Friends of Inscape

Save the date! Our big summer open studios event is coming Sunday June 9th!

Please join us in welcoming our new Winter-Spring 2024 Inscape Artists-in-Residence Jo Cosme!
Jo Cosme is a Native Boricua award-winning multimedia artist who was displaced from Borikén (colonially known as Puerto Rico) to Seattle a year after Hurricane María. Her shock over North Americans’ ignorance of the archipelago inspired her to create works that provoke reflections on US Imperialism, disaster capitalism, and neocolonialism in her homeland. Her upcoming show Welcome to Paradise: Viva Puerto Rico Libre will open on March 7th, 2024 in Gallery 4Culture, Seattle.

Please join us in welcoming our new Winter-Spring 2024 Inscape Artists-in-Residence Harriet Salmon!
Harriet Salmon is an artist using sculpture, installation and drawing, often interwoven with traditional craft. Her work addresses how society has historically reshaped nature and how it’s been viewed, manipulated and consumed culturally. In addition to an art-making practice, Salmon worked on the editorial staff of Artforum from (2010-2015), is the host/producer of Craftsmanship Podcast, and is the owner of Heroes Gallery, a space that recently relocated from New York’s Lower East Side to Seattle. See her show Trace at Method Gallery, through March 9.

We’re thrilled that Historic Seattle has chosen Inscape to do a “Heart Bomb” on Feb 13 at noon!

A heart bomb is a public display of affection for places that matter. Every February, people across the country gather at historic sites and local landmarks (both safe and threatened!) to snap a photo with their valentines. Sharing the photos on social media raises awareness of these special places and why they matter to their local communities. We hope you'll join us! ❤️

This Giving Tuesday, please consider a donation to Friends of Inscape for important work to save the Inscape Arts Building and support the artist-in-residence program! You can donate now through our fiscal sponsor the Northwest Film Forum at the link below:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=32XWXMDMURYY2

Save the date! Inscape Winter Open Studios event is Sunday, December 3 from noon-5pm. Link in comments! Photo by Kirsten Mohan Photography

The Inscape Arts website has been down, so we are extending the deadline for the residency to Friday, August 4th!
We are now accepting applications for our 2024 Artist-in-Residence cycle and four artists will be selected. More information can be found on the Friends of Inscape website link in the comments

The Inscape Artist-in-Residence Open Call is still open. Go here to https://friendsofinscape.org/news/residency-info-application to learn how to apply. (The Inscape website, which has this information is currently down, but the same information is on the Friends of Inscape website).

**update**
We're extending the deadline to August 4th, 2023 at 11:59 pm!

Artist Residency Info and Application — Friends of Inscape The formal Inscape Arts website is temporarily down, but the Residency is still on and we’re accepting applications. In the meantime, please find information for applying to the Residency below. We’re also extending the deadline for an extra week, to August 4, 2023 at 11:59 pm. Residency

"As an artist, child of immigrants, and citizen, I feel the historic and creative value of keeping this building and its artists thriving. Let’s speak openly about the painful history while collaboratively working toward an inclusive future." - Tania Kupczak

We so appreciate our community's words of support! If you haven't joined our supporters list yet, you can sign up via the link in our bio and leave your own message of support!

Please join us for the dedication ceremony for “Oracle Bones” by artist Cheryll Leo-Gwinn at the Inscape building, Saturday, June 24th at 1:00 pm.

We’re thrilled to host current Inscape Artist-in-Residence Alice Gosti’s world premiere performance of where is home : third shore.

Four immigrant solo dancers will guide the audience through Seattle’s Inscape building. These unique tours will integrate the performers’ embodied immigration experiences with the Inscape building’s history as an Immigration and Naturalization Center. Led by Italian-American choreographer Alice Gosti, the artistic team is composed entirely of immigrant artists. The show is produced by MALACARNE and supported by Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4 Culture, ArtsWA Restart, and ArtsWA Revive.
LIMITED RUN: June 16-18, tours beginning at 6PM each night

Don't forget to mark your calendars for our big open studios event next weekend! Saturday May 20th noon -6pm. Link in bio

Residency call is open for the artist in residence program at Inscape. This is a free (no application and residency fee) workspace-only (no housing) residency for six artist in 2024. 

We value artists who are interested in engaging with the building, it’s immigration history, the artist, tenants, and/or the CID neighborhood. We have hosted, visual, performing, and language artists. 

Click the link below to learn more and apply. 

Residency Program | Inscape Arts RESIDENCY PROGRAM Jiyon Hong and Alice Gosti Spring - Summer... Read More Miya Sukune Winter - Spring... Read More Pete Fleming Winter - Spring... Read More ABOUT THE AIR PROGRAM Note: Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we ask artists to be flexible with residency availability dates. We are doing all we....

We’re wishing a warm welcome to Spring-Summer 2023 Inscape Artists-in-Residence Jiyon Hong and Alice Gosti into our Residency program!

Jiyon Hong was born and raised in South Korea and is currently living and working in Seattle, USA. She received her BFA from Kookmin University and MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, USA. In addition to multiple solo shows including a two-person show at ARSG gallery (LACMA) and Gallery2 in South Korea, Jiyon has been an Artist in residence in Berlin, Paris, Reykjavik, and Keumho Museum, Seoul (KR). She is interested in the gap between so-called objective reality and one’s perceived reality and how the latter mutates (transitions), moving away from the real before us. At her Inscape Artist-in-Residency, Jiyon will attempt to map the City of Seattle through her imagination, the real location, and her interpretation through site-specific installation, and paintings.

Alice Gosti (she/her) is a transnational immigrant performance artist, choreographer and cultural strategist who creates site-responsive dance and live art installations that examine how history, politics and place enter the body and condition how we move and relate. Gosti works under the name MALACARNE, an experimental ensemble that relies on transparent and equitable partnerships with artists, communities and institutions in pursuit of social justice. Born in Perugia, Italy and raised by artists SANDFORD&GOSTI, she’s worked between Italy and occupied Duwamish land (Seattle) since 2008. In 2021, Gosti received the Princess Grace Choreography Honoraria award for her lifelong commitment to performance and centering immigrant realities.

Drawing on current/historical social realities, her dances center experiences made invisible by white-normative power structures, fighting reductive ideas about class, gender, ability and ethnicity. She’s co-authored pieces grounded in authentic community storytelling with immigrants, trans-activists, Indigenous populations and those experiencing homelessness. Through “How to Become a Partisan,” “Material Deviance in Contemporary American Culture,” “Invisible Womxn” and “Bodies of Water”, she’s used dance to investigate fascism, unfettered capitalism, the othering of womxn, and Seattle’s relationship to water.

"A city cannot thrive without art and artists. Inscape's community is meaningful to the art world, but also to the continued vibrancy of our city's arts and culture as a whole. The loss of Inscape's studio space would be a catasrophic blow to the working artists who no longer have a space to work, and a sever inpact on the vitality of our cultural landcape." - Sharon Arnold

We so appreciate our community's words of support! If you haven't joined our supporters list yet, you can sign up via the link in the comments!

Congratulations to Inscape tenant Tessa Hulls whose new exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum tells the story of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (C-ID) and the irreversible impact of I-5’s construction on the fabric of the neighborhood and local community.

Nobody Lives Here: The People in the Path of Progress opens to the public on Friday, April 7th, 2023 and will be on display through March 17, 2024. More information about this exhibit can be found at www.wingluke.org/exhibit-nobodyliveshere.

Nobody Lives Here: The People in the Path of Progress tells the story of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (C-ID) and the irreversible impact of I-5’s construction on the fabric of the neighborhood and local community. With the C-ID as the focal point, artist and writer Tessa Hulls examines broader patterns locally and nationally, dating back to the early 20th century when regrades and man-made waterways reshaped the landscape, through the national trend of urban renewal in the 1960s. Today the pattern continues: vulnerable communities are forced to pay the heavy price of demolition, displacement, and erasure in the pursuit of progress. The exhibit uses first-person accounts, archival materials including newspaper clippings and photographs, and Hulls’s original artwork to paint a vivid picture of life in the C-ID before the freeway cut the neighborhood in half, as well as community movements that arose in opposition. As with other impacted neighborhoods across the country, this is the story of what once was, what now is, and what could have been.
Hulls emphasizes that the C-ID story is a microcosm of something larger. “The story of I-5 slicing through the C-ID is like a fractal, a pattern that repeats itself at every level of magnification. Nobody Lives Here highlights both the damage and resilience of one unique neighborhood, then ripples outward to explore a broader history, where the people who are asked to shoulder the burdens of building towards the future, are not the ones who benefit from that future.”
To illustrate the scale of impact, the exhibit also invites visitors to step outside the walls of the museum to experience the full breadth of the story in relation to the neighborhood that exists today. With the I-5 freeway visible less than one block from the museum’s doorstep, the exhibit will also incorporate a digital interactive story map that guides visitors to locations that provide physical context for the written accounts and records.
The exhibit’s opening is timely in light of ongoing conversations and concerns about Sound Transit’s Link Light Rail Extension project, which could potentially place another new transit station in the immediate vicinity of the C-ID. “It’s really peculiar to say that you grew up in an area, and now it's under the I-5 exit of Dearborn. It almost sounds like you're homeless, you know, you live under the I-5 exit. To have it buried there, is really strange,” says author Larry Matsuda. “That same kind of thought is occurring today [with sighting] the light rail terminal – another one. No other area has two! They say it’ll increase business. I say, for 10 years of construction, you're going to kill the area.”

Just a week after On the Boards presented a multi-artist and community performance work about DISPLACEMENT at Wa Na Wari and Inscape Arts, the owners of Inscape are poised to actually displace a Black community and cultural space.

They are raising the rent of the Black-owned Sankofa Theater to $3700/month, a $1200 increase, and gave a 60-day notice to come up wiith the money or else they will just have to divide the theater (also the historic immigration building swearing-in room) into studios to get their desired income.

First, the incrases are pure greed and do not reflect the reality — our studio building is barely maintained and sanitized, it is in an unsafe area, a neighborhood with high poverty rate, and this is class C rentals in a terrible commercial real estate market. There is little to no management and often tenants end up having to take care of the building and precautions. $3700 in Seattle could get you a nice place with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms — this is a small black box theater with no plumbing!

Secondly, these owners are either racist or are too blind to comprehend the optics! In eight years renting space here, I’ve never seen anyone receive a notice to vacate, or vacate with rent increases.

The Sankofa owner has only been there for 16 months, had put a lot of physical work and has been creating a space to uplift her community. She donated the space for a whole week to On The Boards!

We will figure this out, and the overall picture has been a long game. In the meantime, if you need to rent space check out https://www.sankofatheatersea.com and help Sankofa hold on to this future-is-now Black cultural space!

The Sankofa Theater

"I believe in the important role that buildings like Inscape play - so much greater than the designation as a 'building' or piece of 'real estate' - Inscape is a fabric that weaves history and community together, and a resource that is already scarce in the city and only getting scarcer." - Randi Ganulin

We so appreciate our community's words of support! If you haven't joined our supporters list yet, you can sign up via the link in the comments!

Coming up soon at Inscape Arts: Three Print Makers Pop-Up Show
Friday, Saturday, Sunday April 7, 8, 9, 2023
Friday = 5:00 – 7:00
Saturday = 12:00 – 4:00
Sunday = 12:00 – 4:00

Inscape Arts Building
815 Seattle, Blvd. South
Seattle, WA 98134

Magda Baker, Ken Coleman and Patrick Connelly
are the recipients of the 2022/23 Seattle Print
Arts and Pratt Fine Art Center Partnership Grant.
The three of us invite you to this half-way point
review of our work, which includes a variety of
printmaking techniques.
The Inscape Arts Building is not open to the
public, but we will be at the front doors to admit
you and direct you to the gallery space.

Tickets are on sale now for THE UN-[TITLED] PROJECT! It take place at Wa Na Wari, Inscape, and routes in between.

MARCH 23 - 26: Experience Seattle through UN-[TITLED], co-presented by On the Boards and Berette S Macaulay! UN-[TITLED] is an immersive, multisite-specific project that centers on the ways in which communities are displaced by gentrification. Guests are guided through a series of engagements and reckonings with community meaning, cultural memory, and healing in the Central and Chinatown International Districts of Seattle. Head to OtB's website for tickets and more info - link below!

UN-[TITLED]: https://www.ontheboards.org/performances/untitled

Inscape Open Studios is set for Saturday + Sunday, Dec 3+4, noon-6!

The Wing Luke Museum will be conducting tours at 11:30 and 2:30 for visitors to learn the history of the building on both days of Open Studios!

Since so many studio doors will be open, tour participants have a great opportunity to see more deeply into the spaces of the building, imagine the history, and meet the artists creating here today.

To register for the tour, go to https://www.wingluke.org/tour-calendar

Pictured: Eroyn Franklin’s “Detained” shares the stories of detainees in the former and current INS building through the graphic novel form. This work is displayed in the 1st floor foyer of Inscape, curated by The Wing Luke Museum.

We have extended the deadline on our artist call for an artist who can collaborate with the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute to create an oral history zine. Spread the word! Deadline December 2nd!
Details: http://bit.ly/WNWZine

Hi everyone! Sending out a reminder that next Friday (9/16) is the deadline for applying to the Inscape Artist-in-Residency program 2023 cycle. More info below and at the link:

Inscape Arts 2023 Artist Residencies

• Deadline: September 16, 2022 11:00pm

The Inscape Artist-in-Residence program provides artists with a dynamic cultural and historic location to engage with community, research, and develop new work and ideas at the Inscape Arts Building – an art studio building in the former immigration and detention center in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District.

Presented by the Friends of Inscape, the residency features a free work-only space for one artist or artist-team for 10 weeks. Depending on the goals of selected artists, they have the opportunity to hold workshops, talks, exhibitions, and receive studio visits from curators or artist mentors.

Four artists per year are selected. This selection cycle for residencies begins in January 2023. The selection committee includes representatives from the Inscape Community and a representative from the Wing Luke Museum, as well as regional arts organizations that intersect with ethnic and immigrant communities. The committee seeks thoughtful and compelling applications of high quality work and values applications that convey engagement with the historic immigration building and the surrounding diverse neighborhood.

The residency is open to all artists by application. We are currently accepting applications for the 2023 residency period, running from January 2023-December 2023. 
In honor of the history of the building, artists who are immigrants and/or from underrepresented populations are strongly encouraged to apply.

Residency dates will be:
January 11- March 22, 2023
April 17 – July 26, 2023
September 7- November 16, 2023

Residency Program | Inscape Arts RESIDENCY PROGRAM Haein Kang Winter - Spring... Read More HJ “Cortez” Amaro September –... Read More barry johnson Inscape welcomes barry johnson, our new Artist-in-Residence Read More ABOUT THE AIR PROGRAM Note: Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we ask artists to be flexible with residency availa...

Open House was a blast and we're looking forward to hosting more events soon!🤩What's the best way to stay connected AND support our campaign to save the building? Become a Friend of INScape by adding your name to our list of supporters! https://friendsofinscape.org/join

Photo by Kirsten Mohan Photography.🔥

🥳INScape Spring Open House was a smashing success! Thank you to everyone who came out on Saturday to mingle and celebrate art and community!
In case you missed it, you can still support Friends of INScape in our capactiy-building efforts to preserve the building by checking out our ongoing Silent Auction closing this Friday May 20th at 6pm! (link in comments)