Seattle’s historic Coliseum Theater, old Banana Republic store to get new life

A downtown Seattle landmark is getting a new lease on life. The Coliseum Theater, built as a state-of-the-art cinema in 1916 and later home to clothing retailer Banana Republic, will become, temporarily, a sprawling art space opening in summer 2023. 

After its 2020 pandemic closure, the former Banana Republic store on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Pike Street had been sitting vacant behind boarded-up windows. Curators Julianne Johnson and Austin Bellamy Hicks of art production company XO Seattle plan to remove the plywood, install art in the window displays, dust off the interior and fill the 13,000 square feet with art installations, paintings, live music, fashion shows, parties and more. 

While the art space likely won’t be permanent, XO23 — as it is being called — is setting up shop at least through the fall, possibly longer. The grand opening exhibit and party will coincide with the Seattle Art Fair in late July, but the duo plans to install art in the windows before then. In the meantime, they’ll keep busy with repairs, patching holes, building walls for art, installing lighting and cleaning up the space. 

“It’s nuts,” Hicks said in an interview in the space on Monday, his black pants speckled with the drywall mud he was using to fill in the holes left in the wall by clothing racks. “It’s like we got a [expletive] museum! It’s bananas.” 

With its tall ceiling, round arches, chandeliers and decorated friezes, plus its famed white glazed terra-cotta facade adorned with festoons, cornices and Corinthian keystones, the building certainly has the pomp of a grand museum. 

The Coliseum Theater, designed by Seattle architect B. Marcus Priteca, was one of the first theaters in the world intended specifically for movies, given that its auditorium didn’t have a stage. It did have an elevator, electrical system and pipe organ, plus an in-house orchestra that accompanied silent movies. Today, the building is a Seattle landmark and listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

With the monster film “Tremors,” the theater closed its doors in 1990. After an extensive renovation and a seismic retrofit, Banana Republic took up residency in 1994. Today, the doors to the auditorium remain locked, as it has fallen into disrepair, Hicks said, and is too dangerous to be occupied. 

But as Hicks gave a tour of the space, he made clear there was no dearth of space or interesting architectural elements. After he walked under a wide arch framing a set of stairs, Hicks stopped at a lofty dome clad with silver leafing. “This building doesn’t have a bad angle,” he said. 

The building — owned by an Iowa business called Coliseum Building LLC — is in fairly good shape, with ready-made track lighting and niches left from its retail days. (Representatives for the building owners were not available for an interview before publication.) 

Also ready-made for art: the dressing rooms. “These dressing rooms, we’re gonna hopefully hand over to artists for tiny, bizarre installations,” Hicks said. In another niche, local Tlingit language teacher, tattooer and artist Nahaan will be carving a canoe. The basement will be a prime spot for light and neon installations. 

The wide open space also allows for more three-dimensional installation art, by local artists like Emily Tanner-McLean and Kate Bailey, who is working on an installation of blimps that will hover through the space like Roombas. 

Johnson and Hicks (who are also life partners) don’t want to reveal much more, besides that they’ve tapped local artists-curators barry johnson and Seth Sexton as co-curators (of 12 total) as well as an impressive array of more than 80 emerging and “museum-caliber” artists. “Because we got a museum,” Hicks said. 

XO Seattle didn’t exactly “get” the building: they are paying a modest rent and 10% of any profit they make to the property owners (plus utilities and insurance, which comes out to roughly another $1,000 per month), they said. This agreement with the owners came, they said, after an introduction from a nearby business owner who had visited an earlier XO Seattle project, and nearly five months of negotiations. 

Once intros were made, XO Seattle made their pitch to the property owners: They could get some eyes on the building and “take the boards off the doors,” Julianne Johnson said. Plus: Projects like these, Johnson said, also help afford developers and property owners “community goodwill.” “If you can associate the building and people behind it with arts and culture, and cool happenings in the city, that’s not nothing.” 

Johnson and Hicks speak from experience: It’s not the first time they’re filling a vacant building with art. Hicks cut his teeth building out the Museum of Museums, an art space on First Hill housed in a former medical building owned by Swedish Health Services. In 2021, Hicks and Johnson, in collaboration with a group of co-curators, launched Series 001, trendy pop-up art and design exhibits and parties in a vacant South Lake Union warehouse slated for demolition. 

Johnson and Hicks rebranded as XO Seattle in the spring of 2022, when they got the keys to the top floor of the RailSpur building in Pioneer Square, where they organized a sprawling art show (and some of Seattle’s trendiest rooftop parties) in July and August as part of the Forest for the Trees exhibit. 

In the end, that XO Seattle exhibit welcomed more than 30,000 people in the span of six weeks, they said, and sold roughly $110,000 worth of art (artists received 60% of the sale price). With $250,000 in costs — including paying all the artists, plus a modest fee for themselves — and nearly as much coming in, they almost broke even. XO23 will be similar but better, they said: Maybe this year, they’ll turn a profit.  

It can be frowned upon to talk about profit in the art world, but Johnson and Hicks don’t shy away from the conversation. They say a nonprofit model simply wouldn’t work for a project like this: The funding they need to pull it off vastly outstrips what they can patch together with only grants, which often need more lead time, Hicks noted. 

Instead, Johnson and Hicks plan to patch together at least half of the estimated $500,000 in costs (for the build-out, marketing, art installers, equipment and more) upfront. They are raising this money via crowdfunding, grants and investors, who get a 10% return on investment if XO Seattle turns a profit after paying a profit share to the building owner. They then “hope to get paid back through charging tickets, selling art and selling drinks,” Hicks said — and get as much money as possible into the hands of their co-curators, artists, and performing bands and DJs. 

“We are interested in opportunities to make money for artists,” Johnson said. 

“People should pay to be around art,” Hicks added. “Artists have been doing all this work ‘on spec’ forever, they hold all the costs. You should have to pay to own a painting, you should have to pay to stand next to a painting and take a photo of it. There needs to be more of an economy where people are paying for that experience.” 

Hicks and Johnson hope XO23 can prove that this model works. That art can be an economic engine and help revitalize vacant spaces — and maybe even downtown at large. 

“We feel like what we’re doing is a concrete thing, and it’s gonna bring some joyfulness and a lot of fun and a lot of attention to what’s possible,” Johnson said. “We really hope to be part of this imaginative spark.” 

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This coverage is partially underwritten by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over this and all its coverage.