OBAMA Celebrates Bad Art
Upstairs at Café Racer, feast your eyes on the Official Bad Art Museum of Art
By Sam Steele May 3, 2020
This article originally appeared in the May 2020 issue of Seattle magazine.
When Marlow Harris and her husband, Jo David, were given free rein over 10 square feet of a friend’s café back in 2008, they decided to honor two of their favorite things: then presidential candidate Barack Obama and bad art. Today, most of the pieces in the Official Bad Art Museum of Art at Café Racer still come from Harris’ personal collection, although the Jesus made of marshmallow Peeps is by local artist Janet Galore. Now constituting the café’s entire second floor, the OBAMA Room not only serves as a cozy refuge for Racer regulars, but provides what owner Jeff Ramsey describes as “an alternative to exposed wood, wrought iron and fake ferns,” giving young techie transplants a space to recharge away from Amazonia, and older Seattleites a little bit of grunge nostalgia.
Follow Us
Rearview Mirror: A Better Bath, a Bright Riesling, and Les Mis
Things I did, saw, ate, learned, or read in the past week (or so).
Moon Bath Last week, I went to a spring workshop at SLU BRU, the newish beer hall at Dexter Yard in South Lake Union. Open since November 2025 and operated by Gourmondo, it’s definitely ready for nicer weather, with big garage-style windows that open onto the sidewalk. The night was hosted by Orange Moon, the…
Studio Sessions: Lauren Boilini
Seattle artist Lauren Boilini talks about animal behavior, field research, and the whale fall installation she counts among her proudest works.
Lauren Boilini has spent years building dense, teeming painted worlds full of animals, movement, and tension. Her work often starts with close observation—time in the field and conversations with scientists—and turns that research into large-scale paintings that feel charged, layered, and alive. Born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, Boilini studied painting and art history at…
The Story Behind the Bing Cherry
A new picture book follows Ah Bing from orchard history into folklore.
Seattle illustrator Julia Kuo first came across Ah Bing in a history book. She was reading The Making of Asian America: A History when a detail caught her attention: the Bing cherry, the most popular sweet cherry in the United States and a signature fruit of the Pacific Northwest, was tied to a Chinese immigrant….
Staying in the Pocket with True Loves
The Seattle funk powerhouse heads to Jazz Alley for five soulful nights.
If you were to pull aside any casual music fan and ask them to cite quintessential Seattle music, you’d get a lot of grunge, the indie-rock explosion and folk revival of the ‘00s and ‘10s, and maybe some of the hip-hop that came bursting from the underground in the last 15 years. Your average person…