Chronology of events related to the Northwest Annual Exhibition
1906 - Seattle Art Museum begins as the Seattle Fine Arts Society.1
1914 - The Northwest Annual Exhibition is initiated by the Seattle Fine Arts Society, with its first show held in the exhibition rooms of the Washington State Arts Association.2 The Seattle Fine Arts Society begins holding regular art exhibitions in the home of Horace Chapin Henry and various other locations.3
1926 - Henry Art Gallery opened at the University of Washington, with Horace Chapin Henry’s collection of paintings and a continuous program of changing exhibitions.4
1929 - The Puget Sound Group of Northwest Artists founded. Seattle Fine Arts Society becomes the Art Institute of Seattle.
1930 - Women Painters of Washington (initially Women Artists of Washington) formed, partially in reaction to the all-male Puget Sound Group.5
1931 - Women Artists of Washington held its first exhibition at the Women’s Century Club.
1933 - The Art Institute of Seattle becomes the Seattle Art Museum, founded by Dr. Richard E. Fuller and his mother Margaret MacTavish Fuller, and the Volunteer Park museum is opened to the public. The 19th Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists was the first exhibition held in the new SAM location. It was also the first year that 22 year old Morris Graves exhibited in the NWA (he won the Katherine B. Baker Memorial Purchase Prize, sponsored by the West Seattle Art Club, for Moor Swan) as well as 23 year old Florence Harrison (later Florence Harrison Nesbit, co-founder of the Northwest Watercolor Society; she won the SAM first prize in watercolor for On the Willamette6). In response to the Great Depression, the Federal Art Projects began as the Public Works of Art Project, the public arts program in which many Northwest artists were involved.
1939 - Works Progress Administration (WPA) becomes the official name of the agency established by FDR, employing many Northwest artists at the time.
1940 - Northwest Watercolor Society founded by Women Painters of Washington members Dorothy Milne Rising, Vara Grube Hickey, and Florence Harrison Nesbit.
1953 - Life Magazine publishes the article “Mystic Painters of the Northwest”7 featuring Tobey, Graves, Callahan, and Anderson, putting Northwest artists on the radar for national and international art critics and buyers.
1962 - The Century 21 Exposition (Seattle World's Fair) brings nearly 10 million visitors to Seattle. The exhibitions, Northwest Art Today and Adventures in Art, curated by Norman Davis and Millard Rogers (both affiliated with the Seattle Art Museum), is one of several fine art exhibitions at the fair and creates additional international exposure for artists of the region.
1965 - Three years after the Seattle World’s Fair, SAM officially opens the Seattle Art Museum Pavilion at Seattle Center. As a venue for modern art and other changing exhibitions, the Modern Art Pavilion becomes the new location for the Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists, beginning with the 51st Annual Exhibition.
1973 - Dr. Fuller retires as director of SAM after serving forty years as director. Thomas Northrup Maytham succeeds him as Acting Director.
1974-1975 - Willis Woods becomes the new director of SAM. The museum hosts the 60th Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists, which will be the final show in the traditional sense of the exhibition.
1975-1976 - The Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists becomes Northwest Art(ists) Today, a three-part series of Northwest art exhibitions organized around particular mediums—Northwest Art Today - Part 1 (Works on Paper); Northwest Artists Today - Part 2 (Painting and Sculpture); Northwest Artists Today - Part 3: The Artist in the City, C.E.T.A.8 (Glass and Fiber).
1976 - Founder, benefactor, and long-time museum director Dr. Richard E. Fuller passes away on December 10.9
1977 - The exhibition is changed again, this time to Seattle Art Museum Northwest ‘77. This is the final exhibition to be recognized as part of the legacy of the Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists at SAM.10
1 David Martin, An Enduring Legacy: Women Painters of Washington, 1930-2005, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 17.
2 [Unknown newspaper source], “"Fine Pictures Go On Show Monday" Northwestern Artists Will Hold Fifteen Days' Exhibit of their Work,” Seattle Art Museum Libraries: Digital Collections, accessed May 3, 2020, https://samlibraries.omeka.net/items/show/1480.
3 David Martin, An Enduring Legacy, 11.
4 Art of the Pacific Northwest: From the 1930s to the Present, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974), 42.
5 David Martin, A Fluid Tradition: Northwest Watercolor Society--the First 75 Years, (Bellevue, WA: Northwest Watercolor Society, 2015), 14.
6 Ibid., 16.
7 Life Magazine v.35, no.13 (September 1953), 84-89.
8 The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act was a United States federal law enacted by Congress in 1973 to train workers and to provide them with jobs in the public service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Employment_and_Training_Act
9 “About SAM,” Seattle Art Museum, accessed May 3, 2020, http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/about-sam.
10 Six years later, in 1983, SAM begins another series related to Northwest artists: Documents Northwest: The PONCHO Series. More information about this series can be found here: https://samlibraries.omeka.net/exhibits/show/documents-northwest---the-ponc/docsnw.