in its entirety every summer from 1975 through 1983 back-to-back cycles and the Heaters. That same era saw the more sophisticated pop of the short-lived Visible Targets and the still-performing Young Fresh Fellows and The Posies; the pop-punk of The Fastbacks; and the outright punk of the Fartz.By the late '80s a group of thirty artists had organized themselves into an organization called Northwest Crafts Alliance. This group's purpose is to promote emerging and established artisans through their art show Best of the Northwest. Today this alliance includes over five hundred local, regional, and nationally acclaimed artisans.
Conceived in 1980, and incorporated in 1981, Red Sky Poetry Theatre influenced the literary and performance scene in Seattle and the entire West Coast for 25 years. RSPT help organize the Bumbershoot literary arts for many years. It would hold competitions to determine what local talent would perform at Bumbershoot. RSPT performed in many of the same venues as the pregrunge bands.