White Center
Before she was aware of urban policy, Amy Nguyen understood White Center through her feet and her grandmother’s hand.
Every day they walked the main commercial corridor together. The street was full of fruit shops and, as she remembers it plainly, adult video shops: the unglamorous, ungentrified texture of a neighborhood that was affordable because it had to be, that was welcoming because it chose to be. She would pick a mango, pair it with shrimp chips, and walk home.
“It’s such an important place,” she said. “So much of how I feel privileged to understand who I am as an individual, but how I fit within a collective in a city.”
White Center sits just outside Seattle’s city limits, adjacent, technically unincorporated, historically overlooked. Nguyen didn’t know that as a child. She knew richness and diversity. She knew her family had been welcomed there, for sanctuary. Her parents escaped Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. White Center was where second-generation Vietnamese families could afford to land, alongside Latine families, Southeast Asian refugee communities, a whole diaspora of people for whom affordability was survival and not a lifestyle preference.
She learned the policy dimensions later, as an adult, coming back with the vocabulary to name what she had lived. Why disinvestment happened. Why police jurisdiction ended at a certain point on the map and then resumed. Why the county’s relationship to an unincorporated area produces exactly the kind of neglect that looks, from the outside, like a neighborhood that simply never got its act together.
“It wasn’t necessarily a choice,” she said of why immigrant and refugee communities concentrated there. “It’s: where can you afford to live? Where can your family afford to live? Where is the welcoming?”
She went to high school in the Central District and watched a parallel story unfold in real time. She remembers walking down Cherry Street, thinking about Judkins Park, the street where her high school boyfriend’s family lived. His family is the last Black family left on that block today.
“That is displacement. There was a role for the government in the 2000s to take a stand against displacement, and we didn’t do it then. What’s going to be lost if we don’t make real investments and changes now?”
It is the question that brought her to this office. It is the question she is still trying to answer.
Amy Nguyen makes miniature clay cats to unwind
She offered the detail almost accidentally, mid-sentence, while describing how creative practice shapes public policy, and then she moves on, back into the architecture of civic infrastructure and Admission Tax revenue and the 1% for Art ordinance. The director of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, three months into one of the city’s most consequential cultural roles, goes home and makes small, careful, handmade things. It tells you something about how she holds this job.
Nguyen didn’t arrive at arts leadership through a conventional path. She grew up not knowing urban studies existed as a field. What she knew was poetry, photography, and the encouragement of teachers who saw that she didn’t fit the traditional education system and pointed her outward rather than inward.
She left Seattle for New York City and The New School, wanting to study art. The environment there broke something in her. “They encouraged us to be competitive, to tear us apart,” she said. “It kind of made me fall out of love with art.”
What found her instead was a teacher named Laura Liu, and an urban studies course she signed up for without knowing what she was signing up for.
“My life has been informed by falling in love with women mentors,” she said. “Laura; it was the way that she communicated the city, the way that she pushed me, exposed me to ethnography. How much, through everyday experience in life, can we actually understand policies, institutions, people, purpose.”
It is a through line she traces carefully: art to urban studies, urban studies to public space, public space to community development, community development to here. “It started with art,” she said, “but it came through into a place of: what is uniting my love of people and place.”
“Dreaming alongside people and communities to create place, to keep place.”
The economics of a city that says it values art
Nguyen was appointed to lead OAC at the exact moment the financial scaffolding supporting Seattle’s cultural life began visibly buckling. Nearly 13,000 King County workers lost jobs in 2025, more than half of them in the information sector: the donors, ticket buyers, and capital campaign contributors whose median earnings had reached $163,600 the year before. The venues, the festivals, the mid-sized institutions built on that economy are all struggling this year.
The scale of what is at stake is documented in Washington State’s 2022 Creative Economy report. Statewide, the creative economy employs 9% of all workers in Washington, and since 2011 that employment has grown by over 50%. Creative technology alone employs 225,017 people, representing 59% of all creative economy jobs in the state; a sector that grew 130% between 2011 and 2021, weathering even the pandemic. Music, theater, dance, and visual arts employ another 50,474 people statewide. Seattle anchors the Mid-Sound region, which accounts for 73% of all creative industry employment in Washington. The state’s creative economy contributed $119.2 billion to Washington’s GDP, nearly a fifth of the entire state economy.
And yet the city’s own October 2025 economic forecast makes the fragility underneath that growth concrete. Regional employment fell by roughly 13,000 jobs in the first eight months of 2025. Consumer spending in the Seattle metro area declined 3.6% while the national rate grew. Sales tax revenues dropped year-over-year in 18 of the last 24 months. Most tellingly: 75% of the city’s payroll expense tax comes from just ten companies, nine of them in tech.
MOHAI Executive Director Leonard Garfield said it plainly in a recent interview with the International Examiner: “The most important federal partner has walked away.” Nguyen just keeps going. State and federal governments, she argues, must step up to stabilize what the city cannot sustain alone.
She does not soften what she finds inside her own office. Michael Greer, President and CEO of ArtsFund, whose research on arts funding trends examined 349 organizations across 28 counties over six years, has documented what Nguyen sees daily: nonprofit arts and culture organizations in Seattle zip codes alone generated shy of $600 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025. OAC’s budget for that same period was approximately $20 million. Awards have not been adjusted for inflation. More applicants arrive every year and there is less to give them. She signs off on $8,000 annual grants knowing they barely cover a single pay period.
“It’s the crumbs that we’re currently able to provide.”
The “Hunger Games”
She uses the phrase “Hunger Games fight for resources” without irony and without drama. It is, for her, an accurate description of what arts organizations do every grant cycle, competing for a pool that shrinks in real terms while costs rise and the private philanthropic market pulls back.
The reckoning she describes is structural rather than cyclical. This is not a bad year that will correct. This is what happens, she argues, when a city that built its cultural identity on the labor and creativity of immigrant and refugee communities allows affordability to collapse, and then watches the tech economy that replaced it begin to hollow out as well.
When asked how OAC is adapting its funding approach in the wake of job losses, Nguyen gently pushes back on the premise. The problem, she said, is not primarily about adapting to a changed donor base. It is about need, and the need long predates this moment. Each announcement of layoffs, she says, “sets this fire in me on how we need to change the algorithm.” The public funding formula, she argues, has not kept pace with the city’s growth, its wealth, or its stated values.
Her response to the gap is not to wait for conditions to improve. She is working to involve OAC in the state legislative agenda building that the city undertakes, something the office has not traditionally done. She is making the case to colleagues in capital departments that artists belong not at the end of projects, in publicly sited artwork, but within predevelopment, engagement, and delivery throughout.
“That’s jobs,” she said. “And that’s a better public outcome.”
She stopped herself at one point and said it plainly: “We gotta blow it up, we’ve got to change the algorithm.” She means the formula, the funding structure that has not kept pace with anything.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup arrives in Seattle this summer carrying both the pressure and the possibility of exactly the kind of one-time moment Nguyen is determined to push past. Lumen Field will host six matches between June 15 and July 6. According to Visit Seattle, the tournament is projected to generate $929 million in regional economic impact, draw 750,000 visitors, support 20,000 jobs, and produce over $100 million in state and local tax revenue.
The Seattle Unity Loop, a public art initiative led by the local organizing committee, has been described as a legacy project that will connect neighborhoods long after the tournament ends. Asked who will be responsible for sustaining that promise, Nguyen paused before answering. She wants to get this right.
She describes OAC’s goals around placemaking and placekeeping as aligned with the Unity Loop’s intentions, pointing to the dozens of activations the office is supporting this summer, the arts and cultural districts program, the stewardship of Langston Performing Arts Institute, the programs at ARTSat King Street Station. “Working alongside communities,” she said, “to continue to foster a sense of wonder, celebration, and belonging.”
Two of Seattle’s six World Cup matches carry particular cultural weight. The Juneteenth match featuring the U.S. Men’s National Team and the Pride Match during Pride Weekend have both been framed as high-visibility opportunities to create lasting benefit for Black-owned businesses, arts organizations, and LGBTQIA+ communities. OAC is funding Arte Noir’s Freedom Plus Football Juneteenth celebration, rooted in Seattle’s historically Black Central District, and LANGSTON’s Can I Kick It: Black Brilliance and the Beautiful Game, a community celebration and World Cup warm-up whose programs lift up Black culture through games. For Pride, the office is working with PrideFest and BeautyBoiz on the World Stunt Block Party, with the shared goal of ensuring that arts and culture funds are reinvested in local talent and the creative economy.
The Seattle Office of Arts and Culture has published a full listing of over 80 free arts and culture events happening across the city this summer: from watch parties and dance workshops to street festivals and art installations. Many coincide with World Cup matches at Lumen Field, while others continue through late summer. The full calendar is available at artbeat.seattle.gov (https://artbeat.seattle.gov/
“The through line is the same: working intentionally so that these globally visible moments create durable, community-rooted impact rather than one-time exposure.”
When the World Cup ends on July 19th, she is clear-eyed about what comes next. “I’ve heard this consistently in meetings with arts and culture stakeholders and community members: what is the city doing beyond these one-time moments? It needs to do more.” She points to the lesson of the CID and the MLB games as a moment the city cannot repeat. What she is working toward is neighborhoods and communities that can bank on continuous public support, arts and culture integrated into capital infrastructure from the beginning, investments layered rather than stacked and then removed.
Seeds and survival
There is a particular kind of honesty that emerges when someone fully understands the terms of their own position. Nguyen is clear-eyed about hers. She is a political appointee. She may have three and a half years. She knows and names that, with an honesty that is neither self-deprecating nor performative.
“I want to plant as many seeds as possible,” she said, and the phrase would read as boilerplate from almost anyone else. From her, in context, it reads as discipline. A decision to work within the constraints of time rather than against them. To operationalize what can be operationalized, build the coalitions that take years, do the policy analysis that has been deferred.
What must get right, concretely, for this tenure to be a success? She answers without hesitation: respect people’s time. Stop overdoing the aspirational. Deliver on what was promised in 2019.
“People are tired of telling us the same thing,” she said. “They want us to show action and returns.”
She is specific about what action looks like. When people ask why public art funding stays at 1% rather than 2%, or how to diversify revenues and expand who pays into the Admission Tax, the office has not yet done the rigorous policy and economic analysis to answer those questions with a real plan. That work, she said, is what she is building toward — the step-by-step, the coalition, the years of sustained effort that turn aspiration into ordinance.
“It takes a coalition,” she said. “It takes years of work. And we just haven’t done that yet.”
Security is an illusion
Asked directly whether OAC’s budget is secure for the next two years, she paused. She is deciding how honest to be in print.
The office is funded through the Admission Tax, which is tied to tourism and travel: both subject to forces far beyond the city’s control. The April 2025 forecast showed Admission Tax trending downward. The actuals for fiscal year 2025 came in slightly higher, but she reads that as a drop-off point, not a recovery. The budget sits within the larger container of general fund, real estate excise tax, and payroll expense tax — and that payroll expense tax, as the city’s own forecast confirms, runs 75% on the shoulders of nine tech companies.
“What is security anymore today? I don’t know what is secure. Security is an illusion.”
It is a remarkable thing for a city director to say on the record. Given everything she has just described, it is also simply true.
At one point, asked whether arts and culture still feels like the right lever: whether this broader role has changed how she thinks about where OAC’s impact is actually concentrated, Nguyen stopped. She hesitated , because she wants to honor all of the efforts of the Office of Arts and Culture staff, and she is honest about her relatively brief arrival into that relationship.
She has been in this role for three months. She came up through OAC’s Public Art division, with some time as their Interim Deputy Director as well. She now oversees everything. The question of where impact is actually concentrated is genuinely open for her, and she will not close it prematurely for the sake of a clean quote.
“We gotta do what we gotta do,” she said at one point, about the economic language the arts are forced to speak in order to survive.
Then, quieter: “I believe that arts and culture is the pathway to building the city we want to live in.”
She means both. That is the job.
Sources and Further Reading
Washington State Creative Economy: Economic Model and Ecosystem Analysis (2022)
City of Seattle Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts: October 2025 Forecast
ArtsFund: How are the Arts Being Funded Today? (2024)
ArtsFund: What do Expenses Look Like Today? (2024)
Downtown Seattle Association: State of Downtown 2026 Economic Report
Arte Noir | Black Arts and Culture | Seattle
Seattle Office of Arts and Culture
