Originally published by The Seattle Times on December 6th, 2024. Written by Gayle Clemans.
Meet David Martin, historian and PNW art sleuth.
Via chance encounters, hot tips and old-fashioned detective work, Martin has spotlighted hundreds of works by Pacific Northwest artists whose stories have been underrepresented in museum collections and left out of history books. Ever since crossing paths with a late artist’s son in the 1980s, Martin has been on a mission to rewrite that history.
It’s personal to Martin, sole curator at Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, beyond that fortuitous meeting decades ago. Exhibits like “Structure and Form: The Art of B.L. Hyde” (at CAM through Feb. 2) reflect Martin’s commitment to honoring underappreciated artists — a goal driven in part by homophobia he’s encountered as a gay man.
“It’s unfair that they weren’t being represented when a lot of these artists had done great things. They’d shown in museums, started art associations,” Martin said. “I wanted to avenge them, to even things out.”
Origin stories
Now a fixture in the Washington art world, Martin moved to Seattle with his partner, Dominic Zambito, to escape violent homophobia in Arizona during the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s. After Martin started an AIDS information hotline in Phoenix, the hotline office was firebombed.
That experience, paired with the chance encounter with the late artist’s son, sparked Martin’s desire to research marginalized artists and to honor and preserve their stories.
Martin was visiting a gallery in Kent in 1986 when a man brought in a cat-hair-covered painting for restoration. The painting was made by the man’s father, Kenjiro Nomura — a Tacoma-based artist who had a successful career in the first half of the 20th century before being incarcerated during World War II in the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho with thousands of other people of Japanese descent.
Impressed by the painting, Martin remembers wondering, “How come nobody knows about it?”
As he researched other artists from marginalized communities — Japanese American, female and gay artists in particular — he grew increasingly aware of this art-history injustice and dedicated his life to combating it.
Opening up a since-closed gallery with Zambito, Martin began to research and display work by underrated artists with Northwest ties. Without a college degree or any official art history training, the gallerist essentially molded himself into an independent scholar, building a network of contacts through collectors, artists and their families.
Barbara Johns, a Seattle-based art historian and curator who worked with Martin on an exhibition and publication about Nomura, lauded Martin’s methods and results, saying “he’s added meaningfully to our appreciation of the region’s art history.”
“His knowledge of collectors, his photo and archival files, and his own extensive retrieval work are tremendous resources,” Johns added.
Since 2015, Martin has been the sole curator for Cascadia Art Museum, a role that was developed with him in mind by current board President Lindsey Echelbarger. Martin’s “curatorial program became the vision of the museum,” said Gary Faigin, an artist, board member and longtime local arts writer.
That influence is a testament to Martin’s expertise and standing in the Northwest art scene.
“I know of no other museum that follows an exclusively curatorial model like the Cascadia Art Museum,” Faigin said.
Currently on view at CAM is an exhibition of the work of Tacoma’s Beulah Loomis Hyde (1886-1983), whose paintings of industrial and architectural scenes are strikingly fresh and modern. Like other female creatives of the period, B.L. Hyde signed and exhibited her work with her initials instead of her full name to avoid gender-based discrimination.
Also on view (through Jan. 5) is “A Legacy Rediscovered: Northwest Women Artists 1920-1970,” and Martin was the force driving the groundbreaking 2019 exhibition “The Lavender Palette.” With that show, Cascadia Art Museum became the first U.S. museum to explore regional gay culture through the work of early/mid-20th-century LGBTQ+ artists.
But local art institutions have not always clamored for works by forgotten Northwest artists. Over the years, Martin has encountered resistance in collecting and exhibiting some of the treasures he has unearthed. Meanwhile, as museums worldwide diversify their holdings and seek out artists whose oeuvres have been overlooked, Martin has been able to place numerous pieces at the prestigious Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
As Martin tells stories about his adventures — opening a trunk to find stacks of beautiful platinum print photos by artist Myra Wiggins, hand-carrying priceless photographs onto an airplane, giving a sold-out lecture in London, learning that his books are held in Ivy League libraries — there’s always a tone of self-effacing surprise.
“It’s kind of shocking,” Martin said of his discoveries, “but it’s also not shocking at all because the work is really good.”
Alluding to Martin’s informed, personable approach, Carolin Görgen, associate professor of American studies at the Sorbonne University in Paris, said “David’s in-depth knowledge of the Pacific Northwest is quite contagious and, more than once, he helped me locate sources and references that I thought were long lost.”
This internationally recognized art expert stays busy. Martin not only curates all of Cascadia’s exhibitions, he is also building the museum’s collection and publishing a book every year through the museum, in association with the University of Washington Press.
It’s a remarkable pace for such detailed scholarship, but Martin feels a sense of urgency.
“I want to get this all recorded because, unfortunately, there aren’t very many people that know what I know about the early art scene here. I have these remarkable personal stories that the artists’ families tell me, or that the artists themselves told me,” Martin said. “I’ve researched this for over 30 years. I have everything ready in separate boxes. So, it’s just a matter of putting things in order.”
Martin is also at work on a highly anticipated series of exhibitions about the history of art in Washington state, the first of which is scheduled to open in 2027.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that an entire historical blank spot on the map will be filled out by the time he is done,” Faigin said. “This narrative would not have existed otherwise and will be relied upon for years to come by anyone interested in the cultural legacy of this unique region.”
While Martin isn’t retiring anytime soon, he’s eager to find younger people to mentor, to collaborate with other scholars, and to publish as much as he can of his decades of research.
In 2023, the members of the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild honored Martin with the PNW History Award. But for the Washington art curator, historian and writer, it’s all about the artists and their legacies, not personal accolades.
“There’s no reputation without representation,” he said. “I want to make sure that their stories continue.”
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