On a beautiful sunny day in early October, when Seattle is in the throes of fake fall, Diana Adams walks a few blocks from her Capitol Hill art gal- lery, Vermillion, to Xom in Chophouse Row, where we meet for Vietnamese food. She is wearing her requisite black hoodie, her chin-length light auburn hair slightly disheveled. As the subject of our conversation turns to the name she’s made for herself in the local art community, she slumps slightly in her chair and says, “I don’t want to be famous!” It might be too late for that. If she’s not exactly “famous” the way some other Seattle art figures are, she’s certainly among the most respected figures in the city’s art scene. Adams’s art gallery and event space is the main vehicle for her supposed fame—and specifically the community work she’s practiced out of it for 17 years and counting. Opened in 2008, right as the economy cratered, Vermil- lion managed to survive the financial crash and emerge on the other side as an artistic force in the city. She jokingly describes the oddly shaped space as “business in front, party in back,” thanks to its long, narrow gallery and the cozy bar behind it. Over the years, the salon has hosted rotating exhibitions of just about every art form and subject matter—paintings, sculptures, multimedia, and mixed media—while the bar usually hosts its own crowd of drinkers, dancers, and spectators who are drawn by the various arts events. A selection of recent examples include a poetry lab, a live comic book reading, a queer drink-and-draw night, and an “indie sleaze, Britpop, and post-punk” dance party. I quickly see this respect for Adams firsthand in the wild just a few days after our first interview. During the monthly Capitol Hill Art Walk, I meet up with her at Passable Art, a collaborative maker’s space, and find her chatting with the proprietor, Shelly Farnham. Later, she heads with some friends to photographer Steve Gilbert’s studio on Broadway, and as we make our way around the Hill, people stop to say hello to her every block or so. We eventually wander into Eleven : Eleven, artist and community builder Carolyn Hitt’s newly opened all-ages event space and gallery two doors down from Vermillion. Hitt’s known Adams since about 2013, she guesstimates, and she has shown at Vermillion nearly annually since 2016. In fact, it was Vermillion that inspired her to open her first studio, Blue Cone, down the block. “Vermillion is a bar, but it's just so much more than that, right?” Hitt says. “Because she's so much more than that.” Yet another example of the deep esteem for Adams that’s running through Seattle’s art community came when COVID-19 forced businesses to close in 2020, and artist Derek Erdman, who showed many times at Vermil- lion before moving to Chicago, shipped her a bunch of his own paintings, so that she could raise funds for the gallery.

    • + By now, Art Walk’s remaining official hours are starting to dwindle, but Vermillion’s crowd isn’t. Adams quickly puts out the cigarette she’d lit only seconds before and goes inside to help out her bartender, grabbing empties from the gallery and pulling glasses from the dishwasher. A pair of female DJs spin deep Chicago house, and a tall blonde woman at the bar paints Surrealist scenes that suggest a Terry Gilliam film. The mélange of art genres on display reminds me of what Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, the former director of Frye Art Museum, had said about Vermillion. “The Frye, as a Seces- sionist museum, was open to having all disciplines being presented,” she said, referring to the innovative first wave of Secessionist artists in 1892. “What was very interesting about the Munich Secessionists was the combination of painting, photography, performance, and dance,” she said. Like the Frye, she added, “what was interesting for me with Vermillion was that this was how Diana had structured her space, and it has stayed that way.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m Mother fucking Theresa or something.”

While Adams works, I check out the just-opened group exhibition We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, presented by the Seattle Women’s Commission and pegged to Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The works are arresting. In two pieces by Holly Ballard Martz, the words Love Hurts and Be Mine are spelled out on a huge canvas using spent bullet fragments. Another piece, Put a Pin In It by Jennifer Leigh Harrison, maps documented femicides in the country in 2021, each death marked by a flower—a hand-pinned red globe amaranth. Adams eventually gets to step outside and smoke the cigarette she’d lit earlier, and as she stands in front of the gallery, people approach her and effusively thank her for hosting the show at Vermillion. Later, when we’re recap- ping the night on the phone, she comments on the grateful patrons approaching her outside. “I don’t want you to think I’m Mother fucking Theresa or something.”

    • + Adams was born in Los Angeles. Her parents were artistic, although not professionally—her mother is an illustrator, and her father was a classically trained musician. When she was 12 or 13, the family moved to Plattsburgh in upstate New York. A half-hour’s drive from the Canadian bor- der, it was close enough to get the Montreal radio station that played underground music. At the end of the ’80s, she went west for college to Northern Arizona Uni- versity, when 120 Minutes was playing New Order and The Cure on MTV. Living in mountainous Flagstaff, Adams cultivated a creative group of friends and started dating a guy who played in a band and worked at a record store. It was during college, long before she became a gallerist, bar owner, curator, and community activist, that Adams herself was a pho- tographer. Inf luenced by her artsy boyfriend, she took a pho- tography class and found her- self drawn to the work of Sylvia Plachy, whose moody, mesmer- izing black-and-white photo- graphs appeared in the pages of the Village Voice every week. She also noticed the work of other female photographers like Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, who specialized in what Adams called “humanist” photography. From there, she began shooting her own black-and-whites. In 1991, Adams headed to Alaska to work as a waitress at the Homer Spit for the summer, stopping through Seattle each way. She found the now-closed Benham Gallery on First Avenue and gave the gallerist some Xeroxed copies of her pho- tographs: black-and-white landscapes of the Ari- zona desert, including one that featured two nude women photographed from the back. That piece was later enlarged to 30 by 40 inches and hung on the front wall in a group show—her first in Seattle. “Anyway, I told my boyfriend, ‘Hey, I'm moving to Seattle. You can come with me, or I guess we're gonna break up,’” she says with a shrug and takes a French fry from my plate. She moved here in 1992, just as Seattle was explod- ing, and worked at Gravity Bar and Chang’s Mon- golian Grill. Eventually, she moved into a group house in Mount Baker with chickens in the back- yard. Fellow creatives Reed O'Beirne of Emerald Reels and Dan Groussman, a leather artisan, were among her housemates. The same mix of nonchalance and determi- nation that brought Adams to Seattle also gave her the wild idea to turn up unannounced at Spin magazine’s offices while visiting her sister in New York City, armed again with copies of her photographs. “I just walked in and said, ‘Hey, I'm in Seattle. If you ever need a photographer out there, I can do it.’” She ended up shooting the Lilith Fair, Marilyn Manson, and Hole for the mag- azine. Courtney Love spotted her from the stage as the only female photographer in the pit. “I got this really cool abstract picture of her face that actually ended up on the cover of The Stranger one year.” During the ’90s and early 2000s, Adams shot for The Rocket, took band bio photos for K Records, and accompanied then-Stranger music editor and colum- nist Kathleen Wilson as she covered the post-grunge indie rock scene, when bands like Modest Mouse and the Murder City Devils played Seattle’s stages. She and I met in the ’90s, when dance music was ascending; Adams took photos for Seat- tle-based indie music mag Resonance, which I helped edit. “I was in the right place at the right time a few times, but I didn't pursue the grunge scene in Seattle,” she says san- guinely. “I was more into EDM. I saw the Foo Fighters before they were the Foo Fighters. There’s a reason I wasn’t meant to document it.”

By the late ’90s, Adams had gotten a job at a streaming music dot-com doing pro- duction work. Her coworkers were cash- ing in on the early tech boom money, but Adams felt her creative spirit dwindle. “I would just drive past this little store- front on 12th Avenue every time I would go to work, and I was like ‘What is going on with that storefront?’” She ended up moving into the $1200-a-month rental house attached to the street-level storefront she’d been eyeballing, which served as a precursor to Vermillion. Upstairs, her housemate was a Cornish theatre student and DéjàVu dancer; they used the storefront for punk parties and art shows. She dubbed the space “Aftermath,” for its post-9/11 opening. It’s now occupied by Canon, the celebrated cocktail bar where drinks sell for $24. “I still have nightmares that we're hav- ing a punk rock show,” Adams laughs, “and my dirty underwear is all over the floor in the living room.” Although she eventually became less interested in shooting photography her- self, she still remembers the magical feel ing when someone first purchased one of her photos, at a Flagstaff café. “That changed my life in a weird way,” she says. She wanted to do that for others, so she scouted around for a permanent venue, then wrote up a business plan and scraped together just enough capital to open Ver- million. Before opening, Adams got a gig working at the Frye to refresh her memory on hanging artwork—as well as the business side of it all. It took two years to build out the space, most of which she did herself, and it finally opened in May 2008, just as the financial crisis hit. “I just thought I was making a little quaint wine bar where you could go to an art opening every night instead of like once a month,” Adams says, “because I felt like art shouldn't be intimidating, and it should be in a more relaxed environment.” This open-arms philosophy was baked into her business plan—and is what has garnered her so many fans in the local art community. “It was always something that could be slightly affordable,” Erd- man commented, “and it would be some- body that you could talk to. Like, the artist would be there, and they would be approachable. It didn't feel highfalutin.” Elisheba Wokoma, the cofounder and curator of Wa Na Wari, an art center and community space focused on Black artists and ownership in the Central District, has worked with Adams and other artists on Collect, an art party bus that shut- tles people between galleries during the Seattle Art Fair and various art walks. “There are a lot of artists who had their first or second show at Vermilion, who moved on to larger galleries,” Wokoma said, pointing out the gallery’s reputation as an accessible proving ground for new artists. “She’s constantly evolving to what the community needs.” The artists Adams has shown at Vermil- lion range from people like Ryan Molen- kamp, a painter who turns landscapes into bold geometric shapes, to Karen Hack- enberg, whose paintings pair the ridicu- lous (balloon animals) with the sublime (a beach at sunset) as a commentary on environmental waste. The work of other well-established artists, such as Bette Burgoyne, known for her delicate white illustrations on black paper, have also appeared there, and Adams has shown retrospectives of legacy artists too, like PNW painter Jay Steensma and the inno- vative animator Bruce Bickford. But she is equally proud of shows like “Non-Suffi- cient Funds,” which raised funds for Uni- versity Beyond Bars by showing the works of incarcerated artists. Or of bringing notice to the work of painter and musi- cian Travis Johnson and the annual group show of queer artists, Still Mighty Real, now in its third year.
“How I curate is through websites, Insta- gram, and people approaching me,” Adams says. “I want to give everybody a chance, you know? So I just have to know instinc- tively that they're going to be able to work with me. If somebody's got some sort of negative attitude or preconceived notions, I can feel it, and that's the only kind of artist I just don't want to deal with.” Adams has also built a rep for selfless- ness, thanks to her years of community work. During the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, Adams offered Vermillion as a space for protesters to take bathroom breaks, get free water bottles, and find a respite from the intense clashes with the police and the summer heat. Erdman fondly remembers the commu- nal potluck dinners that Adams hosts on Thanksgiving Eve for friends, family, and strangers alike, welcoming those who don’t have a place to go. “It really was incredi- ble,” he said. “I went to three or four.” When asked about Adams’s decades of service to the community, Birnie Danzker said, “She has never promoted herself or said, 'Hey, listen, guys, here I am.’ It's been a life of service to the people to whom she's given this space. She's a heroine. She has devoted her life to everybody else." In the back of Vermillion’s bar, there’s a permanent display of work by outsider art- ist Darryl Ary, who passed away in 2019. Ary was a constant presence on Broadway and had shown his work at Vermillion several times. When he died, Adams held a memorial at Vermillion, just as she did for her longtime friend and former bar- tender, Brian Clayton, who died this year. Adams had been one of Clayton’s caretak- ers, and she ran a GoFundMe campaign when he had a stroke in 2019; she’d pre- viously raised money so he could jump out of an airplane for his 50th birthday. I’m beginning to think she’s not going to beat those Mother Teresa charges.

    • + As we’re about to finish our lunch, Adams muses on the twists and turns of her art career. “I didn't set out to build a big art com- munity at all,” she says. “I was just look- ing for a way to be in creative spaces but hopefully make a living at it, take risks, and discipline myself. And then I realized how much…people were really grateful for me having a space.” Adams gets momentarily choked up. “I swear, to this day, people stop every single day and say thank you. It's incredible. It's amazing.” She pauses again. “I’m gonna start crying.” We go back to Vermillion to look at the domestic violence awareness show, the harsh messages contrasting with the soft fall sunlight. “It was a hard one to put together,” Adams says of the show. “But it's always so fulfilling, it's insane. I’m very lucky to have this.” And so is Seattle.

Tricia Romano is the author of The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture.