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Beautiful Things sits on the second floor of the Occidental Fine Arts Center in Pioneer Square, open June 1 through August 15, 2026. Paintings, photographs, mechanical marvels, and the everyday objects Seattleites lived and worked with from roughly 1850 to 1950, hung across from new work by the Seattle Art Prize Fellows. It is one of three programs in the Conru Art Foundation’s Summer of Awe season, the city’s biggest international summer in years.
The room was assembled by Andrew Conru. Andrew grew up on a small farm in northern Indiana, built one of the first online dating platforms while finishing a Stanford PhD in 1994, ran it for thirteen years, and has spent most of three decades trying to make rooms where people meet. The Conru Art Foundation, which he started in 2022, is where that habit lives now. He wanted Pioneer Square to have a room where the people who built Seattle still feel close enough to touch.
The foundation works under three values: Beauty, Truth, and Love. Not as slogans. Beauty is the work on the walls and the care taken hanging it. Truth is showing the past as it actually was, including the parts the city has tidied up. Love is the willingness to sit with what other people made, fixed, traded, and kept.
That is why the room is built in layers. Real objects on the wall and the floor. Real archival photographs of Seattle from those decades, many of them gently brought back to color. AI-generated views of rooms and streets that no longer exist, clearly generated and sitting next to the originals on purpose. And short narrated videos you open on your phone, voiced like a curator standing next to you. Each layer fills in what the others cannot show.
A visitor should leave the room a little closer to the people who lived in early Seattle, and a little less sure that the past belonged to somebody else. That is the only thing the room is asking.
“I have spent three decades trying to make rooms where people meet, and trying to understand what happens in those rooms after they do.”
A note from the curator
Beautiful Things is a personal project. I assembled the cast one piece at a time. The photographs, the artifacts, the videos. Because I wanted a place where people could feel the texture of our shared past instead of just reading about it.
If you walk out remembering one face from 1898, or one object your grandmother might have touched, the show worked.
Andrew Conru, founder