A Look at the Art History of SEA

Tucked in a sunny studio in SODO, Julie Alpert is at work on a massive piece of art. Right now, it’s still just an inchoate jumble of blank plywood shapes—122 of them—spread out across tables, waiting for a second coat of fire-retardant primer. Some shapes are recognizable: the outline of a bow, a teardrop, four-leaf clovers. Some are more obscure: whispers of scribbles, the squiggly suggestion of a handwritten phrase.

“Those will become gummy worms,” Alpert says of one undulating shape. A rendering pinned to the wall indicates what other shapes will become: wildly striped candy oranges dancing against a luminous pink, falling leaves and zig-zags set against a backdrop of electric cerulean. Everything in Alpert’s hyper-colored universe is electrified. Even the tears are somehow effervescent.

When it is finished, the piece is headed to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where it will be installed high up on two walls overlooking a new international baggage claim. Which explains why there’s another note on her studio wall with the word Torschlusspanik written out. It’s one of those elaborate German words without an exact English equivalent, and it describes a fear that time is running out. The literal translation is “gate-closing panic.”

“I don’t care how good you are at travel,” Alpert says, “it’s always exhausting, always so much stimulation. I wanted to make a piece that echoes that feeling but also provides some relief. I wanted to capture that sense of possibility and excitement you have when you’re young, when you can lose yourself to daydreaming, to doodling in the margins.”

Alpert’s doodles will live rent-free in our heads soon, as we gather round the carousels, her infectious sense of playfulness sending us on our way. Hers is not the only art at home at SEA. In case you hadn’t noticed, the airport has a lot of art. In fact, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) has the longest-running aviation public art program in the US and one of the nation’s largest airport art collections. The airport currently has 289 artworks, ranging from stained glass and million-dollar paintings to student video art and an immaculate bronze mare.

And they’re just getting started. There are currently more than 20 commissions underway, with a budget of $20 million for additional art that will be installed in time for the 2026 FIFA World Cup Games.

Everyone will agree that art at the airport is a nice touch, but in the past few decades, ports have been doubling down on collecting art. Since when did transit hubs become so invested in becoming cultural institutions? And who exactly owns the art in Concourse C?

You could write an entire book on who owns airports, how they’re run, and how they make money. Every major airport has a slightly different origin story. SEA is owned by the Port of Seattle, a government agency voted into being by King County residents in 1911. Initially, it was created to bring order to the tangle of trains and ships pulling into a young and very messy municipality. At that time, Seattle was still being massively terraformed, with determined industrialists carving ports out of cliffs and doing their darnedest to buttress tidal mud flats—the waterfront we know and love today consisted back then of a 150-foot wide swath of makeshift terrain built of ramshackle wooden planking. Nine railroad tracks operated by three separate corporations ran parallel along this muck. Industry cannot suffer such mess, and so the Port was born, to govern and make manageable the city’s port-iness.

Construction on the airport was approved by the Port of Seattle Commission in 1942, when Boeing Field proved too small to meet the aviation needs of World War II. Thus an international airport was born: an ever-growing operation owned by the county, managed by elected government officials (five Port Commissioners) who oversee an array of corporate contracts and juggle a wide panoply of political interests that together compose an industry that makes the city tick. The industry that shuttles new cars and IKEA bookshelves and Costco bulk peanut butter and, of course, us.

SEA is notable for being the first airport to purchase art. While it began with a smattering of acquisitions in the late ’60s, the airport collection got its start in earnest in 1973, thanks to an ordinance called “One Percent for Art” that was passed the same year. The ordinance, whose predecessor was a similar program created by FDR in 1934 as part of the New Deal, sets aside 1 percent of funds spent on the city’s capital improvements projects to be used for commissioning or purchasing artworks for said projects. Many cities have a similar program that serves to fund public art. Seattle’s One Percent for Art has funded a huge number of projects over the years, from Jack Mackie’s whimsical bronze Dancer's Series: Steps embedded in sidewalks along Broadway Avenue East to the Hammering Man at Seattle Art Museum. The ordinance includes expansion projects at the airport, so when SEA expanded its facilities in 1973, the overhaul included a budget of $300,000 for the acquisition of original art.

It was at this time, thanks to the guidance of an art advisor with connections to the New York gallery scene, that SEA acquired some very high-profile works—the kind you’d find at MoMA. Like Frank Stella’s York Factory A, purchased for a cool $25,000 from Leo Castelli Gallery in 1973. The piece, protected from the battering public by a metal rail in lieu of a stanchion, is now worth closer to $8 million, and is seen by millions of people every year as they pass through Concourse A.

Over the next three decades, Seattle’s airport continued to amass an ever-expanding collection, one currently valued at around $40 million. Despite the airport’s exceptional art history, SEA has only recently been getting the attention it deserves, due in large part to a guy named Tommy Gregory, the Port of Seattle’s senior art manager and curator, who takes his job very seriously.

Gregory descended into Seattle in 2018, after applying to a call for the position at SEA. Prior to that, the Houston-born artist-turned-curator had studied sculpture, earning a BFA at the University of Houston, and a master’s at the University of Texas, San Antonio. After school, Gregory moved into arts adminis- tration and curation, working his way to public art specialist for the City of San Antonio. Before his relocation to the Pacific Northwest, Gregory spent five years as the public art program director for Houston Airport Systems, where he oversaw art acquisitions and exhibitions. Notably, while a student at the University of Houston, Gregory spent two stints working as a studio assistant to Luis Jiménez, the artist behind the infamous Blue Mustang (a.k.a. Blucifer) at Denver International Airport, where he assisted in the making of the sculpture. Airport art seems to be in Gregory’s bones.

Once the influx of new funding came in, Gregory was not only able to delve into the conservation of older works such as Nevelson’s, he was also able to hire additional members to the team. Since its inception in the ’60s, the art program had remained a one-person shop—unheard of for an airport with that size of collection—making proper upkeep impossible. In 2020, the team expanded to include Public Art Program Coordinator Annabelle Goavec, who oversees the program’s RFAs (requests for acquisitions) and RFQs (requests for qualifications) and who works with artists and construction teams to manage budgets. In 2022, they were joined by Pete Fleming, a public art technician who handles day-to- day maintenance and works directly with Gregory on temporary art projects.

Unfortunately for the common traveler, a few pieces like Night Flight #1 are now only viewable from a distance or are installed completely out of public view in the Port offices (mostly delicate glass sculptures or works on paper, such as a suite of drawings by Kenneth Callahan). A few artworks have been rescued from the din and dent of the crowd but are installed for improved viewing, like Francis Celentano’s Spectrum Delta II. One of the earliest pieces acquired by the airport in the late ’60s, the piece is a magnifcent example of op art created by the Bronx-born artist, who relocated to the Pacific Northwest as an adult and taught art at the University of Washington for nearly three decades. Celentano’s piece vibrates with a repeating pattern of vertical stripes, the colors melting into each other.

Like the Nevelson, Spectrum Delta II had been mounted at ground level for years, subject to wear and tear. Now it lives high above the heads of the crowd, installed across from the Eaglerock and Voyager airplanes suspended midair in the Main Terminal.

Another piece that found new placement up high is Michael Fajans’s High Wire, a nine-panel series of paintings that most will recall, thanks to its rather uncanny, hyperrealistic depictions of a caped magician and assistant performing a disappearing act. High Wire has garnered no small amount of infamy over the years; it shows up as a crowd favorite on Reddit threads and even made an appearance in a David Cross standup special from 1999.

“The airport, that’s really where you wanna hang your art as an artist,” Cross begins his skewer. “The highest echelon, where your work really gets attention....”

The joke doesn’t quite hit the same in 2025, when airports are becoming places where the culture of their cities are reflected and their artists represented. Earlier this year, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was heralded in a New York Times article that outlined a $26-million budget in motion to commission work by 18 artists for Terminal 6 at JFK—numbers lagging well behind Seattle’s current stats.

Yet at the end of the day, it’s not about competition, nor is it about the monetary value of any artwork. (The airport will never sell its Stella, Gregory assures. Why would they when they can make millions parceling out space to coffee giants?) The focus of the art program at SEA is to build a collection that places as much local and regional art as possible side-by-side with other nationally and internationally-acclaimed works. And to put it on display for a global audience. (In case you were wondering, Seattle Art Museum attracts up to 800,000 visitors a year on average. The Louvre sees around 10 million. SEA Airport sees 55 million or more.)

To source that art, Gregory plunged headlong into Seattle’s art community, as both artist (he makes work in neon, cast bronze, glass) and curator (he was responsible for organizing three non-airport-related group exhibitions this year, for galleries in Houston, San Antonio, and Seattle, locally at J. Rinehart Gallery). Gregory’s boots-on-the-ground approach has contributed to drawing in a wide range of local artists who might not otherwise feel comfortable applying for large-scale commissions, like Alpert, who has never made public art before and had no prior experience fabricating projects of such scale. Sticking with the preexisting pool of public art contributors isn’t necessarily the best way to get the best art—certainly not inclusive of the breadth of Seattle talent that Gregory wants to see represented at the airport.

At the time of his arrival, a few big projects were already in motion for the North Concourse, like John Grade’s Boundary. The thing is monumental, made of 400 pieces of interlocking wood, with a width that matches the wingspan of a 737. Gregory doubts anything like it will ever be attempted by another airport. Yet the North Concourse felt lacking; the way nature abhors a vacuum, Gregory abhors empty walls. And the airport has a lot of walls. And, he noted, not a lot of female artists.

As a step toward remedying the imbalance, Gregory went to Greg Kucera Gallery to purchase one of Deborah Butterfield’s bronze driftwood horses. Blackleaf now grazes on commercial-grade carpet, surrounded by benches, a bar, and lounging travelers.

In the ensuing years, SEA unrolled a parade of calls for art. Joining the old host of airport favorites—like Trimpin’s mechanical delight On Matters, Monkeys, and the King, Dick Weiss’s stained glass, and Judith and Daniel Caldwell’s Flying Fish—are a new generation of works, like the plastic filament paintings of Anthony White, hand-carved wooden sculptures by Dan Webb, paintings by Ilana Zweschi, Soo Hong, Lauren Boilini, and Jazz Brown, and sculptures by Tyna Ontko and Cathy McClure.

As the pandemic unfolded and galleries suspended much of their programming, the airport continued to buy. Even if they were just acquiring smaller works, Gregory knew the economic impact on individual artists could mean the difference between making studio rent or not.

Some spaces have been carved out to house the growing collection of smaller work, like a salon gallery in Concourse D, located near a new all-gender bathroom. Though not advertised as such, the space highlights works by numerous Seattle-area LGBTQ+ artists, including a sumptuous bas-relief ceramic painting of a cat lady by Emily Counts, a hand-stitched textile piece by Joey Veltkamp (resplendent with fifty rainbowed setting suns), the haunting figures of Rebecca Bird’s Niche Communicator, Seth Sexton’s Pride Flag Variation, and Laurie Hogin’s Ode to Romantic Love (Still Life with Beautiful Peaches, Queer Melons, and Wrathful Grapes). The gallery is designed so that such smaller works can be rotated in and out, not just for the benefit of regular travelers passing through but also for employees who see it 40 or 60 hours a week.

With that in mind, making space for temporary work is a priority—even the airport grounds. In November 2023, in conjunction with the Refract glass art festival, Gregory invited Kelsey Fernkopf to install a large-scale display of neon sculpture in a field adjacent to the airport’s cell phone lot. (That one took a bit of convincing to get clearance from air traffic control.) For one night only, Fernkopf flooded an otherwise forgettable corner of the airport with color, visible from the surrounding lots, garages, and light rail.

As the expansions and modernizations continue, the art program is working closely with a cohort of architectural firms, including Miller Hull Partnership, ZGF Architects, and HOK, to design spaces made for holding art, or that weave art into the building’s design as an integral part of wayfinding.

“We have to indicate somehow where people are in this maze of public transportation,” Gregory notes. “We have to paint the walls a color; we have to clad them with something. We might as well do it well, with things that are unexpected and stimulating. We’re not just decorating—we’re shaping space.”

Trying to keep up with the ever-expanding list of upcoming projects and artists is difficult. A large-scale lenticular by the de la Torre Brothers is bound for installation in Concourse D, and a large-scale glass mosaic by Sarah More is getting finishing touches at Tieton Mosaic before it gets installed at the ticketing level of the North Main Terminal. In early 2025, the renovation of Security Checkpoint 1 (sharing airspace with the Celentano and the suspended planes) will make space for work by Marita Dingus, Barbara Earl Thomas, KCJ Szwedzinski, Jo Cosme, and Grace Athena Flott. The Turrell-esque expansion of Concourse C will come with light boxes to house original artworks by June Sekiguchi, Beccy Feather, and Jaq Chartier. A nearby wraparound wall will be outfitted with a large screen to showcase videos by glass artists Anna Mlasowsky and Dan Meyer, among others. Other screens for video were recently installed near Checkpoint 1 to showcase a rotating selection of work made by current Cornish students.

So far, the only video work in the permanent collection is Emily Tanner-McLean’s Point of Origins, Tides, a two-channel video that flanks a passageway just past Gate 3 in Concourse C. The screens unfurl a continual kaleidoscopic swirl of shapes and colors that transition from deep blue to watery violet to geometric crescendos of light. After a while, the star-burst-sharp spine of a sea urchin comes into focus, then a hint of tentacle, then the effervescence of saltwater lapping at sand—abstractions drawn from the tidal pools of Alki.

Amongst all the constant movement in the airport, Tanner-McLean’s moving image is, paradoxically, the thing that seems to stand still, extending an invitation to do the same. Travelers pause, washed in the light of a tide pool, for a moment.

Next time you’re headed to the airport, might we suggest you leave an hour early? Not for TSA, but to grab a drink and wander a world-class collection. The way things are going at SEA, the only gate-closing panic you’ll experience is the feeling that you don’t have enough time to catch the art.