395. Cynthia Brothers with Tom Eykemans: Signs of Vanishing Seattle
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Release Date: 01/21/2025
398. Keeonna Harris with Jodi-Ann Burey: Mainline Mama: Raising a Family Through Incarceration and Resistance
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Writer and prison abolitionist Keeonna Harris shares her intimate memoir, Mainline Mama, about the formidable challenge of raising a family separated by prison walls and how we can fight back against a broken Byzantine system. Keeonna and Jason met as young teens. Only fourteen, Keeonna had never had a boyfriend before, dreamed of attending Spelman to become an obstetrician, and thought she was “grown.” Within a year she was pregnant, and Jason was in prison, convicted of a carjacking and sentenced to twenty-two years. Overnight Keeonna had become a “mainline mama,” a parent facing...
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397. Shiza Shahid: Dinner at Our Place
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Celebrate culture and connection with Dinner at Our Place, the latest cookbook from the team behind Our Place, the makers of the beloved Always Pan®. Shiza Shahid, co-founder and CEO of the acclaimed cookware shares the brand’s mission to bring people together through the joy of cooking and dining. With contributions from 11 renowned chefs, tastemakers, and restaurateurs, the book presents over 100 recipes alongside curated menus designed to inspire memorable gatherings. Each chapter of Dinner at Our Place is a fully crafted dining experience, complete with playlists,...
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396. Kay Smith-Blum in Conversation with Joshua Frank, Moderated by Gerry Pollet: Nuclear Secrets, Past and Present
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Environmental advocate and HOANW founder, Gerry Pollet moderates a conversation with debut author Kay Smith-Blum and investigative journalist and author, Joshua Frank. They will explore the real-life inspirations behind Smith-Blum’s novel, Tangles, and its themes of environmental justice and human resilience against the stark backdrop of the state of the cleanup today, highlighted in Frank’s non-fiction volume, Atomic Days. Don’t miss this chance to dive into an emotionally charged story that daylights the fallout—both literal and figurative—of America’s nuclear ambitions and...
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395. Cynthia Brothers with Tom Eykemans: Signs of Vanishing Seattle
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Cities in postcards and sweeping film shots are all dramatic skylines and big recognizable features, but to really love a city is to know it on the ground level. The spaces that build community, shape culture, and support neighborhoods may not always be the flashiest silhouettes, but they’re often the most iconic to the people who live amongst them. This is something Vanishing Seattle knows all too well, as they’ve built an expansive media movement around shining lights on displaced small businesses and disappearing local institutions across the city. In their most recent collaborative...
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394. Unlearning with Lindsey T.H. Jackson: Misogynoir — The Intersection of Misogyny and Anti-Blackness
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Explore the uncomfortable conversations you’ve been eager for in a space that encourages open and safe expression. Weaving together storytelling, poetry, music, and panel interviews with powerful voices, Unlearning offers the opportunity to address issues like discrimination, social justice, violence, and many other pressing (and often taboo) topics while healing and learning together. Join Lindsey T.H. Jackson, a visionary social activist, podcaster, author, and CEO at LTHJ Global, for this first edition of Unlearning focusing on Misogynoir. Misogynoir is the...
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393. Rob Sheffield: An Era Like No Other — How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Throughout her storied career, Taylor Swift has kept her name in the news with chart-topping hits, aesthetic reinvention, and nonstop global influence. Over the years and across the genres, die-hard fans and scholars alike have chronicled the cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift. And long story short, pop music expert and self-described Taylor Swift aficionado Rob Sheffield has been along for the whole ride. In his newest book, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, Sheffield dives fearlessly into the labyrinth of Taylor Swift’s extensive...
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392. Opening Doors to the Outdoors: Inclusivity in Climbing
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Access to the outdoors is a basic human need—from the granite under our feet during adventures or simply a breath of fresh air. Yet, that access isn’t equal. In the U.S., more than one in three people lack access to a park within a 10-minute walk of home, disproportionately affecting Black and Brown communities. The outdoor and climbing industries face similar challenges. Lack of diversity in leadership, limited funding, and gate-kept information make the climb steeper for many. However, climbers of color have risen to become some of the sport’s most accomplished athletes, demonstrating...
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391. Alison Fensterstock with Emily Fox and Rachel Flotard: How Women Made Music — A Revolutionary History
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Celebrate women who rock in a discussion with the hosts of NPR music’s series Turning the Tables as they share their new book How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music. Uncovering the role women have played in shaping the music industry, editor Alison Fensterstock brings long-overdue recognition to female artists, challenging traditional best album lists and highlighting overlooked contributions in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. By bringing together material from over fifty years of NPR’s coverage, Fensterstock underscores the enduring impact of...
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390. Trimpin in Discussion with Gary Faigin: The Sound of Invention
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
Combining digital technology with everyday salvaged materials, sculptor and composer Trimpin has invented ways of playing everything from giant marimbas to a 60-foot stack of guitars using MIDI commands. Taking inspiration equally from junkyards, museums, and concert halls, Trimpin creates eccentric and interactive instruments from found materials, including saw blades, toy monkeys, duck calls, beer bottles, Bunsen burners, slide projectors, turkey basters, and pottery wheels. Trimpin’s computer-driven musical contraptions defy the constraints of traditional instruments. In...
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389. Tonya Lockyer with Jackson Cooper: Navigating Creative Administration — With Advice from Firsthand Accounts
Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series
When we think about consuming art, whether reading a book, visiting a museum, or maybe watching an outdoor performance act, we rarely consider the administrative efforts that go into making art possible. Creative administration is an evolving field that considers the innovation and organizational management necessary to create and present art. Artists find themselves having to balance their own vision, with the practicalities of physical production, collaboration, and so many other factors. Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography, is a...
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Cities in postcards and sweeping film shots are all dramatic skylines and big recognizable features, but to really love a city is to know it on the ground level. The spaces that build community, shape culture, and support neighborhoods may not always be the flashiest silhouettes, but they’re often the most iconic to the people who live amongst them. This is something Vanishing Seattle knows all too well, as they’ve built an expansive media movement around shining lights on displaced small businesses and disappearing local institutions across the city. In their most recent collaborative endeavor, Signs of Vanishing Seattle: Places Loved and Lost, Cynthia Brothers and the Vanishing Seattle team have compiled a handheld visual scrapbook of spaces that have influenced Seattle culture over the decades.
In 2016, Cynthia Brothers took to social media under the title Vanishing Seattle to document restaurants, businesses, venues, and other local institutions being pushed out and shut down by shifting priorities, urban development, and gentrification. Over the years, Vanishing Seattle has brought countless people together over small businesses still trying to make it in a rapidly changing city and the growing number of old haunts that have closed for good. Via their own online community as well as through media coverage, award-winning documentary shorts, and public presentations, the group has strived to show and tell the ways these establishments shape culture and why people should care about keeping their doors open.
Signs of Vanishing Seattle draws from a 12,000-square-foot interactive exhibit dedicated to community-sourced local legacy that Brothers curated in the historic RailSpur building in 2023. This book preserves the ephemeral exhibit into physical form – combining photos of the original signage from shuttered establishments that was on display with the personal notes visitors left under the faded font of their once-favorite cafe or the bar where they saw their first punk show. Signs of Vanishing Seattle presents a first-hand visual history of the way gathering spaces, local commerce, and physical objects connect communities and hold memories long after the neon goes dark.
Cynthia Brothers is a born and raised Seattleite, nonprofit consultant, and the founder of the Vanishing Seattle project with a background in advocacy for immigrant rights, arts & culture, and online organizing. She is a founding member of the anti-displacement organizing group Chinatown-International District (CID) Coalition and has twice been named one of “Seattle’s Most Influential” by Seattle Magazine. Brothers and Vanishing Seattle have been featured in publications including the Seattle Times, the New York Times, Real Change, and Crosscut as well as outlets like King 5, KEXP, and KUOW.
Tom Eykemans is a designer and artist preoccupied with books and the Pacific Northwest from his studio at the historic Woodland Theater in Ballard. Born in Seattle and an alumnus of the University of Washington, he spent a decade designing books at UW Press and is now design director at Marquand Books. Tom is co-founder of the nonprofit Seattle Art Book Fair, owner of the independent Tome Press, advisor to ARCADE Magazine, and instructor at the UW School of Art. He has received many design recognitions, given numerous talks, contributed to various art shows, and has been featured in The Stranger, at SxSW, and by the Washington State Book Awards. He also studies and teaches traditional martial arts at the sixty-year-old Seattle Kung Fu Club in the C-ID.
