New Art Space: Cannonball Arts

This Friday I went to a really cool new art space in Seattle: Cannonball Arts. One of the reasons why it's cool is because how a number of artistic entities in Seattle came together to make good use of a previously abandoned space. In the middle of downtown there used to be a large Bath, Bed and Beyond store which stayed abandoned after the chain went bankrupt. Then, Bumbershoot, the Muckleshoot Tribe, the Seattle Center and other artistic entities pooled together and acquired the building, which was fully remodeled and opened on August of 2025 as a brand new art space for the city.

It is a really nice space because it is quite large, bigger than some of the more established art museums in town: it felt bigger than the Frye Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery. Furthermore, it also has a space for live concerts, which I'm eager to check out. In fact, the team at the center had made an excellent use of the available space, making it feel very airy and roomy, which created a very calming and bright feeling right in the middle of downtown.

Some works of art were particularly noteworthy, and I have to start with the sculpture of the nudibranch. It was a very cool idea! A nudibranch is a tiny creature, the size of the tip of your finger, that can be bright pink as a sign that it's actually poisonous, and it lives in tide pools in California. The artist took a mechanical bull, removed the simulated bull cover and replaced it with a soft sculpture of a nudibranch, which in this case is the size of a whole bull. And viewers are invited to ride it! It moves like a regular mechanical bull except that it is made to be much softer: the idea is not to make the person fall, instead to make you fully interact with the sculpture through its soft motion. I tried it, and it was a very soothing experience, certainly different than the way I interacted with any sculpture before.

There are more creative art installations in the current exposition, for example, a ride through an urban space which is achieved by putting the visitor in an electric cart and then setting the person up with a VR device. Even unexpected spaces actually contain art: the restroom stalls and the elevator both had art in them. All in all, I was very happy that a space that was sitting derelict in the middle of the city now has such a beautiful use.





















Location: Seattle, WA, USA

Popular posts from this blog

Hiking the Granite Creek Trail to the Granite Lakes

Image
At this time of the year, the hiking trails in Washington are becoming snow free, marking the start of the hiking season. To get started, I took a pretty convenient trail, not far from where I live: the Granite Creek trail. The trail starts pretty close to the middle fork of the Snoqualmie River, and as the name implies it follows the Granite Creek until it reaches the Granite Lakes up high. I just returned from the trail, and it was a great way to begin hiking this year. The trail was in great shape, wide and well kept. Nevertheless, it was a very wet hike: there was a drizzle all the way up, plus all the snow melt meant that there were numerous little creeks crossing the trail. In fact, there were two larger creeks on the path that required some fording, but not as bad as I had to do in other hikes. There was also a small bridge when the trail crosses over the Granite Creek, and you can see how much water is coming down the mountain. The trail ends at the Upper Granite Lake, which ha...
Read more

New Music Genre: Hardcore Punk with Refused

Image
A week ago I got a chance to watch a concert of a music genre I hadn't heard before: Hardcore Punk. Most people have heard about Punk all the way from the 70's, with Sex Pistols and the Ramones. From that original genre later came Hardcore Punk: more independent bands, outside of the commercial mainstream, with politically confrontational lyrics and a really, really loud sound. One good example of that sound is  Refused , a Swedish hardcore punk band formed in 1991 that has been touring the world. Lucky for me, they were giving a concert at The Showbox  in downtown Seattle, and I managed to get a ticket. I was really curious about them, and they did not disappoint! To say that you go watch a hardcore punk concert would be incorrect: it's more like that you are attacked by ear blasting sound with incredibly intense lights and other effects, such as lots and lots of smoke and quick changes in the music tempo, to keep you on your toes all the time. I've been to Heavy Metal...
Read more

Kayaking under the I-90 bridges

Image
Yesterday was a sunny day without much wind, so it just made sense for me to finally check out how the I-90 bridges on Lake Washington look from underneath them. The I-90 bridges are floating bridges, but part of their span is on columns, and I could take my kayak around the ones on the Seattle side of the bridge. In addition to the bridges themselves, I could take a look from the lake on the various parks that the City of Seattle has put together and that are looking specially nice now in the middle of Spring. It was a wonderful and very relaxing way to spend a Sunday afternoon. (An interesting finding: one of the houses by the lake, that has its own dock, had some plastic chairs on said dock, and then a gust of wind blew those chairs on the lake. There was no one is sight at the house.)
Read more