Category Archives: Artists

Tabitha Abbott

Tabitha Abbott is a contemporary oil-painter splitting time between Seattle, WA and Denver, CO. Her work’s visual arrangements are inspired by audit evidence and pinned-insects. Organic specimens and elements collected against backgrounds reminiscent of excel for the viewer’s assessment and analysis.

Abbott is an accountant by trade. Since earning her M.S. in Accounting at the University of Wyoming she has been working within the IT audit environments of Fortune 500 companies. Abbott and her creations have been heavily influenced by these rigid control-based surroundings.

Her paintings serve as records not of the natural world’s history but rather as archives of the artist’s own journey, interests, and inspirations. The high-contrast compositions reflect the harmony she has found between her dichotomous worlds of art and regulatory corporate auditing.

Abbott’s work is most easily recognized by the monochromatic pattern captured within a rectangular form on each piece. The pattern’s application acts as a symbolic representation of a time-stamp, capturing the moment when the piece was completed. The rectangular shape in which it lives inspired by the form of the Republic Plaza building in Denver where she first began work as an auditor. 


Michael Abraham, A Fine Bouquet – Urban, Suburban, Rural, 2014, Oil on Linen, 48 x 54 inches

Michael Abraham

From London to Singapore, and Philadelphia to Amsterdam, Abraham’s paintings are featured in international, corporate, private and public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Rockford Museum of Art and the Courtney Cox & David Arquette Collection.

Abraham’s distinct style blends social commentary and playful imagery, refined figurative works that navigate a full scope of content. Commissions include original paintings promoting the Vancouver Symphony and Vancouver Opera, as well as select private portraits and sculpture. An award winning graduate of the Ontario College of Art (OCADU), Abraham currently paints and sculpts, and runs the Michael Abraham Studio Gallery just south of Vancouver, B.C., and is a core member of the ‘Phantoms in the Front Yard’ figurative artists collective.

 

Carol Adelman

Carol Adelman is a painter who mines and stretches traditions of painting to embrace contemporary ideas of constructed identity and a fragmented self. Using a sensual, aggressive approach to materials that embraces the sculptural properties of paint, she melds observed figures, domestic objects and spaces with art historical sources into tableaus that explore the layered inner and outer forces that formulate identity. She has an MFA from the University of Washington and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Her exhibitions include Bowery Gallery in NYC, Washington Studio School in Wash. DC, Meloy Gallery in Bellingham among other venues.

 

 

Layomi Akinrinade

Layomi Akinrinade is a visual artist living in Seattle, WA. Raised in Ife, Nigeria, and later working as a software engineer, he channels both experiences into his artistic lens. Driven by instinctive abstraction, his paintings are forged from his wrestling with perception, memory, and resolution. Meanwhile, his photographs capture cultural resilience, urban solitude, and the ways African youth—on the continent and in the diaspora—reshape contemporary media and culture. Through these mediums, Layomi’s work explores the shifting nature of identity, heritage, and progress in a fragmented, globalized world.

 

Gina Ariko

Gina Ariko is a Japanese-American figurative painter based in Seattle, WA. Growing up, she spent every other summer visiting family in Kitakyushu, Japan, where her ojichan and obaachan first taught her to paint. Despite the language and distance barriers between them, they learned to communicate through a shared love for painting. Her interest in art and storytelling overlapped at Santa Clara University, where she majored in both English and studio art, and minored in art history. After graduation, she worked across multiple museums and organizations focused on education and community development before pursuing her art full-time in 2020.

 

Sarah Barnett

Sarah Elizabeth Barnett is a painter from North Texas, presently residing in Washington State. Sarah earned her BFA from the University of North Texas in 2018 and later attended the 2018 Summer Undergraduate Residency Program (SURP) at the New York Academy of Art. She received her MFA in 2022 from Washington State University, where she taught for a year as an adjunct instructor. Sarah has exhibited both regionally and nationally, including the 2021 AXA Art Prize Exhibition at NYAA, MANIFEST in Cincinnati, OH, the Women’s Museum in Fair Park, Dallas, TX, and the Chase Gallery in Spokane, WA. She is also a 2023 recipient of the Artist Trust Fellowship Award. A devoted oil painter with a background in figure drawing, Sarah’s paintings are highly representational and heavily distorted, with themes revolving around mortality, self-preservation, the human body, and technology. Recently, she has contributed to several mural projects in her community and hopes to help make the arts more publicly accessible.


Matthew Behrend

In his studio, surrounded by the hum of electricity and the gentle ripple of water, Matthew Behrend engages in a unique dance with nature. Using copper and brass as his canvas, he harnesses electric fields underwater to craft vibrant metal patinas. This process, which he calls electric patina, captures the dynamic interplay of energy and matter, revealing forms that exist beyond our usual sensory perceptions of time and space.

Each piece begins with an intuition, a vision of forms that emerge from meditative states. As he sculpts the electric fields in a three-dimensional water bath, these visions translate into two-dimensional imprints on metal. The resulting artworks are not just visual experiences but are records of an intimate interaction with the elemental forces of the universe.

This method draws from his background in engineering and his fascination with the multidimensional nature of our reality. His work invites viewers to step beyond the conventional and explore a world where form and energy converge in unexpected and mesmerizing ways.

Matthew Behrend holds a PhD and has contributed to significant advancements in neuroscience and global health. His artistic exploration offers a profound and accessible encounter of spaces where the physical and spiritual meet.

 

Jo Cosme

Jo Cosme, a Native Boricua multimedia artist from Borikén, Puerto Rico, faced displacement to Seattle following Hurricane María’s landfall. She was deeply struck by North Americans’ lack of awareness regarding their nation’s exploitative and ongoing colonial relationship with her homeland archipelago. Through digital media and installations, Cosme contrasts the romanticized idea of Borikén, PR, as a Caribbean paradise with the stark reality of a People enduring colonial rule for over 5 centuries.

Holding a BFA in photography from PR’s School of Fine Arts, Cosme’s work has graced venues globally, including Museo de las Américas (PR), Whatcom Museum (WA), Alexandria Museum of Art (LA), and Galerie Rivoli 59 (Paris). By 2021 she earned the Puerto Rican Fellowship for MASS MoCA’s A4A Residency. The following year, she received grants from the Collective Power Fund and Artist Trust. In 2023, she received the Bernie Funk Artist Scholarship, CityArtist grant, McMillen Foundation Fellowship, and 4Culture’s Arc Fellowship. Cosme kicked off 2024 at Inscape Arts and Cultural Center’s arts residency, leading to the inauguration of her first solo show, Welcome to Paradise: ¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre! at Seattle’s 4Culture Gallery.

Welcome to Paradise is a growing body of work meant to tour the continental US, aiming to educate and mobilize against US Imperialism and disaster capitalism. It challenges audiences to confront their complicity in perpetuating power dynamics and internalized settler mindsets during travel. Cosme intends to expand the project throughout the year, culminating in an arts residency at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in the fall.


Amara Eke

Amara Eke is an African American artist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who specializes in colorful acrylic paintings and drawings both figurative and abstract. Eke has intentionally intensified an already bright color palette and an artificial materiality to consume viewers’ attention.

She earned her MFA at the University of Washington in 2024 after graduating from Penn State University with her BFA in Drawing and Painting in addition to two degrees for Gender Studies and Art History, as well as the Creative Achievement Award for the School of Arts and Architecture in 2021.

With striking aesthetics, she strives to compel her audience to linger, and give more than a passing glance. “Amidst real-world chaos, madness, and confusion, my ambition is to create beams of joy.”

 

Denise Emerson

Denise Emerson was born in Shelton, Washington, eldest daughter of Bertha Allen who was an enrolled Twana (Skokomish) Tribal Member and Danny Emerson, Sr. who was an enrolled Dine (Navajo) Tribal Member from Sanostee, New Mexico. During her childhood she watched her parents be creative in different ways. Denise’s father oil painted and sketched while her mother sewed and beaded during her free time. She believes she inherited both of her parents’ artistic talents and skills. Denise’s sketchbook went with her everywhere, including when she visited her aunt on the Skokomish reservation. She sketched during the drive to and from the reservation, and whenever her creative energy pushed her to draw. During her teenage years Denise began painting with acrylics, beading, sewing and expanding her artistic talents.

Denise learned how to back, edge, and fringe beadwork at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where she also took painting, drawing and design classes. At that time, she used colored pencils and graph paper to create bead designs. After many years of administrative work at the City of Seattle, Denise enrolled in the UW Graphic Design Program to bring more design training to her work. There she learned to use MS Excel and other software with a goal to design every piece with the family aesthetic in heart and mind. She continues to create bead designs in MS Excel, having learned that her compositions could be as long and wide as she wanted; the designs themselves became art pieces. Denise studies historical flat beaded bags for the contemporary beadwork that she still does and also uses those designs for prints.

You can find more of Denise’s work at her Etsy shop here.