The Delta Air Lines Foundation Community Space serves as a NEW venue at Benaroya Hall to meet, view art, and connect.
Arte Noir will serve as the inaugural curator for the 2026/2027 Season.
Explore our season of Art Exhibits by local artists!
Before we hear a story, we imagine it.
Before we step into a concert hall, a gallery, or a work of art, we cross an invisible threshold, leaving behind the ordinary and entering a world shaped by imagination.
Portals of Imagination transforms the Seattle Symphony's The Delta Foundation Community Space into a place of transition, discovery, and possibility. Rather than presenting a single narrative, the exhibition offers a series of interconnected portals through which visitors are invited to explore wonder, transformation, memory, play, and becoming. Each artwork opens a different doorway while remaining connected to the larger journey.
The exhibition reflects the remarkable breadth of the Seattle Symphony's 2026-2027 season, where audiences are invited into richly imagined worlds through programs as varied as Studio Ghibli, UNDERTALE: Determination Symphony, The 8-Bit Big Band, Seven Lions, The Ring, Elf, and Messiah. Though these performances span animation, gaming, mythology, electronic music, cinema, and sacred tradition, each asks audiences to suspend disbelief and enter a new universe through music.
The artists selected by ARTE NOIR extend that invitation visually.
Working across painting, watercolor, mixed media, illustration, digital art, and illuminated light boxes, these Pacific Northwest artists explore imagination as something far deeper than escapism. Their work considers identity as an evolving landscape, memory as a living force, childhood wonder as an enduring form of wisdom, and creativity as a way of envisioning futures not yet realized. Together, the works demonstrate that imagination is both deeply personal and profoundly communal. It is how we remember, how we dream, how we heal, and how we create.
Rather than organizing the exhibition by artist or medium, the works are arranged as a constellation of thematic portals:
Wonder invites curiosity through celestial landscapes, speculative futures, and the limitless possibilities of exploration.
Becoming reflects transformation, vulnerability, and the continual process of discovering ourselves.
Rooted explores the relationships between ancestry, landscape, joy, and the stories that shape who we are.
Play celebrates nostalgia, creativity, and the cultural experiences that connect generations through shared imagination.
Like movements within a symphony, these portals are distinct but inseparable. Visitors may enter the exhibition anywhere, discovering their own pathways and creating new relationships between the works each time they return.
This exhibition also marks the beginning of a new partnership between ARTE NOIR and the Seattle Symphony. As Benaroya Hall expands its role as a gathering place for community, Portals of Imagination reflects a shared belief that visual art and music do more than entertain. They cultivate curiosity, build empathy, invite conversation, and create spaces where people from different backgrounds can imagine together.
Every concert begins with anticipation.
Every work of art begins with possibility.
Together, these works remind us that imagination is not an escape from the world. It is one of the ways we shape it. Like music, it is both deeply personal and profoundly communal. Every portal begins with an individual act of imagination, but finds its fullest expression when experienced together.
Jazmyn Scott
Executive Director, ARTE NOIR
Details to be announced soon!
Details to be announced soon!
Founded by Vivian Phillips, an arts leader with decades of experience working and advocating on behalf of Seattle's creative community, ARTE NOIR initially emerged in May 2021 as an online publication dedicated to showcasing and uplifting Black art, artists, and culture.
As the vision for ARTE NOIR and the community grew, so has our reach - quite literally. Incorporated as a nonprofit arts organization in June 2021, ARTE NOIR, under the leadership of Executive Director Jazmyn Scott, now boasts a brick-and-mortar location at Midtown Square in Seattle's historic Central District neighborhood.
Our physical space complements our online publication, serving as a dynamic hub that features a gift shop and a fine art gallery, creating a permanent home for Black art and artists in Seattle's Central District. All products and items in the shop are made by Black creatives who receive 100% of net proceeds from their products and goods sold in the shop.
In the coming months, the Barbara Earl Thomas Maker Space will be available for classes, workshops, and artists, and our Source of Labor Recording Studio will offer music and audio production education in partnership with The Residency, further expanding our commitment to supporting the arts. Join our community to stay connected with upcoming exhibitions, artist spotlights, and ways to support Black creatives in Seattle and beyond.
