Native artist makes a statement with new works at Seattle Aquarium

They glow with so much color, and seem to move, their shapes supple and alive.

This school of fish by Lummi artist Dan Friday is made of glass, but also of dreams. It adorns the ceiling of the entrance hall to the Seattle Aquarium’s new Ocean Pavilion.

The art installation is one of three commissioned with Friday, also known as Kwul Kwul Tw, his Native name, for the pavilion’s entrance. The pieces convey the statement of an artist inspired by his ancestors, culture and place.

Friday and his team made the fish one at a time, each of 33 in the school unique and an inspiration as to its combination of colors. The brightest is the red one, the hardest color to render in art glass, Friday said, showing the piece to visitors. The sweeps of color in this rainbow of fish have the luminosity of salmon returning to the Salish Sea and convey a vision of abundance, sustenance and home.

Like the chief of the salmon people, who in Coast Salish teachings leads the salmon upstream, the fish lead visitors from the entryway to the heart of the exhibit.

The artwork continues from the entryway outdoors, where Friday has created a piece called Grandmother Rock, inspired by a Lummi story in which Grandmother Rock shelters her crab grandchildren during a powerful storm, which she quiets by singing.

In the artwork, bronze crabs gleam on a slate gray surface patterned with divots inset with fine aggregate that looks like beach sand, like that floating on the surface of the waves in the story of Grandmother Rock. The circular artwork is located just under an oculus in the ceiling just above it.

The artwork invites anyone to pause and look up to the wonders inside, as sea life swishes and swims past the window.

The story of Grandmother Rock, told by Friday’s great-grandfather, Joseph Hillaire (1894-1967), can be heard on the aquarium’s website. Visitors to the artwork also may scan a QR code on a panel on the wall, alongside a long, comfortable bench on which to enjoy the art, the view and the setting. Hillaire recorded the story in 1950. To hear his soft voice, his singing, and drumming as he tells it, transports the listener to a place of reverie, and feelings of shelter and safety soft as the hush-hush of waves.

The third artwork in the commission is the spindle whorl portal, inspired, Friday said, by the oculus, which reminded him of the hole in a spindle whorl, such as his ancestors and relatives today use to spin wool for weaving. The patterns of the work are rendered in the ceiling around the oculus, as well as on the soffit of the roof, and on the ceiling inside the entryway, from which the glass fish are hung, carrying the design inside.

For Friday, the works were an opportunity to honor teachings he and other Coast Salish artists are bringing forward of Indigenous people who braved the violence of securing the right to fish, in the Fish Wars, and Native boarding schools to pass on their culture.

“When you think of freedom fighters, you don’t think of them,” he said, “The little old ladies that are the tradition keepers, these women who kept the language alive.”

Friday explained that throughout his life he has been inspired by the region’s great weavers, including Lummi Nation elder Fran James (1924-2013), who helped spark a renaissance in the weaving arts in both cedar and wool that continues today. The spindle whorl piece pays homage to them.

A lifelong resident of the Puget Sound region, Friday’s path to glass art was indirect. It took grit and the willingness to remake himself to the acclaimed glass artist he is today, from working as a mechanic. He met a new friend, who had a job in a glass shop. “I saw a path,” Friday said. “I saw people being dynamic, working as a team; they are working with fire, things are burning,” Friday said. What was not to love?

Now 49, after working at the Dale Chihuly Boathouse Studio since 2000, and the Pilchuck Glass School since 2006, among other jobs, Friday said after the commission for the Ocean Pavilion — his biggest ever — he’s ready to strike out on his own. “The day I hung up the last fish, I quit my job.”

All of the Pavilion works are visible from inside and outside the building, and to Friday, that was important. Discussing the art with a visitor, he reminisced that when he used to come to the aquarium as a kid, the family was so poor, the three-piece fish meal from Ivar’s had to be shared three ways, and they saw what they could of the exhibits from a window into the aquarium.

“I was so hungry I wasn’t about to feed my french fries to the seagulls,” he cracked, riffing on the bronze sculpture outside the restaurant showing its founder feeding fries to the gulls.

It was fulfilling, Friday said, to bring these pieces to life for the building, making a statement as a Coast Salish artist for these lands and waters and the first people of this place.

The Ocean Pavilion, he reminded, is just steps from where Duwamish tribal member Princess Angeline, Chief Seattle’s oldest daughter, once lived, on a waterfront where her people were pushed out, and their clam beds and wetlands filled to build the city.

Friday’s connection to the aquarium since childhood, his vision — and his passion for fish — made the final works “all beyond what we expected,” said Susan Bullerdick, senior director of capital projects for the aquarium. “The way it all came together has been in some ways magical.”

In honoring the traditional ecological knowledge and cultures of the First People in these works, perhaps, Bullerdick said, they also can help this new building provide a bit of healing and reconciliation in the history of the waterfront of which it is now a part.

The artworks are an invitation to look inside at the wonders of the exhibit, which features sea life and marine ecology of the Indo-Pacific, and the lands and waters of the Salish Sea.

“This is a welcoming place for all people,” Friday said.