Background
Friends of Inscape
is a grassroots organization of immigrant, arts, tenant, and neighborhood stakeholders working to preserve the Inscape Arts Building as an affordable arts and culture space and reimagine its future as a cultural community center with the primary purpose of creating access to culture, safety, remembrance, healing and reparation for immigrant communities and their neighborhood.
From 1932 to 2004, the US Immigration & Naturalization Service building served as Seattle’s detention and processing center (also the federal assay office for Klondike gold until 1955), and moved to the larger Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. In 2008, a group of investors purchased the building from the US General Services Administration. In stewarding the historic building, they were able to retain many of the features of immigration, with a lighter redevelopment into art studios, and thus met an urgent need against the ongoing displacement of artists in Seattle. A thriving artist community has been growing there ever since.
Friends of Inscape emerged from that community when the owners listed the building on the market in 2021, for one year. Since then, with uncertainty of the future use of the building, this group has advocated for the building to be kept as art studio spaces and has connected the building community to the immigrant and neighborhood stakeholder communities through placekeeping, community visioning, and working with public and private partners. In 2024, Friends of Inscape shifted away from being led only by tenants to a nonprofit with leadership representing arts, immigrant, neighborhood, and tenant stakeholders. Current board directors are Tracy Lai, Berette Macaulay, Tara Tamaribuchi, with advisors Matthew Richter and Cassie Chinn.
Rarely do cities have the opportunity to both preserve a vital and often overlooked piece of history and strengthen the future of creative and underrepresented communities in the process. As Seattle continues to lose art studios and cultural production and the C-ID neighborhood is continued to be threatened by gentrification, Friends of Inscape advocates for preservation of cultural workspaces and against displacement, and to work with community to build something that truly demonstrates how powerful the intersection of place, people, past and present can be.
Tenants
Inscape tenants are artists, small creative businesses, and non profit organizations focused on arts and culture. We are fabricators and designers, artists and artisans of all disciplines, including performance art, theatre, music, dance, sculpture, ceramics, metalwork, weaving, woodworking, painting, printmaking, photography, architecture, design, digital media and a wide variety of other mediums of creative expression.
A number of tenants serve the wider arts community as part of their mission, including Urban Artworks, Print Zero, NFFTY and Shunpike. Many individual artists offer classes, workshops, events, and projects like the Big Building Bash and the American Superhero Project. Tenants run building-specific events (open studios, holiday markets) and programs like the Inscape Artist Residency and the High Wall on a volunteer basis.
Building
The Inscape Arts Building is Seattle’s former Immigration Station and Assay office, reconfigured as an arts complex. Built in 1932, the 77,000 sq ft neoclassical building is on the National Registry of Historic Places and was designated a Seattle Landmark in 2024. It holds 125 rugged concrete-floor studio spaces ranging in size, shape, and amenity (sinks, roll-up doorways, etc), two large historic porches, hallway display space, a black box theater, and a drive-in loading area. One of the most significant artifacts of immigration and detention is tar graffiti from detainees in the former prison yards that are outdoor “patios.”
The building’s elevator lobby features an art installation by Tracy Tsutsumoto honoring the voices of immigrant detainees and prisoners of Japanese American incarceration in the building, curated by the Wing Luke Museum. With a grant from the National Park Service, the Wing Luke Museum completed historic interpretation of the building, and created and installed interpretive panels throughout the hallways marking the stories of people and history of spaces throughout the building.