This story appears in our Spring Art + Performance 2025 Issue, published on March 5, 2025.
Tariqa Waters doesn’t want to ruin the surprise.
I’m asking for details about her upcoming solo Seattle Art Museum installation, Venus Is Missing, but I can only get hints. “Another key element, without giving too much away, is those hair baubles that we wore as kids. Where you could mess up your knuckles on them, you know?”
We’re in the upstairs nook at Charlie’s Queer Books in Fremont, in the attic of the pastel Victorian dollhouse. Waters is chatty and affable; her white raincoat features a festival of rainbow wildflowers, and an image of Fievel Mousekewitz peeks out from her vintage sweatshirt. The whole conversation is a real exercise in nostalgia, physical space included, and the mention of ’80s hair baubles just ties it all together.
But nostalgia is kind of her thing. Waters made a splash locally with her 2021 exhibition at Bellevue Arts Museum, which included a gigantic lunchbox and matching gigantic thermos featuring Diahann Carroll as the title character from the 1968 TV series, Julia. And she’s well known for her Mister Rogers-flavored Seattle Channel talk show, and her old-school advice column in PublicDisplay.ART. And most of all for her renowned, super-maximalist underground art gallery, Martyr Sauce, and its attached Pop Art Museum—collectively known as MS PAM.
Well, her former gallery and museum. Waters has since pulled up stakes and moved her whole operation to Fremont, thanks to the rent getting jacked up at the Pioneer Square space. But her northward move has apparently ushered in a new, still very busy era for Waters. In May of 2025, her first solo installation at SAM opens (although her work has appeared in SAM’s gallery before, alongside other artists), she’ll be a visiting artist at Tacoma’s Museum of Glass from March 12 to 16, and her first book is debuting this summer. And that’s just the first half of the year.
Seems like busy is how Waters likes it. With a two-decade art career that has her in the roles of painter, sculptor, glass-blower, gallery and museum curator, TV presenter, journalist, and author—and sometimes-collaborator with her husband, acclaimed guitarist Ryan Waters—it’s hard to calculate how anyone could wedge all these projects into the same life, even across 20 years. Plus she’s a mom of two who’s lived all over the US as well as in Sicily.
The Waterses landed in Seattle from Atlanta in 2012, and right away, she says, she started experiencing racism in her new, very white city. To illustrate, she tells the story of taking her son to Children’s Hospital around the time they arrived in Seattle, wherein the hospital staff assumed she was homeless because she was Black and her address was in Pioneer Square. “They literally called Child Protective Services.” Another incident came in 2021, following her participation in the Yellow No. 5 exhibition at Bellevue Arts Museum. Waters helped draft and cosigned a letter that documented discriminatory treatment against her and other Black artists by BAM’s executive director, who resigned in response. Waters points out that, coming from Richmond, Virginia, and later the DMV area, and then having lived in Atlanta as an adult, she’s struggled to explain her lived Black experience to folks in this city since day one. In Seattle, the Black population is around 6.6 percent, in comparison to Atlanta and Richmond, where Black people make up the majority at 47.1 percent and 43.7 percent respectively.
“As far as being Black and a woman,” Waters says, “I’ve never considered myself anything that I had to advocate for until I moved to Seattle. You know, it just is a demographic thing. And so the conversations I’ve been having here have been frustrating at best, because I can’t make anybody understand what that experience is.”
For her SAM show opening in May, this round’s nostalgia wave is centered around the mid-’80s, and specifically around the Black experience for kids who were growing up then. The house she lived in as a kid also looms large in the experience she’s describing. “It goes all the way back to this little house that I grew up in in Richmond. We grew up like right behind the old State Fair, in Henrico County, in this little blue-collar neighborhood in the ’80s. And it was the best. We moved to Maryland when I was 11…but all of my core memories are there. I think about it all the time.” She talks about a quieter time living there, when life had fewer distractions. “Back then, unless my phone rang and I picked it up, we weren’t gonna have an exchange. The TV went off the air at midnight, and then it’s static, and you gotta go to bed or you gotta figure out why you’re still up, right? And so there’s something about the pacing, and something about the consumerist elements that I’ve been playing with throughout my work. The distractions are something that’s really interesting to me as a mother and a woman.”
Time travel is a recurring theme in Venus is Missing, Waters says, and refers to her fascination with ’80s toys as well, explaining that being a former latchkey kid is a big piece of that. “A lot of how I position myself alongside those objects is to add in that consumer point of view,” she says. “Like, as a kid, I was consuming that thing too. But I know you saw yourself in that object, because you would never see [someone who looks like] me on those Saturday morning cartoons [and commercials]. I wouldn’t be there. But I was also consuming these things at the same time.”
Waters also chronicles her Black experience in her upcoming book, WHO RAISED YOU?: A Martyr Sauce Guide to Etiquette. The glossy art book is a monograph of Waters’s decade-plus in Seattle and her UX as a Black artist here. It’s loaded with her signature script-flipping, retro pop-culture references, and splashy, colorful photos of her work, herself, and the MS PAM space. Unpacking the title, Waters says, “Whenever I found I had to walk out of a space, I would always say, ‘Who raised you?’ You know, like ‘Why am I even having this conversation and being treated like this?’ And then the subtitle is just a tongue-in-cheek way for me to kind of covertly—or not so covertly—call out just certain circumstances that I’ve been in. And hopefully encourage others who are in those situations to burn shit down.”
A pastiche of an Emily Post-style guide, the book’s a retrospective of the aforementioned racism and, ahem, very bad manners Waters has been on the receiving end of in the Seattle’s arts community, as well as a love letter to her own self. In it, she’s reasserting the decisions she makes as an artist, despite criticisms from or comparisons to other artists.
“Like, I’m going to do what I want to do,” Waters says, “and if you have a problem with it, you can cherry-pick what you rock with or what you don’t rock with, or just write me off altogether. But I’m super transparent in the book. I’m in love with my story, because it’s the only one I have.”
Venus Is Missing opens at Seattle Art Museum May 7. Tariqa Waters’s glass pieces will be on display at Museum of Glass in Tacoma March 12–16. Her book, WHO RAISED YOU?: A Martyr Sauce Guide to Etiquette, is slated to publish in summer 2025 by Minor Matters Books.
