The community-based preservation organization Historic Seattle is teaming up with the owners of the Good Arts Building to preserve the building and continue its mission as a hub for arts, culture and creative enterprises in perpetuity.

Historic Seattle’s board has given preliminary approval to an agreement to purchase a majority stake in the property from Greg Smith, and form a new entity with current owners Steve Coulter, Jane Richlovsky, and Smith, who will retain a minority share.

Historically known as the Scheuerman Block, the Good Arts Building was designed by Elmer Fisher in 1889 for Christian Scheuerman and completed in 1890. Throughout the years, the building has been a hub of entrepreneurial, creative, and colorful endeavors. 

In 2011, the building took on its current role, as a hub for the arts, when a dozen artists, evicted from the nearby 619 Western Building, established ’57 Biscayne studios on the second floor.

In 2015, Good Arts LLC—an unlikely collaboration of developer Greg Smith, artist Jane Richlovsky, theatre veteran Steve Coulter, and Cherry Street Coffee founder Ali Ghambari—purchased the building with the mission of preserving its artistic heritage and affordability to creative enterprises. The building now houses 27 artist studios, as well as Bad Bishop Bar, Saké Nomi, Beneath the Streets Tours and other small businesses.

“Since acquiring the building in 2015, Good Arts LLC has done an incredible job of providing affordable space for artists in Seattle’s most historic and artistic neighborhood, Pioneer Square,” said Kji Kelly, executive director at Historic Seattle. “Protecting community use of space is critical in this changing city.

“While landmarking and historic districts save places, mission-based ownership is what protects purpose. Our organization is dedicated to saving meaningful places that foster lively communities, so this partnership with Good Arts LLC is in perfect alignment with our mission,” Kelly continued.

“Too often artists’ cultural and economic contributions are rewarded with displacement from the neighborhoods they helped make interesting and vital,”  Richlovsky added. “It’s rare that developers recognize that, and even rarer they step up to help.”

“Arts and culture are central to the historic fabric of Seattle and what makes Pioneer Square and our broader community unique and vibrant to this day,” said Urban Visions CEO and Good Arts partner Greg Smith. “Preserving this building and the artistic endeavors within was a personal passion of mine and I am thrilled to see Historic Seattle taking this step to ensure the building’s long-term uses will remain focused on fostering arts, culture and creativity.”

Now, Richlovsky, who has had a studio in Pioneer Square for 20 years, is looking forward to a new chapter. 

“I’m really excited to take what we’ve built together and hand the reins to Historic Seattle. They get us,” she said. “I am planning to be here for at least 20 more.”

In 2015 an unlikely crew—artists, developer, coffee-shop owner—forged an alliance to buy a historic building in Pioneer Square. We dubbed it the Good Arts Building, in an homage to the “Good Eats Cafeteria” that once occupied it, and also as a statement of their purpose. Since its inception, Pioneer Square has historically been home to the performing and visual arts. During economic down-times, artists have snatched up cheap warehouse space, while scrappy black-box theatres claimed dilapidated storefronts, revitalizing the neighborhood in the process. Artists, theatres, art galleries and small quirky businesses have given the neighborhood its identity and “vibrancy” as they say nowadays. The Good Arts Building was founded so that these creators of cultural and economic value could stick around to reap the benefits.

Our model for sustainability harvests the synergy of the complementary businesses that occupy the building: the studio artists attract attendees to exhibitions and events; those attendees patronize the restaurants and shops. A guy who comes in for a haircut buys a vintage suit and has it tailored, all without leaving the building. Part of the coffeehouse doubles as a gallery, bringing interest to the restaurant and income to the artists.

The arts were infused into every corner, raising the foot traffic and the value of the location, while the rents of the studios remained affordable to creative small businesses, yet sustainable for the building. Over the past five years, work spaces for artists have alarmingly disappeared across the city: In the same period, Good Arts added 14 studios to ’57 Biscayne’s existing 14, plus a street-level arcade of maker and micro-retail spaces.

Making space for the arts turned out to be a good business decision. The art studio tenants have paid rent in full every month of the pandemic, and helped us get through the year.

A boutique guest rental for overnight stays supplements our revenues. Moreover, a model of 100% occupancy, rather than the traditional 80%, along with the creative use of underutilized spaces, has allowed us to  pay our bills while still maintaining affordability.

In 2017, we combined our three corner storefronts to create a new anchor location for Cherry Street Coffee House, with a stunning remodel by Atelier Drome architects. That same year, we converted a neighboring long-vacant storefront into Good Arts Arcade, consisting of four boutique-sized retail spaces that open on to a central gallery, currently occupied by a bespoke tailor, hair design studio, and a perfumerie.

We also gave the exterior its first paint job in over twenty years, with a new color scheme designed by the resident artists. Customized steel flower basket hangers, featuring pictorial nods to the buildings’ colorful occupants past and present, and handmade by owners Richlovsky and Coulter, reinforce our identity and add visual interest. In 2019, Bad Bishop Bar picked up the final storefront and gave it a gorgeous makeover, opening to rave reviews.

As it turns out, making space for the arts was a really good business decision. This year, when the restaurants and retail tenants saw a precipitous drop in revenues, or had to close entirely, our rental receipts took a hit, just like those of every commercial building owner. However, the art studio tenants have paid rent in full every month of the pandemic, and helped us get through the year.

Our tenants and partners continue to creatively respond to challenges: Cherry Street Coffee, a daytime business, is making room in the mezzanine for Sake Nomi tasting room, an evening destination. They will share some seating (when we can sit inside again), and their coexistence will add to the dynamism of the whole. We invested in community when we bought this building, and community is what is helping us survive.

This year, we are looking for additional partner-owners, people who share our vision of a world where creatives reap the benefits of their work, to help write the Good Arts Building’s next chapter. It’s an opportunity to invest in the creative economy and Seattle’s future. Contact us if this sounds like you.

The Salon Rue de Cerise, our swanky guest suite on the third floor, comes with its own gallery show, hung salon-style, of course. Until now, the show was exclusively for guests, and guests alone could purchase the art, through our top-secret shop page.

Our mission as a building is to support artists and other micro-businesses that contribute to our city’s vitality. The proceeds from the Salon Rue de Cerise help us keep the art studio rents below market rate. We also use it to promotes the rich culture of Seattle and Pioneer Square, encouraging guests to support the local arts scene. At the moment the Salon is sadly guest-less, and will remain so until social distancing orders are dialed back to the point that people are again visiting Seattle.

To help generate some income for Seattle’s artists, and make sure there’s a culture to come back to when all this is over, we’re opening the gallery up to the public for a limited time. We have some very affordable art by many beloved Seattle artists* that we’ll ship to your home for free. Simply visit the shop page, find something to fall in love with, and we’ll make it happen.

*Juan Alonso Rodriguez, Daniel Carrillo, Jed Dunkerley, Eric Eschenbach, Henrietta’s Eye, Elizabeth Arzani, Karey Kessler, Krisna Schumann, Dara Solliday, Jane Richlovsky, and Nathan Vass, to name a few.

In keeping with our mission of making more affordable space creative entrepreneurs of all stripes, we recently renovated our third floor into art studios. Creative work space being at a premium in this town, it took about five minutes for eleven of them to get snatched up. The largest one is still available, and we’re looking for the perfect anchor tenant for this buzzing hive of activity.

It would make a perfect printmaking, photography, or other shared workshop space. Thinking of starting or moving such a venture? Here are some of the many advantages to locating your fabulous maker space in the Good Arts Building:

 

Stability: ’57 Biscayne studios, which occupy the upper floors, encompass an established community of artists.The building, since 2015, has been owned by a partnership that includes artists, and which is committed to providing space to creative tenants as affordably as possible.

 

Location: Centrally located; convenient to buses, light rail, ferries. It’s on the route of the Pioneer Square Art Walk, the oldest one in the country. First-floor retail & restaurants in the building attract foot traffic, from tourists to techies.

 

Community: This is the big one. ’57 Biscayne was founded in 2011 by a group of displaced artists in a tight spot, who found that working together was the best way to survive. Today, twenty-eight studios host a mix of fine, applied, and commercial artists and artisans, young and established, who share ideas, tips, techniques, and business savvy, to their mutual benefit. Collaborative teams have been born here.

 

Vision: In a changing art business landscape, where galleries frequently close and cannot be counted on to support artists financially, an artist-run enterprise that puts artists first is the only way we stand a chance. The Good Arts Building has strong ties to the larger community—tech firms, developers, architects, charitable non-profits—and we’re not afraid to use them to develop new markets and come up with innovative ways for people to purchase art. The Good Arts partners have placed their money, time, and reputations toward keeping the creative class centrally located and thriving in the twenty-first century. And we’re only getting started. (Up next: a theatre in the basement!)

 

Perks of being artist-run: Proper utility sinks, natural (skylights!!) and gallery lighting, and other details that artists know you need. Artists’ schedules are welcome. As are dogs. A lovely hallway gallery for exhibits. A parklet is coming to the Cherry Street side of the building that is a great blank slate for art events, mini-classes, installations, urban gardening, or just hanging out. An Air B&B space is in the works on the property; special rates will be available to tenants’ clients, friends, & family.

 

Visibility: Because of the uniqueness of our vision, the timeliness of our mission, and the unusual nature of the collaboration between an artist and developer (natural enemies in the wild), we’ve received our share of attention in the press. Reporters who have written about us continue to follow and keep in touch, to see where this great experiment will lead.

Photos and other info about the space are on the ’57 Biscayne blog.

You Are Here, Too opens Thursday, May 3 at the Good Arts Gallery.

In a city in which the ground has literally shifted several times over the past hundred years from seismic activity and human intervention, and continues to shift through highway projects and rampant development, maps can provide a link to the shared past and a record of the layers underneath.

You Are Here Too, an exhibition of artists’ responses to maps and mapping, opens May 3, 2018, continuing through August 30, at the Good Arts Building in Pioneer Square. The show is divided between two galleries within the building: Good Arts Gallery, inside Cherry Street Coffee House at 700 First Avenue, and ’57 Biscayne Artist Studios, upstairs at 110 Cherry Street (maps provided onsite). You Are Here, Too is co-curated by artists Annie Brule and Jane Richlovsky. Brule is also a cartographer.

Incorporating actual maps, or images, typography, and constructs borrowed from maps, the artworks in the show trace the topography of the natural world, political boundaries, the built environment, slavery, motherhood, and more. Artists working in diverse media—paintings, drawings, layered collages, embroidery, digital media, and ceramics—include David Francis, Nia Michaels, Dara Solliday, Joseph Pentheroudakis, Dawn Endean, Savina Mason, Morgan Cahn, Beverly Naidus, Elizabeth Arzani, Ann Marie Schneider, Hadar Iron, Lindsay Peyton, Warren Munzel, Marie Abando, Ann Marie Schneider, and Karey Kessler.

Like visual art itself, maps are an agreed-upon, yet arbitrary representation of real things; they are abstract metaphors for real places. In a lifetime of experiencing the world through these metaphors, maps and the actual places they represent start to layer themselves on top of one another in the mind of the navigator.

The layering effect is reflected in the very location of You Are Here, Too: Beloved local institution Metsker Maps occupied the footprint of Good Arts Gallery, purveying maps there from 1986-2004. Digging deeper into the layers, the ground on which the building sits was a center of commerce for the Duwamish, and Seattle’s original coastline.

The First Thursday opening reception will be held on May 3, from 6-9 PM, along with our first building-wide open house. Artists’ studios will be open to the public at ’57 Biscayne (110 Cherry), including the new third-floor expansion, and inside the Good Arts Arcade at 108 Cherry. We’ll have live piano music by Victor Janusz in the second-floor lobby.

Image: Orientation / Sand Earth, Ann Marie Schneider; photography, digital media, custom printing technique; limited edition giclee print

. . . to Cherry Street Coffee House. He probably just wanted a cup of coffee.

Actually, that’s the name of an art show, our second one at the Good Arts Gallery, nestled in the upper level of Cherry Street Coffee House. Every two months, ’57 Biscayne proprietrix Jane Richlovsky teams up with a different guest co-curator to put together a new exhibit. This month’s co-curator, Hen Chung of RAD AND HUNGRY, brings us paintings by Mike Tidwell.

“The Devil Showed Up Early” opens January 4 with a First Thursday reception from 5-7:30 and continues through February.

If God and the Devil met on Earth to battle against one another, I’ve always imagined it would take place in the American Deep South. With probably more churches than schools, one could argue the South is setting the stage for a confrontation of “good vs. evil”.

Growing up in small town Alabama, The Devil Showed Up Early is a series inspired by places from my childhood. It’s always felt like there was something sinister happening below the surface – a supernatural eeriness. Dig deep into the soil, and there’s beauty born from the Deep South’s past despite its twisted history. And of course, the Devil would show up early.

Mike Tidwell

This month marks a new milestone in the transformation of the Good Arts Building, and we’re celebrating with art events all over the building. The long-awaited new Cherry Street Coffee House is finally, gorgeously open on the corner and will stay open into the evening, serving wine and beer. Up the block at 108 Cherry, the Good Arts Arcade sports new studios and retail space.

Upstairs, ’57 Biscayne will present the fourth annual 100 under $100 show, which is just like it sounds, 100 works of art priced under $100 each. Tiny paintings, exquisite ink drawings, collages, tin constructions, photographs, and more, all ready to take home by the lucky buyers. You can also tour the open studios and sip a glass of wine while the excellent and suave Victor Janusz serenades you with standards on the piano.

Inside Cherry Street Coffee House, on the mezzanine level, the Good Arts Gallery will debut with C.Y.: Selected Work by ’57 Biscayne Artists. The venue will feature rotating exhibitions organized by ’57 Biscayne proprietrix Jane Richlovsky and a cast of guest curators.

In the newly renovated Arcade, at 108 Cherry Street, guest artist Fernando Sancho will present selections from his series of photographs African Dream Academy (featured above), as a pop-up in the large gallery space (we’re currently reviewing art/retail concept proposals for a permanent tenant). The new studio tenants of the Arcade, Gina Grey & Ieva Ansaberga are also cooking up a show in the back!

Thursday, September 7

110 Cherry Street, 108 Cherry Street, 700 1st Ave.

5-9 PM

R.I.P. the album cover, sort of. We said our goodbyes to that roomy square-foot of substantial cardstock, with its fantastic artwork — maybe by Warhol or Dali or Mapplethorpe —to name just a few. We also said our goodbyes to the hours of contemplation of the cover-art while the music spun on a nearby turntable, a unique synthesis of the aural with the visual with the tactile — a feast for the soul. Then the album cover was demoted in both size and importance, a mere afterthought of a booklet cover, encased in brittle plastic. Now stripped of its physicality entirely, it’s relegated to the ether where its low-rez pixelated remains live out their diminished existence barely visible on tiny hand-held screens. Until now! With LP sales now at a twenty-eight-year high, the album cover (both genuine and fake) is back!

Original Hits by Original Artists, opening May 4 at the Good Arts Building, will pay proper homage to the art of the album cover, both past and present—without the album. The exhibit features covers for dozens of fabricated albums cut by bands that exist only in the artists’ imaginations. The show will be on view May 4 – May 31, 2017 in our 108 Cherry Street storefront, downstairs from ’57 Biscayne & next door to the future home of Cherry Street Coffee House.

A Release Party and reception for the artists will be held First Thursday, May 4, 6:00 -10:00 p.m. followed by the Upstream Music Fest, May 11-13, when there will be actual live (if unrelated) music on site, programmed by Upstream during the run of the festival. One of a handful of free venues in the neighborhood, it will be open from 4-8PM on May 11 & 12; and 1PM-8PM (music 4-8PM only) on May 13. Beer and snacks will be available for purchase during the festival courtesy of co-owner Cherry Street Coffee House. The exhibit will also be open on the last two Fridays and Saturdays in May, from 1-6PM and by appointment.

Original Hits is co-curated by artists Jane Richlovsky and Dara Solliday of ’57 Biscayne studios which, incidentally, were named for a Joni Mitchell song lyric. For this show Richlovsky and Solliday invited approximately thirty-three and one third artists to unearth those long-forgotten catch phrases that had once sparked a reply of “That would make a great band name!” and then create a full-size old-school 12-inch LP album cover for this hypothetical hitmaker. Artists include Romson Bustillo, Kelly Lyles, Nia Michaels, Jed Dunkerley, Gabriel Campanario, Richlovsky, and Solliday, showing fake album covers in paint, collage, repurposed tin, textiles, wood, and who knows what else.

Watch this space! Construction began this week for the new Cherry Street Coffee House in the southwest corner of the Good Arts Building. Three spaces are being combined, the former Cafe Bengodi plus two adjacent storefronts that once housed Metzger Maps and, in more recent memory, a bar featuring naked sushi.

Good Arts denizens ’57 Biscayne Studios will present Original Hits by Original Artists as the inaugural exhibit in the new space: Opening May 4,  the show will pay proper homage to the art of the album cover, both past and present—without the album. The exhibit features covers for approximately 33-1/3  fabricated albums cut by bands that exist only in the artists’ imaginations. On view May 4 – May 31, 2017 in the future home of Cherry Street Coffee House, 700 1^st Avenue.

A Release Party and reception for the artists will be held First Thursday, May 4, 6:00 -10:00 p.m. followed by the Upstream Music Fest, May 11-13, when there will be actual live (if unrelated) music on site, programmed by Upstream during the run of the festival. (One of a handful of free venues in the neighborhood.)

There’s a peepshow at the Good Arts Building. If you should happen to glance over at the window as you walk by 108 Cherry Street, you might catch a glimpse of a gyrating silhouette through the cutouts in the blacked-out windows. Step right up and take a closer look, and leave your noseprint with all the others on the window.

Amanda James Parker’s Ghosts II is an iteration of an earlier site-specific video installation, Ghosts of Flesh Avenue. Inspired by the artist’s experience as a dancer at an iconic, now extinct Seattle peep show, Ghosts II pays homage to downtown Seattle’s checkered history as a skid row and red light district, the evidence of which is rapidly being washed away to make way for a shinier, cleaned-up downtown. Artist, art model, longtime associate of ’57 Biscayne, Parker created the original video to project at the former site of the defunct Lusty Lady strip club, just down the road from us on First Avenue. She needed a place to shoot a video of naked people dancing, and Good Arts had an open space to lend her. She hung a translucent scrim from the ceiling and invited a bunch of her former stripper pals to dance together once again, filming their ghostly silhouettes through the fabric.

Parker first projected the video onto the walls of the old Lusty Lady last September, setting up a dance floor for patrons to join them. The more voyeuristically-inclined could watch through holes in a nearby wall. Jen Graves wrote about the piece in the Stranger.

Ghosts of Flesh Avenue was slated to run at the Lusty Lady for just a month but, our building being no slacker in the sleazy-past department, we invited her to remount the video piece at the Good Arts Building in the same storefront where she’d shot the original footage. Ghosts II had its Cherry Street debut in December 2016, and is now running 24/7 for several months, until construction begins for the Good Arts Arcade gallery and studios. Best time to see it is after dark, but come take a peep any time. C’mon, you know you want to.