At Seattle’s new Cannonball Arts center, even the bathrooms have artistic flair.
The city required the developers of Seattle’s newest contemporary art center to build 24 new bathrooms during their transformation of a long-closed Bed Bath & Beyond space. Each bathroom functions as a small, immersive art installation featuring painting, digital art and a mixed-media environment. Highlights include a stall created by Vanishing Seattle — an organization dedicated to preserving the city’s history amid unprecedented change — a Kurt Cobain tribute and a bathroom confessional.
The 66,000-square-foot Cannonball Arts center opened last month in a building that sat vacant for seven years. The two floors of art space serve as a creative hub for the region’s art community for artists and patrons alike or, as the organization describes it, an “arts playground.” Cannonball Arts is a partnership between New Rising Sun (producers of the recent Bumbershoot Arts & Music Festival) and the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe.
“Cannonball is not really like any other art center,” says Greg Lundgren, co-founder and chief creative officer at Cannonball Arts. “It’s a little bit of a museum. It’s a little bit of a nightclub. It’s a little bit of an amusement park.”
The diverse range of artistic expressions include a theatre, a performance space, large-scale murals and an elevator installation. Current exhibits include a rideable soft-form “nudibranch” sculpture; a virtual reality monster truck ride; an indoor sculpture park with works from more than 15 artists; and live canoe carving from Muckleshoot Tribe artisans.
“(Cannonball) celebrates not just the art, not just the painters and sculptors, but the fashion designers, the chefs and dancers, the filmmakers and the animators and the technologists,” Lundgren says. “All the people who do the things that they do not because of money, not because of fame, but because they have pure passion.”
Located in the heart of downtown at Third Avenue and Virginia Street, the unique venue is within walking distance of numerous restaurants and shops. Walk a mile south and enjoy a cocktail and 35th-story views from Smith Tower’s speakeasy-inspired Observatory Bar. Just blocks away is Ben Paris in The State Hotel, often called Seattle’s favorite downtown neighborhood restaurant.
Take a short walk north through Seattle Center — less than a mile away — and enjoy the city’s “living room” on your way to the MarQueen Hotel’s Roaring ‘20s-themed Tin Lizzie Lounge. Or, head west toward Puget Sound and grab lunch at Gourmondo Café Omeros near Myrtle Edwards Park and Olympic Sculpture Park, a former industrial site now home to several colorful contemporary structures.