In a building where shoppers once pushed carts filled with oranges, ground beef, milk bottles and frozen dinners, people now lean in not to inspect produce but to get a closer look at the brush strokes of paintings and the detail of sculptures that show the form and beauty of the Northwest.
The Cascadia Art Museum opened last weekend in Edmonds’ Bowl neighborhood inside what was designed as a Safeway supermarket in the 1950s by the late Everett architect Charles Ogden, who also designed the early campus of Everett Community College and The Herald’s former location on Grand Avenue, along with several other buildings in Snohomish County. The building’s sweeping arched roof, held up by laminated hemlock beams, will now shelter Northwest art. The former supermarket’s post-modern design is a fitting setting for a museum dedicated to art of Pacific Northwest subjects and artists from the late-19th century to the mid-20th century.
To open the museum, $350,000 was spent renovating the building to create a central hall, six climate-controlled galleries, an education room and a gift shop. A small library also is planned. Retail space in the building features a craft distillery and other shops.
The museum, founded by art patrons Lindsey and Carolyn Echlebarger of Woodway is supported by a nonprofit foundation. Lindsay Echlebarger told Herald arts writer Gale Fiege that the couple’s interest in Northwest art started 30 years ago with the desire to fill an empty wall in their first home.
“Our college dorm posters wouldn’t do and family portraits only go so far,” Echelbarger told Fiege.
Cascadia’s inaugural exhibition, “A Fluid Tradition,” features watercolor paintings of the past 75 years by artists with the Northwest Watercolor Society, some of whom were the contemporaries of more famous Northwest artists with Snohomish County ties, including Guy Anderson, Morris Graves and Kenneth Callahan. Each of that trio have works loaned for display at the new museum.
While historical photos can give us an accurate look at our past, the watercolors and other art that the museum will feature show us things photos can’t always capture, the color of city skylines, the simultaneous exuberance and lethargy in a Depression Era Hooverville or the exhaustion of a World War II Nazi death camp survivor sketched by a soldier.
A future exhibit will mark the centennial of Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts.
Cascadia adds to the arts and cultural resources in Snohomish County that include the Schack Art Center and the Everett Performing Arts Center, the Edmonds Center for the Arts, the Edmonds Arts Festival, the Fisherman’s Village musical festival, and the public gallery spaces found throughout the county in libraries, city halls, colleges, hospitals and other public buildings.
As a significant and welcome addition to Snohomish County’s arts community and its quality of life, Cascadia Art Museum is deserving of continued support and patronage from residents and visitors.
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