James Washington Jr. (1911-2000) was a sculptor and painter who became associated with the Northwest School of artists in Seattle. He grew up in Mississippi and moved to Seattle in 1944 to work for the Navy during World War II. Washington was largely self-taught and he believed this lack of formal training was essential to his artistic success. In the 1950s, Washington became interested in making sculpture from stone after being inspired by a piece of volcanic rock he found among the ruins of the pyramids at Teotihuacan in Mexico; he later carved it into his first stone sculpture, “Young Boy of Athens.” Washington’s work in both mediums often expressed spiritual feelings and used symbols from Christianity, freemasonry, and the animal world.

Here, James Washington Jr. smiles while holding his sculpture “Falcon with Egg on Obelisk." The piece was one of several of Washington's works on display at the Foster White Gallery at the time.

Caption information source: Washington, James Jr (1911-2000), HistoryLink.org Essay 5328, reprinted from Deloris Tarzan Ament's Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art, 2002.
Caption information source: “Carved in stone,” by Regina Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 8, 1983, page D1.