Art x NW: At the Burke, interwoven stories of Coast Salish weavers

Hark — Do you hear it? That’s the sound of sweater drawers being slid open all over town. And while it’s not quite time to break out the heavy woolens, there’s nothing wrong with peeking in on your furry friends and nudging them awake from their long summer’s nap. 

For another immersion in warmth and fuzziness, head to the Burke Museum for the new exhibit Woven in Wool: Resilience in Coast Salish Weaving (Sept. 13 - Aug. 30, 2026). 

Art x NW (formerly ArtSEA) is a weekly arts and culture newsletter from Cascade PBS. Read past issues and subscribe for more.

A fascinating and fresh look at Native weaving traditions past and present, the show makes clear that practicing this art form requires year-round dedication. That’s because there’s a seasonality to gathering materials (such as huckleberries, red cortinarius mushrooms, cattail fluff and mountain goat hair), spinning the wool, dying it and finally, weaving. 

“I just got a text last night,” Kelly Sullivan (Port Gamble S’Klallam) told me with excitement at the press preview. “It said the alder cones are turning brown.” Alder cones are key to Coast Salish wool dying, as they’re plentiful — and don’t require a hike high into the mountains. “You can pick them up from your driveway,” she said with a laugh.

Sullivan is part of the Coast Salish Wool Weaving Center, which worked with the Burke Museum over the past five years to develop the exhibit. Six Coast Salish co-curators visited cultural museums all over the country, seeking examples of Northwest weaving that they could replicate and learn from. “This stuff lives in drawers,” Sullivan said. “We want to bring them out and keep teaching the techniques.”

Art forms that were traditionally performed by women, such as weaving, have historically been undervalued as “crafts.” That means the long legacy of Native weaving techniques wasn’t largely documented, collected or written about, and contemporary weavers are still figuring things out. 

“It’s like solving a puzzle,” Sullivan told me. “In our research, we’ll find one sentence in a book that says something was dyed with alder cones and urine … We have a lot of questions!” 

Displays include the results of the contemporary weavers’ research, including beautifully woven vests, tunics, braided skirts and tumplines (intricately woven straps to help carry heavy loads). You’ll also see the last existing example of a woolly dog pelt — prized by Coast Salish weavers who relied on their fur before they went extinct. On loan from the Smithsonian, where he’s lived since the 1850s, is what remains of “Mutton” the woolly dog.

“In the Pacific Northwest, carvers get the spotlight,” said Katie Bunn-Marcuse, the Burke Museum’s curator of Northwest Native art. “This exhibition helps bring balance back to the history of Indigenous art traditions.” 

Season 2 of Art by Northwest continues, this week highlighting esteemed Walla Walla artist Keiko Hara. I first encountered Hara’s work in 2022, when I visited the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at WSU in Pullman during a fall road trip across the state. (Recommended! The museum is beautiful and currently exhibiting vibrating ink-blot prints by British sculptor Anish Kapoor.) 

Back then, as curator/director Ryan Hardesty walked me through Keiko Hara: Four Decades of Paintings and Prints, I was struck by both the massive size of many of her abstract works and her powerful use of color. Hara’s paintings and prints hint at landscapes, with glints of light and organic shapes, but something deeper is humming inside — something that eludes strict definition, like a dream or foggy memory. 

At that point I had no idea I’d get to spend two days with Hara in her beloved Walla Walla, where she’s lived for 40 years — and which she talks about with more gusto than a visitor’s bureau. “The sky!” she exclaimed on our visit. “The beautiful wheat fields!” 

Born in North Korea to Japanese parents, Hara grew up largely in Japan before moving to the U.S. in 1971. As a child she used to love walking by the sea, and finds a similar oceanic quality to the rolling hills of the Palouse. Often expressing “topophilia,” or love of place, her immersive works invite viewers to step inside and connect with their own relationships to closely held spaces. 

The Art by Northwest crew and I jokingly dubbed this episode “Chasing Keiko,” because Hara raced us all over town — and into the rolling hills above it — with boundless energy and enthusiasm.

We visited her incredible art storage unit (a former WWII artillery bunker built the same year she was born), and her gloriously paint-spattered studio (a former barracks on the same air base). 

She took us to her print studio across town, to Walla Walla’s historic Pioneer Park, to the revered Walla Walla foundry, and even to a good coffee shop — though she preferred getting back to painting to sitting around sipping java. 

Now in her 80s, the recent Twining Humber Award winner is rushing around for a reason. “Life is going so fast,” Hara told me, shaking her head in disbelief. “Really, so fast.” She’s making art at a pace to keep up with it. Watch the episode. Note: The video narration contains an error, stating that Hara was born in Japan. We regret the error (a lot!) and are working to correct it.

Catching up on Season 2 of Art by Northwest? Check out our recent profiles of ceramic installation artist Io Palmer and printmaker/basket weaver/fused-glass artist Joe Feddersen.

Another harbinger of fall: the enormous rush of arts events currently overloading my inbox. Here are just a few Fall Arts happenings, with many more to come.

< The Seattle Symphony kicks off its new season with new music director (finally!) Xian Zhang. Opening night (Sept. 13) is very close to sold out, but soon after she’s also conducting Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (Sept. 18 and 20). 

< The Black and Loud music fest returns to the Crocodile with retro headliner Living Color plus beloved Northwest rockers including King Youngblood, Paris Alexa and Black Ends.

< Local contemporary dance company Whim W’Him is back with a Fall ’25 program showcasing three compelling California-based choreographers: Chloe Crenshaw, Genna Moroni and Lea Ved. (Erickson Theater, Sept. 12 - 20; get a glimpse on the company’s Instagram.) 

< Seattle theater veteran David Armstrong discusses his new book, Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical, at Elliott Bay Book Company (Sept. 12). 

< And speaking of Broadway musicals, Seattle stages are heating up this season, including with the touring production of the Tony Award-winning Some Like It Hot at the Paramount (Sept. 16 - 21).