Our city’s grown up a lot in the past 10 years, and with it, our visual art scene. As with the other categories, it’s hard to try to narrow it down, so here are just a handful of the brilliant folks raising the bar in Seattle—artist-led projects curating the hell out of our city to make platforms for more artists to shine; artists forging highly personal, political, and innovative work within their respective genres; artists hijacking late capitalist bullshit; artists peeling back the layers of the cosmos, making a wormhole and inviting us in. Seattle used to be a place visual artists left, but thanks to people like these, that story has changed.
Dana Blume’s body of work is often populated with freaky characters like snails, dead fish, sentient blobs, and, most notably, a long-nailed amorphous blue figure. Many of Blume’s paintings seem like moments from a larger, disconnected story, like a single panel of a graphic novel. A slug determinedly heading somewhere. A dark figure stealing a pie left to cool on a windowsill. A naked blue dude holding a translucent egg.
Despite their narrative feel, the San Diego-raised, Seattle-based painter hesitates to explain or decode the goings-on in his work. Blume has nurtured a lifelong fascination with pareidolia, the human brain’s tendency to perceive meaningful images, patterns, or symbols from random visual stimuli like a cloud, wine stains, or a rock formation. In a similar way, his works are designed to be associative and evocative, putting the onus of meaning back onto the viewer. The thematic murkiness is the point. “I want to not know for as long as possible,” says Blume of his creative process, “so there can be some Freudian slippage or something.”
There’s a trippiness to Blume’s paintings, an overture to counterculture that culls inspiration from underground comix scene legends like R. Crumb, as well as compositionally complex history paintings from guys like Peter Paul Rubens. Part of his work’s appeal lies in the tension he creates, between the sluggishness of subject and grandness of its size, underscoring the dissonance between the two. He balances the abstractness of his pieces with a cheeky, nostalgic sense of humor. I remember having a hard time sussing out the thick brushstrokes of Blume’s large-scale Doom Cloud when I first saw it. But slowly, the scene revealed itself to me—a delicate, lone flower just barely visible against the blue and purple chaos of a huge cloud. Kinda like the dainty aftermath of an Acme explosion in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
“It’s the idea of taking something [like history painting] that has like all these classical notions of beauty or heroicness and transforming it into something that is like just so not that,” says Blume. “I have an affinity towards things that are grotesque or awkward.” JAS KEIMIG
All hail the queen of art objects! In Mary Anne Carter’s maximalist world, accessories are giant, plates of food are hung on the wall, cars have 10 wheels, and anything can be a balloon. Working with textiles, glass, wood, and printmaking, Carter creates immersive environments that pull you in with their candy-colored whimsy, but hold your attention by sparking serious contemplation about consumerism, marketing and messaging, and waste. In 2024, she dreamed up (with collaborator Lilia Deering) STÖR, a parody of a certain Swedish mega-retailer with delicious meatballs. More than just an immersive experience, STÖR functioned as an actual marketplace, featuring handmade goods and work by over two dozen artists. (In three months they saw over 10,000 visitors and over $50,000 in art sales!) “The happiest place on Earth used to be Disneyland. But now it feels like, for millennials, it’s IKEA,” she writes. “When thinking about bridging Seattle’s wealth and sometimes lack of art patronage, it felt like, Well, maybe we help people by giving them a familiar layout, so they feel invited to shop.”
Not only is Carter an expert fabricator and installation art whiz, in 2024 she also cofounded Wishbone Industrial Arts with Bradley Sweek and Jack Bennett, a design studio that produces furnishings, lighting, architectural amenities, and art objects that prioritize both form and function. In an age of cheaply made, disposable home goods delivered on your doorstep, Carter highlights the importance of beautiful, long-lasting objects made with care—conscious consumerism that supports local creators and actually sparks joy. AUDREY VANN
Priscilla Dobler Dzul traces the networks connecting land and people, people and other beings, beings and resources, resources and power. When those connections take shape in red-clay sculptures, intricately embroidered tapestries, or fantastical blown-glass vessels, their force is palpable.
At Dobler Dzul’s first solo museum show, Water Carries the Stories of Our Stars, at the Frye earlier this year, I was drawn across the room to gape at her tapestries. They seduce with vibrant colors, shimmering fabrics, exquisite stitching, and mythological beings, but the stories woven into the surface tell of brutality: skulls shoveled into pits, men with machine guns, cyclocopters you can almost hear hovering overhead. These are stories of cultural and ecological destruction that don’t generally find homes in hallowed institutions.
But there are stories of creation here, too. Many draw on Maya cosmology; Dobler Dzul now lives in Tacoma, but was born in the Yucatán and maintains strong ties there. Her labor-intensive practice often involves months—sometimes years—of research with scientists, anthropologists, and Maya elders. She spent seven years studying the ecosystem surrounding the henequén plant (a type of agave that holds historical significance for the Maya) and the endangered bat that pollinates it.
It’s particularly thrilling to encounter these stories told through embroidery—long diminished as mere craft or “women’s work”—or clay, but Dobler Dzul also works with newer technologies. Her video The only thing that existed, was the movement of the waters and the skies documents the destruction of Wetland 296 to make way for South Tacoma’s Bridge Industrial Warehouse Project. Last year, she participated in an unsanctioned augmented-reality intervention at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, covering Thomas Crawford’s 1848 marble Mexican Girl Dying with the virtual puma pelt.
Dobler Dzul understands that she exists within a web of connections, too. Last year, she secured funding to start Wayak Chuy, a textile collective based in the Yucatán that helps Maya women artists preserve and pass on traditional embroidery techniques in danger of being forgotten. Her immense talent lies not in merely drawing connections, but in making them stronger. BESS LOVEJOY
Baso Fibonacci—a name borrowed from the Zen Buddhist and an Italian mathematician—has become more than a pseudonym. It’s the identity of one of Seattle’s preeminent living painters.
Baso grew up at the foot of Tiger Mountain near Issaquah, surrounded by lush natural life. As a teenager, he fell in love with the city, too—its underbelly, overpasses, and street culture—as a graffiti artist. You can still find his work on the streets, if you know where to look.
An accident while painting put him in a wheelchair and shifted the course of his life and work. The studio practice that unfolded reflects an affinity for nature: Deer, raccoons, bears, and florals are rendered in florid patterns of precise, energetic brushstrokes that hover between representation, decoration, and abstraction. He paints city life with just as much care. His documentation of Seattle’s downtown fire hydrants—a nod to Morris Graves—is a testament to his dedication to the overlooked.
Over the past decade, Baso’s documentarian impulse has increasingly turned toward the sociopolitical, bringing the same close attention to homelessness, addiction, displacement, and death. In 2021, he painted the portraits of 20 Washingtonians who died of COVID-19. In 2023, he began So Far, a two-year project memorializing individuals who died from fentanyl overdoses downtown, using statistics from Public Health—Seattle & King County as his guide. For the series, Baso painted over the wrinkled, shimmering small squares of discarded fentanyl foils, covering the brown burn marks with bone-white gouache—a painting of one skull per foil, each representing a reported death. Taking in the whole series, skulls clustered in a tightly packed, asymmetrical grid across a single wall, delivered something data cannot. More recently, his life-size portraits of unhoused, disabled, and otherwise marginalized Seattleites bring parts of the city into focus from which most of us would rather look away.
His gift to the city, to lovers of art, is something that runs deeper than the images he paints. It’s the way he teaches us to see. AMANDA MANITACH
Airports are generally considered sites of stress, overpriced snacks, and endless waiting—not spaces to see cool art. Thankfully, Tommy Gregory doesn’t see it that way. Since 2018, the indefatigable artist and curator has worked as the senior project manager at the Port of Seattle, rapidly growing the Port’s world-class art collection at Seattle-Tac.
Under Gregory’s purview, SEA has become a place to see work from innumerable local and global artists just on your way to check-in. Perhaps you’ve spotted Rachael Comer’s bronze cake and platter sculptures balancing on the security bollards on the way to Departures or been wowed by John Grade’s monumental Boundary while riding the escalators to the N Gates. Collectively, these pieces and hundreds of others serve as a unique introduction of our fair city and the artists who call it home. “I like letting people make art,” says Gregory. “I like letting them make work that actually adds value, adds a little bit of wonder for somebody who’s wandering through the airport.”
Outside the airport, Gregory stays busy with a personal art practice that encompasses neon-bending, glass-blowing, and turning detritus like condom wrappers and single-use coffee cups into sculptures made of bronze. He is also deep in the mix of the local art scene, curating group exhibitions across Seattle, as well as in his home state of Texas. Recent exhibitions include a group show of banned words rendered in neon at the Factory and Grand Gesture, a selection of work from the Port’s extensive art collection brought into the city, exhibited at RailSpur. For Gregory, bringing the Seattle art scene together is of paramount importance. “We can’t stay in our corners,” Gregory says. “We have to get together, we have to share ideas.” JAS KEIMIG
Seattle has a thing for tearing down beautiful old houses and throwing up multi-story McModern boxes in their place. Lucky for us, gallerists Zoë Hensley and Sammy Skidmore decided to turn soon-to-be-demolished houses into the art event of the year—if just for one night.
It started as a flicker of an idea last summer when Hensley and Skidmore (whose day jobs are at Foster/White and Traver Gallery, respectively) were introduced by mutual friends. They quickly realized their common interests include not only working at high-profile commercial galleries, but also wanting to show the kind of messy, experimental art that would never make it into those spaces. An empty house not long for this world seemed like the perfect location.
Their first was a bungalow in Greenwood. They found a developer willing to give them the keys, and over the course of five frigid days in February, they filled the empty house with sculpture, video, and installations. Then, for one night only, the project was opened to the public; a band and DJ played as onlookers explored the rooms and took in the art. The second iteration was staged in a mid-century house in West Seattle this past June. Once Removed 03 is currently in the works, this time in Georgetown, where Hensley and Skidmore are collaborating with Watershed Community Development and Equinox Studios to take over a cluster of properties slated for demolition to make way for affordable artist housing and studios. The site includes a lot with three derelict houses and a condo overrun with foliage. “It’s very apocalyptic looking, like the last place on earth,” Skidmore says.
The crowds showing up at Once Removed’s doorstep prove there’s an appetite for unconventional art in nontraditional places. Hensley and Skidmore prove that if you care enough—and are just a little crazy enough to work your ass off in a house with no heat in the dead of winter—you can turn anything into a stage for art. AMANDA MANITACH
Return to the 2026 Genius Awards page.
