By Anthony Edwards, The Seattle Medium
On the corner of 23rd Street and Union Avenue in Seattle’s Central District, bright murals depicting Seattle icons such as Jimi Hendrix, Edwin T. Pratt and DeCharlene Williams announce an artistic revival.
The murals, painted by Myron Curry, are the eye-catcher to Midtown Square, a new development by Lake Union Partners that features seven floors of affordable housing, street-level retail spaces and a large display of local art.
To ensure Midtown Square would serve as a space where Black art and culture could be represented, Lake Union Partners began working with Central District native and arts leader Vivian Phillips in 2019. A few years later, Phillips opened Arté Noir on Sept. 17, a brick-and-mortar shop that sells products from local Black creatives, such as candles, bookmarks, whiskey glasses, shower curtains and more.
Arté Noir got its start in May 2021 as an online publication and newsletter to help uplift Black art, artists and culture, but since the opening of the brick-and-mortar location, Phillips has been delighted by how it has drawn the community together.
“One of the benefits that I had not actually envisioned was how critical this space has become for Black artists to feel like they have a home,” Phillips said. “That’s a part of the mission fulfillment and there’s no way of quantifying that. Community healing, it really has done that in an interesting way.”
Phillips named her daughter Jazmyn Scott executive director of Arté Noir. The two began by partnering with the artists on display throughout Midtown Square about ways to turn their work into for-sale products inside Arté Noir.
“For instance, Myron’s murals that are on the 23rd side of the building, we have done magnets with that, and Myron had some prints made and we sell those,” Scott said. “Perri Rhoden’s[CQ] mural, we have a shower curtain… we did a bookmark magnet set and we also have some whiskey glasses. Takiyah Ward’s mural turned into a really nice custom bookmark.”
In addition to the artists whose work was selected for the design of Midtown Square, many other Black artists are featured inside the building at Gallery Onyx, which Arté Noir hosts in the same space.
“We built out and own the entire space, but the partnership with Onyx is one that allows them to be in that space… for as long as they’d like to be there,” Phillips said. “We saw that if we were to have a place that was the celebration and spotlighting of Black art, we knew that it would be essential to have a state-of-the-art gallery in the space.”
Gallery Onyx, which also has a gallery at Pacific Place in downtown Seattle, highlights artists of African descent who are now located in the Pacific Northwest. According to the Arté Noir website, “the Black-led Onyx Collective is the only gallery in Seattle that exclusively showcases Black visual artists.”
More than four dozen pieces are on display at the gallery, most of which are for sale and cost anywhere from $100 to thousands of dollars. Styles featured in the gallery include oil canvas paintings, photographs, mixed media and more.
The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Scott says Saturdays are the busiest day so far.
Scott is surprised and pleased that Arté Noir has created a sense of community, becoming a hub of activity for the Central District. In the two months since opening, Scott says that many folks from out of town have been drawn to Arté Noir and Gallery Onyx by the murals and come inside to learn more about the Central District and its art history.
The display of history extends outside Arté Noir to the central part of Midtown Square, where a new apartment complex was recently completed and construction on new street-level businesses is winding up.
Curry, one of many local artists whose work adorns the walls of Midtown Square, has lived his whole life in the Central District. He’s watched all of the changes in the neighborhood. But one thing that hasn’t changed, he says, is how art draws out the best of the community.
“It’s refreshing to see the actual impact of the art,” Curry said. “What I do love the most about doing art, is when you see people gather around the art of the mural and talking. That whole project of Midtown Square is centered around community; bringing culture to the forefront.”
