Press Release— June 2026, Seattle, WA

Downtown Seattle Association and Sound Transit are pleased to announce the inaugural installation of a new temporary public art series at Westlake Station. 

WILD RIDE, a collaborative sculpture by Seattle-based artists Colleen Louise Barry and Mary Anne Carter, opens this week in an 8x20-foot former Macy's storefront reimagined as a dedicated platform for temporary public art. 

Built with fabrication support from Wishbone Industrial Arts, the sculpture is site-specific and measures 16 feet long. Designed to fill every inch of the space, WILD RIDE is a maximalist, mixed-media work drawn from one of the great shared symbols of modern life: the automobile. 

An art glass windshield and headlights, ceramic door handles and fins, a quilted textile grille and taillights, and a mosaic and plaster exhaust pipe recreate familiar car forms in unexpected materials. The interior departs further still, featuring an extra-long bed and quiet clues about whoever might sleep there.

WILD RIDE offers you the chance to consider: the funeral Flower Car, toddlers sleeping in race car beds, Highway Furniture, Rolling Psychology, the average cost of a gas gallon in Seattle right now: $6.19, the agreements we've all made, archeologists from the future discovering the skeleton of a Buick, the ecstatic symbolism of a maximalist cathedral, Thelma and Louise holding hands as their iconic convertible careens off a desert cliff, transportation as utility and fantasy.  

The work is intentionally layered, providing visitors the chance to briefly view something unexpected and commuters the chance to discover something new everyday. Every viewer is invited to find their own entry point: a memory, a material, a symbol, a form. There is no wrong way in.

Barry and Carter have long demonstrated their dexterity across materials and disciplines. WILD RIDE is an opportunity to see these longtime collaborators build something bigger than the sum of their parts.