PROJECTS
El Barrio
El Barrio
In partnership with Cultivate South Park, the Agency acquired over 30,000 square feet of the heart of the South Park neighborhood, a suite of contiguous properties that includes the South Park Hall (a 100-year-old music hall and community gathering space), the South Park Idea Lab (a space for community cultural projects to collaborate and explore partnerships), and multiple affordable small local business spaces. This project also includes a development opportunity, to create over 45,000 square feet of new affordable housing and ground-floor cultural space.
Columbia City Theater
The New Columbia City Theater
In partnership with Rainier Avenue Radio, a Black-owned community radio station serving the Rainier Valley, we acquired this 100-year-old vaudeville hall and cinema. The venue is undergoing a significant upgrade, as we create accessibility with ramps and lifts, renovate the existing bathrooms, and address decades of deferred maintenance to critical building systems.
Station Space
Station Space
The Cultural Space Agency has created a youth-centered arts education space at King Street Station, Seattle’s 120-year-old passenger rail station. In partnership with Totem Star, Red Eagle Soaring, the Rhapsody Project, and Wh!psmart, we are creating a 10,000 square foot youth arts empowerment lab, which will include three recording studios, a black box theater, an arts resource center, a luthier shop, and multiple classrooms, meeting spaces, and offices for the nonprofit partners.
STORE
Launch Point: a cultural space incubator
The Space Agency has purchased a single large storefront in an affordable housing complex in the Rainier Valley. Beginning in 2025 this space will serve as a permanently dedicated pop-up venue for cultural space projects reflecting the many cultural communities that have called this neighborhood “home” over the decades, back to its original Indigenous roots. A series of exhibitions, microbusinesses, performance spaces, and arts engagement opportunities will flow through this space for decades to come. When completed, it will be the nation’s first permanently dedicated pop-up space.
B.A.S.E
Build Art Space Equitably (B.A.S.E) Certification Cohort
The founders of the Cultural Space Agency also created the city’s first cohort dedicated to creating capacity for cultural space projects deep in communities of color. Each year, the BASE program brings 20 participants (from the worlds of commercial real estate, the arts, and community development) through a curriculum that examines the intersection of arts and commercial real estate.
Arte Noir
Arte Noir
The Cultural Space Agency partnered with this dynamic new Black arts space in the heart of the Central District, created by Cultural Space Agency cofounder Vivian Phillips. Arte Noir is one of the “home BASEs” of our BASE program and houses the Onyx Fine Arts Gallery and a new community-focused professional recording studio.
