After showcasing immersive installations by dozens of local and national artists for nearly a decade, a unique and sprawling Seattle art space is shuttering. MadArt, an idiosyncratic venue in South Lake Union, is closing in summer 2024, executive director Emily Kelly announced in a news release. The organization behind the venue, founded in 2009 by art historian, entrepreneur and philanthropist Alison Wyckoff Milliman, will also sunset.
MadArt’s last exhibition, “MAD STUDIO,” is slated for next summer, and will be a grand finale that celebrates many of the artists who have exhibited with the organization over the years. (The current show on view, by local artist Priscilla Dobler Dzul, remains open, and a scheduled January 2024 exhibit with Brooklyn artist Sara Jimenez will open as planned.)
With the closure, Seattle loses one of an increasingly small group of art spaces sprawling enough to allow artists to experiment and build large-scale installations, and one of the few that paid them to do so. Over the years, MadArt established a solid reputation for showcasing surprising work by artists-to-watch and established artists alike. In a double whammy for the city’s art scene, this closure announcement comes just a few months after the playful Museum of Museums shuttered on Capitol Hill, another major loss for non-commercial installation art.
“During our tenure we’ve supported over 90 artists to realize their thoughtful and inventive ideas and we are humbled by this experience and the relationships that have been built,” the release noted.
So why are they closing? After 15 years of operation, 10 of which in South Lake Union, it was just time. “Some things need to wrap up,” Milliman said. “You can really, really love something and still say: ‘It is time.’”
While Milliman, 62, didn’t want to call it a retirement per se — she said she plans to stay active in the local arts scene — the closure allows her more free time, she said: “I just want to spend more time outdoors.”
Milliman co-owns MadArt’s brick-and-wood Westlake Avenue building with her husband Glen Milliman, and said she’s not planning on selling it. In a move atypical for the largely nonprofit-based ecosystem of non-commercial art exhibition spaces, MadArt is an LLC owned by Alison Milliman. The artists and programming are funded with income from rents from the residential building above the venue, from renting out the venue for corporate events and weddings, as well as the couple’s additional personal funding. Milliman said it will continue to operate as a rental space for now, and that all four MadArt employees have been offered retention packages.
Executive director Emily Kelly, who’s led MadArt and has been its curator since 2017, isn’t sure what’s next for her yet but said she fully supports Milliman’s decision. “My next objective is to ensure that MadArt sees a rightful end,” she said.
MadArt’s closure means there are now fewer places for Seattle artists to spread out, experiment and make work that isn’t commercial.
Such space is rare in Seattle — and far beyond.
MadArt is one of few art spaces that asks artists “What would you do if you could do anything in this space?” and then pays them to do just that. Each project is entirely built on-site and lives only for the duration of the exhibit, usually a few months.
With its tall ceilings, brick walls and bounty of natural light, the 3,800 square feet space is a playground for artists, who often have to work in small studio spaces as larger ones are much more expensive.
Also unique is how visitors are invited to stop by and witness the installations-in-progress before the exhibition officially opens. (Entry is and was always free.)
In the first five years of its existence, MadArt operated without a home, and installed art in storefronts, vacant houses and other surprising locations. MadArt’s South Lake Union space opened in 2015 with “Middle Fork,” a massive wooden sculpture by local artist John Grade, who — with the help of hundreds of community volunteers — re-built the trunk of a 140-year-old hemlock tree by carefully gluing together hundreds of tiny pieces of salvaged old-growth cedar. The massive sculpture later traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and currently hangs in the lobby of the Seattle Art Museum.
Since then, more than 30 artists have used the space to maximal effect, building installations that ranged from the political to the whimsical and emotional, including light sculptures that made you feel like you’d stepped inside an arcade game, a gigantic sculpture of oversized pillows that were actually made of plaster and the recreation of a childhood home with billowing blue fabrics.
Seattle artist Casey Curran made his first MadArt work in 2010, shortly after graduating from Cornish College of the Arts. He and a few other artists were given stipends to create temporary installations in Cal Anderson Park. Curran created a large disk of grass that visitors helped water and keep green throughout the summer. “It became a stage and a performance of care, and I think for me MadArt has done this for Seattle as a whole,” Curran wrote in an email.
Curran exhibited with MadArt again in 2021, when he filled the gallery space with a field of delicate white flowers “growing” from crumbling wooden towers. Thanks to a motorized lever system, the flowers moved as if blooming and closing their petals, references to the cycle of growth, destruction and regeneration.
“MadArt was one of the few places left in Seattle that allowed artists to create massive installations that pushed boundaries of what was possible for emerging creatives,” Curran wrote. “We didn’t have to think about what might look good on a collector’s wall. We were given (I was given) a livable wage for the duration of the installation and was able to use that as a springboard for greater more involved projects. It’s so important for artists to create work that isn’t constrained to [the cycle of] make-sell-make-sell. Otherwise we’re left with Instagram tropes and AI hallucinations.”
Curran also pointed out that the closure comes shortly after the shuttering of Capitol Hill arts venue Museum of Museums, which offered a space (akin to MadArt) where artists could create large-scale installations. Curran had a show planned for that space in January 2024.
“I really wonder who will step in,” he wrote. “I have my fingers crossed for the longevity of the Mini Mart City Park and all the scrappy arts organizations working with empty spaces and shoestring budgets.”
Milliman, on her part, stressed that MadArt’s closure wasn’t a signal of the end of her support of local arts — or the end of the local art scene itself. She said she felt buoyed by a wave of new art spaces and the next generation of arts leaders: “I feel very positive about the arts ecosystem in Seattle,” she said.
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This coverage is partially underwritten by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over this and all its coverage.
