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We the Innovators: Creativity in the Time of COVID-19 

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We the Innovators: Creativity in the Time of COVID-19 

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Saturday, May 8, 2021
4 pm
The link for more information and to register is here: https://mohai.org/event/we-the-innovators-creativity-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

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MOHAI is grateful that our community is positive, friendly, and supportive of one another. In that spirit, contributors are expected to:
• Exercise consideration and respect in your speech and actions
• Disagreements are necessary to consider difficult questions, but they must remain respectful
• Engage with genuine curiosity
• MOHAI does not condone acts and language that promote inequity, or that disenfranchise or marginalize people.
• We will be screening the posts and will post ones that follow the guidelines.

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We would love to see examples of innovation in your own lives. Please include a picture and description of the ways that people have innovated in big and small ways all around us. Examples will be shown live! Click the red plus sign to add your own post. Include your name if you want to be credited.

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Instructions for Questions and Comments: 

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Instructions for Questions and Comments: 

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In preparation for our event, we ask you to contribute a potential question for the speakers or a comment about what innovation means to you! In your comment, please include your name, if you feel comfortable, so that we may credit you during the live session. Please comment below your questions and comments!

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Ex.  My neighbor has learned how to make masks and is distributing them to our whole block and also in our Little Libraries for people to take for free.

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They are group that have been selling Cuban baked goods on weekends and giving all the funds to QT + BIPOC mutual aid. You can order online and then pick up.

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They make authentic tamales in Greenlake. They started giving out free flowers to healthcare workers. They've been giving free meals to people impacted by Covid-19. The flowers are from flower vendors whose flowers were going to waste when the Pike Place Market closed.

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I love this theatre/org! I've been so impressed with how they switched to virtual film screenings and festivals. They've been really adaptive while also coming up with creative ways to strengthen and support the Capitol Hill/Seattle arts community during the pandemic.

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COVID-19 has taken its toll on Seattle artists and performers - Many rely on Capitol Hill's thriving nightlife for gigs and income. With live performances and gatherings on hold, many creatives are suddenly out of work. A new streaming film festival is hoped to bring some of that work and energy into homes around Seattle and the world while raising money to help artists make ends meet.

The Capitol Hill Arts District Streaming Film Festival starts Wednesday and runs through May 3rd featuring a dozen Capitol Hill arts organizations. Facilitated by the Northwest Film Forum, the event is free to all, but purchasing sliding scale festival passes are encouraged. All proceeds will go to the COVID-19 Artists Trust Relief Fund.

Capitol Hill Arts District Streaming Festival 2020

"Given all of the circumstances around COVID-19, with artists really being displaced and out of work, and a lot of people having a difficult time with this, we thought this would be just an excellent opportunity to provide that platform for artists to showcase their work, to provide resources for them, and to connect them with engaging audiences," said Terry Novak, chair of Capitol Hill Arts District and executive director of Photographic Center Northwest. "I'm very proud of the district and the work that we do, and we're just happy that we have the resources and the talented team to be putting something together like this,"

"I think it's an exciting initiative at this time because it gets money into the hands of arts administrators and arts organizations," said Vivian Hua, executive director of Northwest Film Forum. "Because the optional donations go towards Artist Trust and artist's relief funds, we're also able to give money to artists. Everyone in the arts community at some level is able to get some support out of this."

The festival's format give each presenting partner a 90-minute block of programming, and "whether that presents one artist, or 10 different artists within 90 minutes is up to the organization," Novak affirmed.

Some of the participating organizations include: Photographic Center Northwest, The AIDS Memorial Pathway, The Annex Theater, BeautyBoiz, Capitol HIll Block Party, Crybaby Studios, Hugo House, SubKulture Cabaret, Velocity Dance Center, Longhouse Media, and Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas. The roster will change as more artists and organizations are confirmed and announced.

Photographic Center Northwest will feature a collaboration between local photographers Jenny Riffle and Natalie Krick, among other works.

Founder and creative director of BeautyBoiz Kaleb Dameron wants to focus on an oft-overlooked part of Capitol Hill nightlife: its videographers. "We're definitely used to seeing drag queens on stage or performers on stage and they're the people that are highlighted . . . I feel like this right now is really important to highlight another group of artists in our community who don't always necessarily get that opportunity."

BeautyBoiz programming will feature the work of videographers Joe Moore, Justin Ortiz, Stephen Anunson, and Bri Patin.

"All of the artists that I'm working with, they're all researching and thinking about how dance fits in with the context of what we're all experiencing right now," Velocity's artistic director Erin Johnson said. "Dance is the practice of being in your body, and thinking about and sharing in a community what it means to move your body and be a human in the world. I think it's really poetic to use dance to express what it means to be in your body right now because we're all experiencing new choreography, a new societal choreography."

Velocity Dance Center's 90 minute block will include work that had been canceled due to COVID-19 as well as previously-released dance film, like Daniel Costa's premier of a duet choreographed by Adam Barruch, Alicia Mullikin's Trapped, and an excerpt from Lavinia Vago's stage performance NOESIS X.

The Capitol Hill Arts District Streaming Film Festival runs April 29th through May 3rd online here and on the NW Film Festival's Facebook page. You can learn more and give to support the effort here.

For more online and virtual events, check out the CHS "Stay Home" Calendar.
CAPITOL HILL ARTS DISTRICT STREAMING FESTIVAL Wednesday, April 29 to Sunday, May 3 FACEBOOK EVENT: Schedule bit.ly/caphillarts2020fb
OPENING NIGHT: Wednesday, April 29: bit.ly/caphillarts2020A

6:30-7:30 pm - NORTHWEST FILM FORUM

7:30-8:30 pm - PHOTOGRAPHIC CENTER NORTHWEST

8:30-8:40 pm - COMMUNITY PROGRAMS

8:40-9:45 pm - CENTRAL DISTRICT FORUM FOR ARTS AND IDEAS

Thursday, April 30: bit.ly/caphillarts2020B

7:30-8:30 pm - COMMUNITY PROGRAMS

8:30-9:30 pm - SUBKULTURE UNDERGROUND

Friday, May 1 - bit.ly/caphillarts2020C

7:00-8:30 pm - CRYBABY STUDIOS

8:30-10:00pm - BEAUTYBOIZ

Saturday, May 2 - bit.ly/caphillarts2020D

4:30-5:45 pm - THE AMP: AIDS MEMORIAL PATHWAY

5:45-6:00 pm - COMMUNITY PROGRAMS

6:00-7:30 pm - HUGO HOUSE

7:30-9:00 pm - CAPITOL HILL BLOCK PARTY

9:00 pm until late - KAME HAUS

CLOSING DAY: Sunday, May 3 - bit.ly/caphillarts2020E

4:30-5:30 pm - MIPoPS x NWFF

5:30-7:00 pm - LONGHOUSE MEDIA

7:00-7:30 pm - VANISHING SEATTLE

7:30-8:30 pm - VELOCITY DANCE CENTER

THANKS! WE DID IT! 1,000 CHS SUBSCRIBERS -- We asked, you answered. Thanks for stepping up!
Support local journalism dedicated to your neighborhood. SUBSCRIBE HERE. Join to become a subscriber at $1/$5/$10 a month to help CHS provide community news with NO PAYWALL. You can also sign up for a one-time annual payment.

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Celebrate the neighborhood's arts - and your seventh week of COVID-19 'stay home' - with the Capitol Hill Arts District Streaming Film Festival

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COVID-19 has taken its toll on Seattle artists and performers - Many rely on Capitol Hill's thriving nightlife for gigs and income. With live performances and gatherings on hold, many creatives are suddenly out of work.

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Pretty neat new design for a mobile sink to increase the number of publicly available cleaning stations, especially for houseless folks during the pandemic when lots of normally public washrooms were closed. Real Change spurred the project with a group of UW professors, architect, and middle school collective.

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A sink is nestled in the University District alley between 15th Avenue Northeast and The Ave. It's bolted to a trough of plants. It appeared in May.

Another sink just like it is up The Ave on 47th Avenue Northeast. One was also placed at the University Heights community center along 50th Avenue Northeast.

The first sink is perfectly positioned for shelter-goers at the Roots Young Adult Shelter to wash their hands. Many have also been using the deep-tubbed sink to rinse their clothes. The one on The Ave is right next to Teen Feed, an organization that provides meal support for homeless youth.

These are the first sinks from the Seattle Street Sink program, a grassroots tactical urbanism effort to give homeless people more places to wash their hands and to access water. The program could grow, if the Seattle City Council chooses to fund it.

The sinks were born out of Tiffani McCoy's frustration with the city. McCoy, the lead organizer for Real Change, has been fighting to solve Seattle's public restroom deficiency. She thought she'd won that fight last year when she successfully advocated for a $1.3 million budget item to add a system of mobile pitstops across Seattle (the "Everybody Poos" program). Except, months after that decision, the city still hadn't acquired any pitstops. And then COVID-19 hit.

Libraries, businesses, and parks supplement the six 24-hour restrooms that Seattle's homeless rely on, but those places closed in the wake of COVID. Seattle fumbled its early response to the problem, as PubliCola documented, and so McCoy decided to take matters into her own hands. She emailed the American Institute of Architects to see if someone could help her find a solution.

A team of professors from the University of Washington College of Built Environments, a Seattle architect, McCoy, and a middle schooler from Bellevue-now known as the Clean Hands Collective -came up with the design for the street sink, a do-it-yourself sink design that could be placed anywhere in the city.

Currently, the six in-use street sinks are only on private property. City funding would expand the number of sinks and the number of locations where those sinks could be placed.

Councilmember Tammy Morales indicated this week that she'll sponsor a budget item to fund the street sink program with $58,000. With that money, the city could add 63 sinks-nine for each district-and place them on city property.

To meet the hygiene need now months after the pandemic began, Seattle has added 15 hygiene centers to supplement around 200 other city-owned hygiene resources present in parks, community centers, and libraries that have partially re-opened since April, according to Seattle Public Utilities. The hygiene centers contain toilets and sinks. They cost around $35,000 per month per hygiene center, PubliCola reported. Durkan's 2021 budget includes $1.5 million to keep them active through 2021.

"I don't think it's nearly enough," Morales told me.

Access to water in general is hard to come by for homeless people. It's the biggest hurdle for the unhoused population in her district, Morales explained. People steal water from local businesses' hoses and spigots. It ratchets up tension between the homeless and the housed in the community. Those drastic measures, Morales said, are a symptom of the city not meeting people's basic needs.

"People need better access to water and access to handwashing especially during COVID," Morales said. Seattle Sinks could provide that for a fraction of the cost.

Water access was the core idea at the beginning of the design process for the Clean Hands Collective team, said Elizabeth Golden, an associate professor in the UW department of architecture. Makeshift sinks had been installed before, such as the ones Mehr Grewal, the 13-year-old Collective member from Bellevue, set up around King County at the beginning of the pandemic. But she had to constantly refill them.

Golden came up with the idea to tap into hose bibs. Outdoor faucets, spigots, garden hoses, or any sort of water hook-up are everywhere across the city. The sinks would never need to be refilled. Organizations could choose to host sinks, as long as they were easy enough to make.

Rick Mohler, a UW associate professor of architecture as well as a member of the Seattle Planning Commission, drew up designs. Prototypes gobbled up his backyard space throughout the summer. It was important to the team that the sink was easily replicable and affordable, accomplishable in one Home Depot run.

One of the fatal flaws of the original design, according to Brice Maryman, a landscape architect in Seattle, was the grey waste, or sudsy, dirty water run-off from the sink. Maryman decided to bolt the sink to an agricultural trough filled with plants, soil, and gravel, so that the hand-washing waters the plants in the trough. It's a modular rain garden, a natural filtration system used in the Pacific Northwest for decades.

Not only is it environmentally friendly, Maryman said, but it's genuinely pleasing to look at.

"It's a piece of the public realm that feels gracious," Maryman said of the final version of the sink. "It's a humane place rather than defensive architecture."

"It's a kind of critique of how bad [the housing crisis is]," Golden added, "to put parts of a house-these things that you need-out on the street because people don't have them."

Maryman described the moment the team installed the first sink outside Roots to test it. A homeless woman walked up to them and asked, "Is this for us?" Though the woman wore a mask, Maryman could tell from her eyes that she was smiling.

Roughly 100 people per week use that sink, according to estimates from the team. Currently, six exist in Western Washington. With the council's help, they could be all over Seattle.

Originally, the plan was to put the sinks in public spaces. But stigmas around homelessness and bureaucratic red tape drove the Collective to place the sinks with non-profits and community centers. Golden worked hard on the branding for the sink to make it clear they were a public utility for everyone. They're bright white with colorful legs and a sticker that says "Seattle Street Sinks."

City funding can expand the program beyond just the non-profit realm and across the city. McCoy with Real Change would love to see the program maintained by Seattle Public Utilities with people assigned to small upkeep tasks like filling up the soap dispensers.

Morales believes her budget proposal has a good chance of making it into the final 2021 budget.

"If we're able to do something like this it's not a lot of money," Morales said, of her $58,000 proposal, "but it would have a dramatic impact."

She and her colleagues are also looking at expanding the purple bag program, homeless encampment trash collection that services around 17 encampments. She would like to increase it to 30 encampments by allocating $195,000 in the budget.

"These are easy wins for the city," Morales said.

The best news is that DIY design for the sinks is accessible online for anyone to build. A teacher in the Methow Valley found the designs and built a sink herself. And Duke University in North Carolina just contacted the Clean Hands Collective to let them know they were going to build a sink.

"Anyone of us can contribute to a more friendly public realm," Maryman said, "We don't have to wait. It's this little gift."

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That Sink in the Alley Is Supposed to Be There

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A sink is nestled in the University District alley between 15th Avenue Northeast and The Ave. It's bolted to a trough of plants. It appeared in May. Another sink just like it is up The Ave on 47th Avenue Northeast. One was also placed at the University Heights community center along 50th Avenue Northeast.

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I'm really going to miss all of the beautiful art that's gone up during the pandemic - it really brought a lot of joy to what would have otherwise a really bleak walk around shuttered spaces.

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Editor's note: This is one in a periodic series called Stepping Up, highlighting moments of compassion, duty and community in uncertain times. Have a story we should tell? Send it via email to newstips@seattletimes.com with the subject "Stepping Up."
Plywood is going up all over town. It's not pretty.

Give Seattle's art community a little time, though, and it will catch up. Already artists are out and about, painting murals to combat the growing blight as the novel coronavirus pandemic forces continued closures of local businesses and restaurants.

"I have been homebound mostly like everybody else and trying to think of ways that I can help my community," artist Amanda Bishop said. "I've been feeling a little bit helpless because I'm not on the front lines. I'm not a nurse, I'm not a doctor. I don't have a ton of money and my husband and I both lost work because of the virus. So when this opportunity came up, I was like, 'This is a way that I can use my skills because this is my full-time thing.' "

Working with permission from owners through the group Overall Creative, Bishop has started painting murals. She spent Sunday at the corner of Pike Street and 10th Avenue working in front of the Comet Tavern and Lost Lake Café along with other artists, each presenting their own vision.

"I can contribute in a positive way that lets Seattle know that I love it and that we're all going to be OK and bring some people some joy, hopefully," Bishop said. "I actually did have a lot of people come up and say thank you. And I've done a ton of murals over the last eight years of doing this professionally and I haven't had that as much as I had the last two days. It was pretty awesome to feel like it's a morale boost, it's keeping spirits up in a really difficult time."

Plywood started going up about two weeks ago after vandals began smashing windows of closed businesses. That led to more plywood from store owners who feared they might be next. Things were starting to look bleak all over town.

The folks at Venue in Ballard realized this immediately. The shop sells the work of local artists and features a row of large picture windows. There was no question the windows needed to be covered up, but plywood seemed so ... blah. So owners decided to hire a painter to beautify the plywood with a forest scene.

"We didn't want to promote fear with boarding up, so we thought instead we could spread a message of happiness and hope if we made our boards beautiful," Venue owner Diane Macrae said. "Knowing artists are struggling as well with canceled shows and lack of sales, we figured it was a chance to provide some additional work for them. Our store is all about supporting local artists, so it made sense to continue to do this during this time in any way we can."

A similar effort has been under way in the International District and Little Saigon areas after vandals took out the windows of several restaurants nearly two weeks ago.

"It's disheartening, but also it's great to see the community come together," Sarah Moriguchi said after snapping a picture of the new mural that now decorates the front of Jade Garden.

Moriguchi is a resident of the neighborhood and a fellow restaurant worker at nearby Momosan, so she feels for the Chan family that owns Jade Garden, and the other businesses in the area that seem to have been targeted because they are Asian restaurants. As she talks, there are only one or two other people on a street where, in pre-coronavirus times, you might have seen throngs of patrons swarming local restaurants and shops.

"It's just kind of how the world is right now," Moriguchi said. "You see something terrible and then something good happens, you know? So it's bittersweet, I'd say."

Ivy Chan and her family, which has run Jade Garden for 17 years, aren't sure if the vandals were trying to break in or were just out to cause damage. But she feels the opportunity arose because the streets are virtually empty thanks to the stay-at-home order.

"Those people, they like to take advantage of the fact that there's less people now because they're all trying to do their diligent part to stay home," Chan said. "And then other people are like, 'Oh, it's easier for me to go out there and do stuff. There's less police patrolling, there's less eyes to watch, so I can go and break in and do things like that and take advantage of the situation.' "

Keoke Silvano, a local photographer, is a frequent visitor to the block and saw the damage the morning after it happened as he was getting coffee. He organized a group of artists who proceeded to paint the colorful mural at Jade Garden. He hopes it's just the start, and that painters who might be out of work or looking for a way to contribute will continue the effort for businesses forced into fortress mode.

"I don't know if there were other restaurants or businesses that were impacted in the Belltown area or Capitol Hill, but it seems to me that some of these businesses might've been targeted because they are Asian businesses," Silvano said. "And it just seems hard not to draw that conclusion that it was just a target because of the conversations that are going around the country. I mean people blaming China for the virus or calling it the Chinese virus or the kung fu virus, and various other xenophobic and racial undertones along with that."

He decided to fight back and put out word to the art community. He ended up with a half dozen or so painters who decorated the front of Jade Garden in a variety of colorful styles. They used mostly spray paint to craft scenes that included a meal of noodles, vegetables and tea with a fortune cookie, and a Seattle skyline framed by jacaranda blossoms with the words "we're open."

"Some of them also have been impacted by the business slowdown, have been laid off themselves," Silvano said. "So I thought it was just an amazing thing for them to just pitch in despite the fact that they're also hurting."

One of those painters was Seattle artist Quincy Quigg. He saw Silvano's post on Facebook and volunteered after joining a similar effort in Belltown.

"So we were doing it basically just for the community," Quigg said. "Seattle is my city that I came up in, so I've definitely got love for my city. And it's just pretty heartbreaking to see everything boarded up. And the Jade Garden one, I don't know if it was racially motivated or not, but if that is the case, that's (garbage). And I definitely wanted to intervene there."

More on the COVID-19 pandemic

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In a tough time for Seattle because of the coronavirus, artists brighten boarded-up storefronts

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Editor's note: This is one in a periodic series called Stepping Up, highlighting moments of compassion, duty and community in uncertain times. Have a story we should tell? Send it via email to newstips@seattletimes.com with the subject "Stepping Up." Plywood is going up all over town. It's not pretty.