Downtown Seattle’s Bed Bath & Beyond building to become an arts center

Where once there were towels and frying pans, you’ll soon find sculptures and concerts: The former Bed Bath & Beyond store in downtown Seattle is coming back to life. The organizers behind Seattle’s Bumbershoot Arts & Music Festival are transforming the sprawling two-floor building — which has been largely vacant since the houseware retailer’s departure in 2018 — into an ambitious, year-round contemporary art center set to open in early 2025.

Called Cannonball Arts, the 66,000-square-foot space on Virginia Street between Third and Fourth Avenues will host art exhibits, concerts, fashion shows, art markets and a variety of pop-up events throughout the year, all in the quirky, playful and accessible vein of the festival itself. 

The initiative comes courtesy of New Rising Sun, the production company that last year revived Bumbershoot, the long-running, beloved Labor Day music and arts festival at Seattle Center. The project’s name — a reference to the childlike pleasure of launching yourself off the diving board — was chosen to avoid confusion with the annual festival, but the idea is to create a year-round Bumbershoot experience. Essentially, it’s Cannonball Arts, presented by Bumbershoot. 

New Rising Sun creative director and longtime local arts entrepreneur Greg Lundgren will manage the project with NRS CEO and veteran concert promoter Joe Paganelli. (Neumos co-owner Steven Severin, one-third of the NRS trio, has shifted into an advisory role at the company. The Muckleshoot Tribe, which owns a stake in New Rising Sun, won’t play a programming role at Cannonball.)

You might have a sense of what’s to come at Cannonball Arts if you visited last year’s Bumbershoot, where you could see a pop-up dance performance on the way to a concert, visit a visual art show featuring local artists, get your tarot cards read at a “witches temple” inside a geodesic dome, see kittens prancing (and napping) in an artist-created cat circus, enhance your hands with nail art, and purchase locally made designer clothing in the fashion district. 

It was a success, both creatively and attendance-wise, Paganelli said. Cannonball, he noted, is an opportunity to build upon that foundation. “Pulling that spirit of discovery out of what made the live experience as exciting as it was on campus and … bring that into a really big [brick and mortar] space.”

The initiative is also a bid to help activate the city’s downtown and offer more opportunities and jobs to local artists, creatives and (aspiring) art workers. “I think that we can do it in a way that can really change the pH in the water in downtown Seattle,” said Lundgren, who also founded Seattle’s DIY art fair Out of Sight and the now-shuttered but impactful Museum of Museums. “That really can change the pH in artists’ attitude and ability to stay and live in the city.” 

Today, the cavernous space is still largely empty, save for a few chairs, white pedestals, paint-clad mannequins — and even a few souvenirs from its former retail days. “Look, you can buy an electric kettle for $49.99,” Paganelli said during a recent visit, holding up a plastic tag he’d picked up off the carpet, which he was in the process of ripping out with a floor scraper.

The team got the keys in early April and immediately went to work gutting the space so that local design firm SHED can start the remodel.

The clock is ticking: Cannonball Arts signed a five-year lease. The owners of the building, local real estate company Clise Properties, gave the team — as they put it — a “heavily discounted” rate, which both Clise and NRS declined to share. Paganelli and Lundgren wouldn’t disclose how much it will cost to get the space up and running, only that it was a “seven-figure” number. (The team’s still actively seeking sponsors to support the effort.)

Right now, touring the space requires some imagination. Rope strung between the space’s many columns visualizes where walls will appear. Pieces of paper note the future use of each section. The former break room: to become a black box theater. A gallery wall will replace the rows of mannequins. People will model for live drawing classes on a pedestal. Near the window, Native carvers will create canoes from giant cedar logs. Much like a department store, the space will be somewhat modular, with sections and pods that shift in size and location according to programming. 

New Rising Sun’s vision for Cannonball Arts defies straightforward explanations or ready-made labels. It won’t be a museum or an art gallery per se, nor a concert venue or nightclub, exactly. But all those things will likely find a home at Cannonball in some form. 

Similarly, its financial model takes a best-of-both-worlds approach: It’s a for-profit endeavor that will rely on sponsorship, ticket sales and memberships. It will also be able to lean on philanthropy via Bumbershoot’s nonprofit arm, Third Stone. 

Paganelli said the vision for Cannonball was a bustling artistic space in the vein of the Factory, Andy Warhol’s famed studio that was as much a creative playground as a party hub and artist hangout in the ‘60s and ‘70s. 

“We can attract tourists to this space, we can attract people who want to have a party in a bunker, we can attract large-scale art installation partners who just take the place over,” Paganelli said. “For a period of time, we can attract Amazon workers who want to have a drink and come into a killer space that looks like nothing else in the entire city and just has art installation and immersion all around them. We want to make a scene.”

Moreover, Cannonball wants to draw more activity and creativity to Seattle’s downtown and improve the neighborhood’s — and the city’s — reputation by showcasing just how vibrant, diverse and unique our creative scene is.

“This partnership not only revitalizes a once-empty space but also fulfills our goal of establishing Bumbershoot as a year-round presence in addition to its iconic Labor Day weekend festival at Seattle Center,” Seattle Center Director Marshall Foster said in a statement. Plus, it “fulfills a key initiative outlined in the Mayor’s Downtown Activation Plan, showing a great example of adaptive reuse of retail space.”

Another prime goal is to stimulate the local arts economy and help artists and creative workers make a livable wage by compensating them fairly, Lundgren said. Cannonball also aims to help grow the local arts economy by expanding Bumbershoot’s workforce development program, which trains young people from underserved communities in the behind-the-scenes know-how of cultural production.

Via Cannonball Arts, Bumbershoot can add more visual arts-focused learning opportunities to the roster, and “hopefully inspire the next generation to be aggressive, independent, confident arts producers,” Lundgren said. 

But the ultimate hope is that Cannonball serves as inspiration — or even a blueprint — for aspiring art producers and local creatives who want to tear up distressed or vacant buildings and open their own spaces. 

Like a well-executed cannonball, the idea is to make an impact that reverberates far beyond its own point of impact, Paganelli said. “We want this to be a big splash.”

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This coverage is partially underwritten by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. The funder plays no role in editorial decision making and The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over this and all its coverage.