I just sent this email note to Honorable Ed Murray, mayor of Seattle, Hyeok Kim, deputy mayor of Seattle and members of the city council regarding the NIMBY response in Ballard (neighborhood of Seattle) to the mayor’s siting one of three tent encampments.
I am writing to express my support for the Ballard tent encampment. Seattle needs a comprehensive housing policy and inclusive programs to eliminate homelessness. As Bill Hobson, the recently retired director of Downtown Emergency Service Center, has stated we need to spend about as much as the [highway 99] tunnel is costing to end homelessness. For me services and housing for poor and vulnerable people are preferred uses of public monies to privileging real estate interests. Unless we start to tax those beneficiaries of present policies, we will continue to need modest self governing communities such as tent encampments to address needs. For too long Seattle has courted the ideologies of Le Corbusier and ignored the warnings of architectural historian Vincent Scully. I live in north Ballard and have worked near this site. I look forward to your progressive leadership that facilitates people determining their own housing and community building.
Alice Dubiel has exhibited her work in the US, Asia and Europe for more than 35 years. Since 1994 she has created paintings and prints as well as installations and projects concerned with ecology and the politics of representation. She has worked with community based groups and exhibits in similar spaces. The Landscape Tale and Implode the Dome were conceptual works to stimulate community-based land use dialogue, appearing at Bumbershoot, the Seattle Arts Festival, 911 media arts and in ArtPapers, published in Atlanta. In 2007, she co-curated with artist Deborah Lawrence, Syndicalism: The Art of Tend and Befriend, a group exhibition by Art Cartel at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center.Dubiel has received public funds for artmaking and research including the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2007 she received funds from 4Culture in King County, WA for The Hazel Tree Mother and again in 2014 she received 4Culture funds for travel to Korea. In 2006, she was artist in residence at North Cascades National Park.Ā Her work appears in the collections of the University of Washington and Swedish Medical Centers, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and is represented in private US collections. Her work appears in Women Artists of the American West by Susan Ressler.Born in Berkeley, CA, she received a master's in painting from San Jose State University and an AB in English literature from UC Santa Cruz, and pursued graduate literature studies in medieval literature, art and critical theory. Dubiel works and lives with her family in Seattle where she volunteers as an amateur naturalist.
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