An Inside Perspective - Discussion with David Martin and Tore Hoven about the NWA's Impact and Legacy

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Gallery photo of Northwest Art Today, Part II, held in the Modern Art Pavilion at Seattle Center, 1975-1976. Features SAM staff members Tore Hoven, Susan Brown, and Paul Macapia. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum Photo Archives.

Because the final exhibitions associated with The Northwest Annual (NWA) were held in the late 1970s, there are many figures still in the Northwest with stories to share about the exhibition and what it meant for the lives and careers of Northwest artists in the 20th century. 

Tore Hoven first began working for the Seattle Art Museum in 1967, eventually becoming the manager of the Modern Art Pavilion at Seattle Center. In the over 50 years of his work with the museum he has taken on any and every role, from installing exhibitions (including the NWA) and hanging artwork, to setting up lighting, and even serving as a security guard for the galleries. For this digital collection he has generously allowed many of his personal photographs to be digitized, which have provided an invaluable behind-the-scenes look at the kind of labor and organization involved in the production of each show. 

David Martin is the head curator of the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, Washington, and one of the most noted and internationally recognized experts on Northwest art. In 1989 Martin and his partner Dominic Zambito first opened Martin-Zambito Fine Art, a gallery in Seattle specializing in 19th and 20th century Northwest art, with a special emphasis in promoting the work of women and minority artists.[1] He has written numerous books about Northwest art societies and movements, including A Fluid Tradition: Northwest Watercolor Society--The First 75 Years (Northwest Watercolor Society, 2015) and An Enduring Legacy: Women Painters of Washington, 1930-2005 (Whatcom Museum of History and Art, 2005), both of which focus on members who regularly exhibited in the NWA. 

When Martin first began researching Northwest art in the 1980s, he reached out to and soon became good friends with many of those who were involved during SAM’s earlier years, including longtime and beloved SAM employee Dorothy C. Malone, as well as artists who exhibited during the NWA such as Yvonne Twining Humber.[2] These connections proved invaluable for gaining first-hand knowledge of what it was like to be an artist in the Northwest at that time, and how important the NWA was in getting recognition for their work, especially for less established artists. “The artists that I knew [said the Northwest Annual Exhibitions] were lifesavers because there really weren’t any galleries, there were only a couple of galleries. So you could show your work at SAM and you could build a reputation from it.” Regarding what kind of work was typically submitted, Tore Hoven described it as “everything and anything.” If an artist wasn’t selected one year, it wasn’t unheard of for their piece to find itself in the judging pool again the following year. “Sometimes the same painting showed up a couple of years in a row, too,” Hoven recalled. As long as an artist had at least one piece that they believed in, or had the unwavering desire to be a part of the show, then that could be enough for them to continue trying their luck to get in.

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Gallery photo of the 42nd Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists, 1956. Features the Carl F. Gould Gallery in the Seattle Art Museum, Volunteer Park. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum Photo Archives.

In its heyday the NWA was seen as one of the cultural events of Seattle, inspiring even generally relaxed Northwesterners to dress up for the occasion. “[The NWA] not only gave exposure, but it was covered a lot in the press, and it was a big society event. So that was another thing, if the works were picked up in the newspaper, it was free advertising for the artist” Martin said.

The best way for local artists and SAM to connect was through the call-to-artist request for the exhibition. At that time artists didn’t send slides or photos of the artwork beforehand, but would send the entire piece from their studio in order to be considered for the exhibition, packing the artwork in crates and shipping them either by truck or by train. Once all of the art had been collected by SAM, the judging process would begin, requiring all of the artwork to be brought out from storage for the jurors. Works rejected for the show would be packed up, and winners would be labeled and later displayed in the show.

The judging process was not done completely blindly, and local jurors especially had knowledge of which artists were a bigger deal at the time, sometimes even favoring the work of those who had more name recognition. For the most part, though, the work of lesser-known artists was judged equally with that of their more famous peers. But some jurors would make more unorthodox decisions that occasionally clashed with the typical way that other jurors selected pieces. Hoven recalls that Clement Greenberg, modern art critic from New York and juror for the Fifty-fifth Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists, “didn’t know any Northwest artists, so he picked a lot of strange stuff...I think that was one of the times when some of the artists got upset.” Gallerists who participated as jurors were also reported to have favored the work of artists who were being represented in their galleries at the time.

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Juror photo for the 47th Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists, 1961. Features (left to right) Thelma G. Lehmann, Walter Hook, Tom Hardy, Richard E. Fuller, and Gervais Reed. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum Photo Archives.

During the first half of the Northwest Annual Exhibition, the issue of favoritism was already becoming an issue amongst artists. Margaret Tomkins[3] and her husband James H. Fitzgerald,[4] both Northwest artists who exhibited during the NWA, boycotted the show for many years due to their concerns about which artists were gaining the most recognition. Martin recalls personal conversations with Tomkins in which she confirmed that the reason they had boycotted the exhibition for so many years was because “there was too much favoritism, too much pressure on the artist to conform to the Northwest School.” Kenneth Callahan, as the assistant director and curator for SAM, the Seattle Times art critic, and one of “The Big Four” artists,[5] was embedded in nearly every aspect of Northwest art and culture for a large portion of the twentieth century. Some artists at the time, such as Yvonne Twining Humber, claimed that he utilized this power by controlling who had knowledge about upcoming exhibitions, giving preferential treatment to close friends who also happened to be the most well-known and established artists at the time. “That’s why you had this unbalanced representation of the Northwest, because if you weren’t [Callahan’s] friend or weren’t doing what he liked, you weren’t in the know and you couldn’t get into these exhibitions unless you had connections elsewhere,” Martin said. If an artist was already reputable or was a member of a local group such as the Northwest Watercolor Society, then they had the benefit of being connected to the broader art community through different means. But for those who were not, or who lived in more remote areas, there could be much larger hurdles for them to have to overcome to make their way into the exhibition. 

What was in fact a constant source of support for local artists, and the driving force behind the positive effects that the NWA had, was Seattle Art Museum founder and long-time director Dr. Richard Fuller. Although his art knowledge was mostly focused in Asian antiques, he made a conscious effort as director to bring attention to regional artists. At a time when women and minorities struggled to get the recognition they deserved in the art world, Dr. Fuller was an advocate for anyone he thought to be producing good work, no matter their gender, race, age, or sexual orientation. “Dr. Fuller pushed it to another level. He really, as far as I know—women, men, black, white, whatever you were—he didn’t care if he thought your work was good. He really built the culture here,” Martin said. Dr. Fuller was known to have given many solo shows to women artists, legitimizing their work while the biggest names at the time were all men. By also regularly purchasing local artists’ works, especially through the Northwest Annual Exhibition, he tried to help support their careers and to validate them as serious artists. “It was important that he bought works from these artists because it gave [them] a stamp of approval,” Martin said.

From 1965 until the end of the exhibition in 1977, all but one of the shows was held in the Seattle Art Museum Modern Art Pavilion at Seattle Center. After the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962, the United Kingdom Pavilion was remodeled to become a new gallery space for SAM using a grant from PONCHO.[6] As its manager and one of less than a handful of employees at the Pavilion, Tore Hoven recalls the difficulties of keeping the space organized amidst the popularity of the exhibitions “We had a long narrow staff room, and we were just piling paintings, so you couldn’t even walk through the middle aisle,” he said. Storage in the back that was reserved for sculptures was also often crowded since these took up even more space than the paintings. However, the high ceilings, expansive windows, and moveable walls of the Pavilion afforded the staff a lot of flexibility and creativity when installing exhibits that wasn’t otherwise possible in the Volunteer Park museum.

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Gallery installation from Northwest Art Today, Part II, held in the Modern Art Pavilion at Seattle Center, 1975-1976. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum Photo Archives.

Concurrent with the time of Dr. Fuller’s retirement as the director of SAM in 1973 came a cascade of events that marked the 1970s as a time of major change for the museum. Amongst the demise of many other regional SAM exhibitions, such as the International Exhibition of Northwest Printmakers and the Northwest Watercolor Society Annual Exhibition,[7] the NWA had its final show in its traditional form in the winter of 1974-1975, the Sixtieth Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists. Following this, the NWA transitioned into 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. (Glass and Fiber). Unlike the previous annual exhibitions which were roughly one month long, these three shows were held back-to-back over a seven-month period from 1975-1976. After this, the final exhibition to be considered part of the NWA was Seattle Art Museum Northwest ‘77. As stated in the exhibition checklist “The purpose of this is to demonstrate the wide spectrum of artists’ activities in the area. Through the support of the Pacific Northwest Arts Council of the Seattle Art Museum, we hope to continue to bring to the museum visitor current work of both established and relatively new artists of the Northwest.”[8] 

When the NWA did finally end, many factors were at play. Hoven recalls the exhibitions as becoming too big to be sustainable, what with many more artists living in Seattle by that point, and an increase in newly graduated art students from the University of Washington looking to get their first break in the NWA. At the time SAM, influenced by the direction of more international museums, was also experiencing a significant shift in reorienting towards a more global art perspective, at the expense of supporting local art in the same capacity that it had been. And with the gradual movement away from the time of Northwest Mysticism and its strong community of artists, newer artists were less focused on their locality as their primary source of inspiration, diluting what had been perceived as the iconic Northwest art style. Although SAM ended its role as host of the NWA in 1977, the exhibition has continued on to a certain degree in other museums since then.[9] But the time of the NWA at SAM represented a unique period in the museum’s history when an exhibition held such significance for so many artists, uniting them all, big or small, within one collective event, and showcasing them all as artists worthy of recognition.


[1] Michael Upchurch, “Curator Martin alters PNW’s sense of its own art history.” Seattle Times. Last modified August 3, 2014, https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/curator-martin-alters-pnwrsquos-sense-of-its-own-art-history/.

[2] Humber exhibited in the NWA the years of ‘44, ‘45 (Purchase prize winner), ‘46, ‘47, ‘48, ‘49, ‘50, ‘53, ‘54, ‘55, and ‘57.

[3] Tomkins exhibited in the NWA the years of ‘40, ‘41 (Honorable mention in transparent watercolor), ‘42 (Honorable mention in transparent watercolor), ‘43 (Honorable mention in oil), ‘44 (Honorable mention in oil), ‘45, ‘46 (Honorable mention in oil), ‘47 (Purchase prize winner), ‘49 (Purchase prize winner), ‘51, and ‘58. 

[4] Fitzgerald exhibited in the NWA the years of ‘32, ‘34, ‘38 (Honorable mention in oil), ‘40, ‘42 (Second prize in oil), ‘43 (Honorable mention in oil), ‘44, ‘45, ‘46, ‘47, ‘48, ‘49 (Honorable mention in oil),’50 (Purchase prize winner), and ‘51.

[5] "The Big Four" were the four most prominent Northwest artists of the mid-twentieth century and most closely associated with the Northwest School art movement. These artists were Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson.

[6] Patrons of Northwest Civic, Cultural and Charitable Organizations, a non-profit corporation focused on funding the arts in Seattle.

Seattle Art Museum, “The Pavilion Era Ends,” Seattle Art Museum Libraries: Digital Collections, accessed May 4, 2020, https://samlibraries.omeka.net/items/show/1258.

[7] The International Exhibition of Northwest Printmakers held its final exhibition in 1971, and the Northwest Watercolor Society Annual Exhibition held its final exhibition in 1976.

[8] Seattle Art Museum, “Seattle Art Museum Northwest '77,” Seattle Art Museum Libraries: Digital Collections, accessed May 1, 2020, https://samlibraries.omeka.net/items/show/1550.

[9] Under the name Pacific Northwest Annual, it has been hosted at various times by the Bellevue Art(s) Museum, and sponsored by COCA, PONCHO, and the Washington State Arts Commission. http://www.tfaoi.com/newsmu/nmus24a.htm

An Inside Perspective