Tacoma Wayzgoose 2025
This year’s Tacoma Wayzgoose theme was “make some noise.” The email plopped in my inbox sharing the prompt for hopeful steamroller artists sharing, “This year's steamroller print theme celebrates the music of Tacoma. Think of all the great artists who've called Tacoma home, all the great venues, all the great music the city makes (foghorns and seagulls!), the music of languages, the music of everyday life...” I took that last section as my inspiration, ruminating on the music of Tacoma, what it’s like to close your eyes in the middle of the city and listen. What is the song of Tacoma?
“Where’s that confounded bridge?” Led Zeppelin’s The Crunge’s final lyrics ask. What is a song’s bridge? A musical change of pace, intended to provide contrast to the rest of the composition. Here in the Northwest we’re the bridge. We’re not the fancy metropolitan city of Seattle, we’re not a densely wooded small town or coastal hamlet, and we aren’t rolling fields of agricultural land. We’re something different. Something gritty and creative. We’ve got a little bit of funk to us, and I’m not just talking about the aroma. We strut to the beat of our own rhythm. Blue collar, grunge, and art all steeped together under the watchful eye of our namesake peak.
And then there’s the bridge, or should I say bridges. We’re perched on our peninsula jutting out into the Puget sound, anchored on west and east by bridges— Tacoma Narrows, Murray Morgan, and the E 21st St bridge.
In this piece I wanted to share a poem about the music of Tacoma, it’s people, it’s land, the interweaving of everything we hear when we close our eyes in the middle of the city. Tacoma has birthed many amazing artists, some nationally known, like Neko Case, some with cult Tacoma followings, like Girl Trouble— but I like to think we are all a part of the song of Tacoma, being sung throughout the ages as we build our lives between bridges in this little gritty city, “a dusty old jewel on the south Puget Sound.”
I wanted to create something that had a similar visual style to last year’s Wayzgoose print, so they could hang together and be like a sort of diptych. They both have the same black border and if you hang the Home Sweet Tacoma one to the left of this one they’re sort of geographically accurate with the port east of the Murray Morgan Bridge.
The few original steamroller prints I had sold out in ten minutes but I made 20x30 and 16x24 reproduciton giclee prints of this one like I did for last year’s steamroller print so those are in the shop!
