Mark Baumgarten

Apr 8, 2024 | mossback.podbean.com | Sara Bernard |Knute Berger |Mark Baumgarten

He was invited to the city to talk about his storied past, but the Nez Perce chief had his eye on the future of his people. When Chief Joseph arrived in Seattle in 1903, he had a message to deliver and a public interested in hearing it. He had become a kind of celebrity, though the nature of his renown was complicated. A leader of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce Tribe, Joseph had joined his people as they were pushed out of their ancestral home in northeast Oregon by the U.S. Army.

Apr 8, 2024 | mossback.podbean.com | Sara Bernard |Knute Berger |Mark Baumgarten

Before there was Ernestine Anderson, Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, there was Frank Waldron. The unfortunate irony of Seattle’s storied jazz scene of the early 20th century is that there are many stories but not much jazz to account for it. While recording technology existed at the time, it wasn’t being used to capture much of the music being created in those early years of the Jackson Street music scene.

Apr 8, 2024 | mossback.podbean.com | Sara Bernard |Knute Berger |Mark Baumgarten

The Canadian artist created landscapes unlike her contemporaries’, intuiting the web of life beneath the canopy and putting it on canvas. As a painter in early 20th-century British Columbia, Emily Carr approached her subject matter through a colonial lens and expressed what she saw with a modernist style developed in the studios of London and Paris. She earned renown for her early depictions of Indigenous cultures, work that would later be criticized as appropriative.

Apr 8, 2024 | northwestreports.podbean.com | Sara Bernard |Conor Courtney |Mark Baumgarten

Reporter Conor Courtney explains how cyclist Danny Roberts began the passion project — and what the journey meant to both of them. In late 2021, freelance writer and photographer Conor Courtney noticed some strange patterns on the fitness app Strava. An acquaintance, Danny Roberts, was posting about riding his bike all over Seattle—but not on typical bike-friendly routes. He would consistently zig-zag back and forth on every street in a given neighborhood.

Apr 8, 2024 | northwestreports.podbean.com | Sara Bernard |Margo Vansynghel |Mark Baumgarten

What reporter Margo Vansynghel learned from talking to the mayor, the artists and the people who cover up spray paint over and over and over again. Graffiti is a part of everyday life in Seattle, from the smallest tag on a street sign to the giant letters greeting commuters along the interstate. But it is a part of city life that Mayor Bruce Harrell believes should be brought under control.