citizenM’s highly anticipated Seattle Pioneer Square Hotel reveals stunning mural

Dutch lifestyle hotel brand citizenM is unveiling a mural on the facade of its highly anticipated Seattle Pioneer Square location set to open in Q2 of 2022. As the brand’s second property in Seattle, following citizenM Seattle South Lake Union which opened in 2020, citizenM Seattle Pioneer Square is bringing much-anticipated new life to one of the city’s most historic and original neighborhoods.
citizenM’s new presence in Pioneer Square highlights an important milestone for the historic lot. Originally home to Seattle’s first saw mill, the corner lot will now represent the neighborhood’s evolution into one of the country’s premier cultural and art districts. citizenM’s mural by RYAN! Elizabeth Feddersen, called Schema, captures the diversity, energy, and story of the square.
Schema is a large-scale graphic mural that features an abstract map depicting layers of Seattle’s early history and idiosyncrasies. Composed into a vibrant grid, the artwork engages the aesthetic structure and color palette of turn of the century Native American beadwork. The abstracted and symbolic imagery layers and contrasts histories, events and systems quintessential to Pioneer Square’s early history. It touches on colonization, nature, industry, politics, city planning and ideologies. The imagery focuses particularly on choices and events that have long lasting effects, depicting how the plans devised today, shape lives both physically and experientially tomorrow.
Washington-native artist RYAN! Feddersen creates interactive murals, site-specific installations, and immersive public artworks that invite audience engagement and interrogate official histories to examine how peoples’ thoughts have been formed by the information they’ve been taught. Schema for citizenM is one of many pieces she has created throughout North America, working previously with Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, the Museum of Art & History Santa Cruz, Seattle Art Museum, and more.
Feddersen has worked for 10 years in Seattle as an artist, curator, studio assistant, and arts administrator, and recently relocated to Tacoma where she creates mixed-media projects utilizing traditional Plateau storytelling applied to contemporary issues, historical research, and digital tools. She has curated exhibitions for the New Burke Museum, Museum of Northwest Art, and Center for Contemporary Native Art at the Portland Art Museum.
As with all of its hotels, citizenM Seattle Pioneer Square aims to bring art to the community through both commissioned and existing works. citizenM consulted with 4Culture — King County’s cultural funding agency and the steward of its public art collection— to commission Schema and to curate a variety of works by Seattle artists for the hotel’s interior spaces.
The facade mural is just the first piece of a larger portfolio that will give the new property an art collection that is distinct to the region. A second commissioned piece—wallpaper by Seattle-based artist Harold Hollingsworth—will be featured in the hotel’s bar area. In the living room, cabinets have been designed to showcase a vibrant third piece, titled The Allure, by Anthony White, an artist and curator based in Seattle. The in-room artwork will feature pieces by Natalie Krick, Mary Iverson, and Jennifer Zwick