Cannonball Arts Opening Keeps Momentum For Revitalized Downtown Seattle Rolling

Forbes

14 hours ago

UNITED STATES - 2025/04/21: View of the Seattle Waterfront from the Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington State, USA. (Photo by Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images) LightRocket via Getty Images
Greg Lundgren, creative director at New Rising Sun, the Seattle-based events production company behind the city's annual Bumbershoot arts and music festival, was confident when pitching the local Muckleshoot Indian Tribe on a festival sponsorship. The Tribe already has a major presence in Seattle with its logo on the National Hockey League's Seattle Kraken's jersey.
Convincing the Tribe to extend its branding to the festival launched in 1972 now attracting tens of thousands of people downtown every Labor Day Weekend should be a breeze.
Not interested.
'What else you got' Lundgren remembers tribal officials asking him. He improvised.
'There's a 66,000-square-foot concrete building in the heart of downtown Seattle and we want to turn Bumbershoot into a year round brand that isn't just celebrating our community for a weekend, but all year round, and we are going to help revitalize downtown Seattle, and we are going to help retain our creative community,' Lundgren told Forbes.com about his pitch pivot. 'They looked at me, 'That's what we want.''
Lundgren was pitching Cannonball Arts, more idea than reality at that point. The idea, converting an enormous former Bed, Bath & Beyond store that had sat vacant for nearly a decade into a playful, eccentric, contemporary art center. Exhibits, concerts, fashion shows, art markets, pop-up events. Smack dab downtown–1930 3rd Ave–two blocks west of Seattle's iconic Pike Place Market and its 10 million annual visitors.
'Going into their office, I was like, 'We want a couple hundred thousand dollars to put your name on a banner at a music festival,' and it ended up turning into a much bigger gesture and a much larger, longer-term commitment,' Lundgren said. 'I was caught off guard that they were receptive to hearing other opportunities to collaborate, and shocked that they rose their hand to doing the largest art center that Seattle has ever seen in a part of downtown which some people think is full of drug addicts and crazy people.'
Lundgren went to the Tribe looking for a sponsorship and ended up with the Muckleshoot as part owner of the company. The partnership allowed Cannonball Arts to move from idea to reality with a full grand opening to the public coming August 20, 2025.
'We've got a five-ton cedar log in our lobby which (members of the Muckleshoot Tribe) will be carving out as a dugout canoe. We have a virtual reality dark ride made out of a repurposed 1980s monster truck that came from a state fair. We have a mechanical bull with a felted wool sea slug that people can ride. We have one of the best sound systems on the West Coast for doing live events,' Lundgren explains about Cannonball Arts opening attractions.
Cannonball Arts is not a Native American arts center. It will include Native American art, but it's a contemporary art center–and a great deal more. Why would a Native American tribe be interested in partnering on such a project?
'Muckleshoot sees downtown Seattle as their home, where they fished and where their cabins were,' Lundgren explained. 'There's a version where they stay out of downtown, contemporary downtown Seattle. There's a version where they just present this 5,000-year-old version of Native American culture, but I don't think that that's a story that really suits anybody.'
Aligning itself with contemporary art reminds non-Natives that the Muckleshoot–all Indigenous people–are contemporary. That they don't exist solely in textbooks and sepia photographs. That Muckleshoot people, and culture, and art are every bit as contemporary as anything or anyone else. The Question
The Leviathan exhibit – A large-scale kinetic sculpture by Casey Curran. Jim Bennett Photo Bakery for Cannonball Arts
Lundgren was born and raised in Seattle in the 1970s. He's been an arts curator and producer in town for 30 years. He's consumed by a nagging question.
'In the 90s, we had 13 art critics and a lot less money. In 2025, we have maybe two art critics and a lot more money,' Lundgren said. 'How did Seattle get so much bigger, so much richer, and our art community is diminishing? There's got to be a way that you can grow your creative class alongside the growth of a city.'
That's the question Lundgren dedicates his professional life to solving. That's the hope for Cannonball Arts. For Seattle.
'The story that the world doesn't hear that often is that we have an incredibly rich pool of creativity, some of it is well employed and some of it unemployed, but our greatest resource are the people that live here,' he said. 'I don't think the artists and the creatives that are here are getting the attention or the opportunity or the resources to fully see their ideas realized.'
Cannonball Art's mission is serving local artists as well as the public. The same artists whose talents it will rely on for success.
'It'd be an idiotic thing to do if there wasn't a tremendous amount of creative talent here,' Lundgren said of opening a gigantic, multi-media, public, contemporary arts center. 'Between the tech sector–everyone gives people that work at Microsoft or Amazon or Meta this hard time for destroying the city or stealing jobs or making it more expensive–that talent pool, just by itself, is enormous.'
While the Muckleshoot are Cannonball Arts primary funder, financial support has also come from Amazon and the big philanthropic foundations set up by the area's tech billionaires, like Ballmer Group (Microsoft). And Starbucks. Global Seattle-based companies New Rising Sun had existing relationships with through Bumbershoot.
'How many artists work in tech, and when it comes to new media, when it comes to virtual reality, when it comes to artificial intelligence, when it comes to just about any kind of cutting-edge technology that's happening in the world, Seattle and the East Side is a world leader,' Lundgren continued. 'We have thousands and thousands of technologists in our backyard doing brilliant work.'
Perhaps not artists in the traditional painting, sculpting, drawing, photography, sense, but creatives to be sure. And Makers. The exodus of Boeing from Seattle over the last decade left more skilled residents.
'Talk about metal workers and woodworkers, there is a craft population here that is, I think, unparalleled anywhere in the world,' Lundgren said.
Despite all the recent tech wealth and tech jobs and development growth, Seattle's creative community has shrunken, a trend long predating COVID. Why haven't arts and culture and creatives benefited from the city's massive infusion of tech cash now dating back 20-plus years?
'The reason I haven't moved to Europe or left Seattle is because I feel like we have this great concentration of wealth. There's this great concentration of talent. We live in a beautiful city that's surrounded by nature and eagles and salmon. We have the technology, we're still a pretty new city. If we can't figure out how to make it work in Seattle, I don't know what other city has a better chance,' Lundgren said. Downtown Seattle
UNITED STATES - 2025/04/21: View of the Seattle Waterfront with the Aquarium, Seattle, Washington State, USA. (Photo by Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images) LightRocket via Getty Images
Seattle suffers from the same phony accusations hurled at many big cities in America: dangerous, derelict, drugged out. Kernels of reality and anecdote spun into gospel and motif by media and politicians rooting for the failure of cities. Rooting for the failure of urbanism and liberalism and diversity.
'My mom lives in Bellevue, across the lake from Seattle, and in Bellevue, (the belief is) downtown Seattle is filled with drug addicts, and you're going to get shot or robbed, or step over somebody that's on the nod, that the downtown core is hollowed out because of the pandemic, and that there's no nightlife, there's no energy,' Lundgren explains. 'The narrative of downtown Seattle is that it's shitty, the same narrative that San Francisco and parts of Los Angeles and parts of Portland have.'
Lies.
Not that the truth matters anymore to huge sections of the country.
The truth is, Seattle's downtown is gorgeous. And safe. Full of world class attractions like the Space Needle, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Pop Culture, the Wing Luke Museum–America's only pan-Asian art and history museum–Olympic Sculpture Park with its magnificent Alexander Calder Eagle, Chihuly Garden and Glass.
Alexander Calder's 'The Eagle' sculpture with Space Needle in background. Chadd Scott
An $806 million renovation of Seattle's central waterfront begun in 2010 wraps up this year. A $100-plus million expansion of Seattle Aquarium served as centerpiece.
'The (roof) of the new aquarium became this deck with panoramic views of the Olympics (Mountains) and of Elliot Bay that connects the front end of Pike Place Market to the waterfront,' Lundgren explained. 'Everything feels so well considered and well built. I walk down to the waterfront now and I'm like, 'This is fantastic!' I'm such a critical person when it comes to urban design and architecture, and it is just spectacular.'
Field Architecture, the firm responsible for New York's High Line, arguably the most influential urban redevelopment project in America over the last 50 years, handled the waterfront's new design.
'The pandemic was rough for everybody, and fentanyl was rough on a lot of American cities, but I have fallen in love with downtown Seattle all over again from being down here,' Lundgren said.
Cannonball Arts will offer more to love, with a location right downtown by the new waterfront. That location, with its ability to siphon off a small percentage of the 40 million tourists who visit Seattle and King County each year, along with the center's scope, makes the idea just crazy enough to work. If kooky Meow Wolf can become a global sensation in Santa Fe, NM drawing off a small portion of Santa Fe's tourist pool and local residents, a far smaller number than Seattle has, why can't Cannonball Arts similarly excel?
'I would never have opened a 2,000 square foot art gallery in downtown Seattle because it doesn't have the critical mass and the momentum,' Lundgren said. 'You have to go in big and make a destination that will draw people out, (where) they can spend a couple hours. If we're truly successful, we've changed people's relationship to art, both from a corporate level and from a visitor level. I want people to see Cannonball as a place they can come once a week and hang out, not once a year, or every couple of years. I want it to be more like a YMCA that people have memberships to and meet their friends at and socialize in.'
Cannonball Arts feels like the answer to Lundgren's question. Visit
The Toxic Beauty exhibit – A rideable mechanical soft-form sculpture of a 9-foot nudibranch by Stephanie Metz. Jim Bennett Photo Bakery for Cannonball Arts
Cannonball Arts operating hours will be 11 a.m.-5 p.m. on Wednesdays and Sundays, and 11 a.m.-7 p.m. from Thursday to Saturday. Ticket prices are as follows: Adults: $25 ($28.46 with taxes and fees)
Seniors (65+): $20 ($22.94 with taxes and fees)
Students w/ ID: $20 ($22.94 with taxes and fees)
Children under 10: Free
Cannonball event rentals are available for groups of up to 2,500 guests. For tickets and more information, visit cannonballarts.com. More From Forbes Forbes Seattle Art Museum Becomes the Alexander Calder Destination with Shirley Family Collection By Chadd Scott Forbes Initial Public Art Commissions Announced For Pittsburgh's New Arts Landing By Chadd Scott