Limitless: Stories from the Neighborhood That Shaped Seattle

The people of Seattle’s Central District, forced together by discriminatory housing practices, built a thriving community that felt limitless to those who grew up there. Racist and restrictive policies meant to keep Central District residents in their place instead fueled creativity and resistance. These oral histories recorded by the Shelf Life Community Story Project, and illustrated by Central District artists, reveal how one neighborhood’s innovation, art, and action shaped Seattle in ways that still resonate today.

Jill Freidberg is a documentary filmmaker, oral historian, radio producer, and youth media educator. Her work reflects her belief that responsible, powerful storytelling builds understanding and solidarity across borders and across the street.

Inye Wokoma is a multi-disciplinary artist, journalist, and executive co-director of Wa Na Wari, a Seattle-based Black arts organization. His creative practice explores personal narratives through the lens of politics, economics, and collective histories. For the past fifteen years he has explored the displacement of the Black community from Seattle’s Central District, where he was born and raised. This creative arc has manifested as a series of works in solo and group shows in museums, galleries, and site-specific community installations. In 2019 he extended his practice to include the co-founding of Wa Na Wari, a social practice art project that transformed a Black-owned home into a center for Black art and community building.

Bonnie Hopper was born and raised in Seattle and is one of thirteen children. In 1987 she applied to and was accepted into the advertising art program at Seattle Community College where she studied art for two years. Although art has always played an important role in Bonnie’s life, she did not pursue her dream of becoming a professional artist until 2008 when she was commissioned to do a portrait by a friend of the family. In 2016 Bonnie began her association with Onyx Fine Arts Collective in Seattle, taking part in the ＂Truth B Told＂ exhibition for artists of African descent at the King Street Station and was a selected as a finalist in Gallery 110’s Emerging Artist Program exhibition.

Erin Shigaki is a fourth-generation Japanese American. She creates art that is community-based and often grounded in the World War II incarceration of her people. She is passionate about highlighting similarities between that history and systemic injustices communities of color continue to face. Erin’s activism includes work on the annual Minidoka Pilgrimage to the American concentration camp where her family was incarcerated and with Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, abolitionist project of social justice advocates.

Chi Moscou-Jackson of Seattle studied at Ontario College of Art & Design University. He practices mixed media art and installation art and focuses on social, political, and ecological themes. He uses collage to mix elements of photography printmaking, sculpture, drawing, etc.

Jite Agbro is a Nigerian American artist from Seattle, WA. She is best known for her colorful figurative artwork featuring layered patterns, sharp contrast, and fabric and paper collage. Agbro has completed several solo exhibitions and large-scale installations around the Northwest, including P.L.U.A. (Proposed Land Use Action) at MAD Art (2022), Deserving at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (2019) and Skap-got at 4Culture Gallery (2018). Notable group exhibitions include the Gates Foundation 20th Anniversary at the Gates Foundation Discovery Center (2020). Agbro studied fine art at Cornish College of the Arts and California College of Arts before completing a B.A. in Environmental Design at Evergreen State College and an M.S. in Design and Engineering at the University of Washington.

Originating from Mindanao, the Philippines--a multi-ethnic, multi-faith island--Romson Regarde Bustillo’s family immigrated to Seattle in the late ’70s, joining relatives already rooted there as a result of the Philippines’ colonial history with the United States. Raised in South Seattle and the Central District, Bustillo grew up in historically Black, immigrant, and working-class communities shaped by redlining and later impacted by gentrification. This layered cultural foundation, along with extensive travels across the U.S., Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa, informs his artistic practice.