Watch: Henry Jackson-Spieker

Walk into Seattle’s Midtown Square from the 23rd Avenue entrance and you’re immediately enticed to look up. The passageway to this plaza in the historically Black Central District is strung with 16 suspended lanterns, a permanent art installation called “Lighting the Past.” Made from metal and colorful glass panels, each features the image of a prominent Black artist from deep Seattle history — among them photographer Al Smith, singer Ernestine Anderson and painter Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence.

Current Seattle artist Henry Jackson-Spieker created the piece, in collaboration with local artist KT Hancock, with the idea that these figures essential to the city’s past are literally lighting the way for contemporary and future artists. His overhead positioning of the piece sparks a physical response: pause, tilt your chin up and acknowledge.

Jackson-Spieker is a born-and-raised Seattle artist known for his art installations and as a professor of glass at the University of Washington. In his own work he uses a mix of material — metal, glass, paracord, neon, wood — to push viewers’ expectations of space and discernment, forcing them to rethink their physical and sociological relationship to everything around them. Such as: lifting your eyes skyward to honor past luminaries.

When building his installations, he’s thinking about three things: attention, perception and environment. “Those come together to create this intense sensory input for the viewer,” Jackson-Spieker says of his practice. “I’m interested in disrupting that natural pathway of a built environment to where it forces the viewer to interact with the space in a new way that they have to be hyper-aware of their own body within the space.”

Jackson-Spieker’s work encompasses a wide range of subjects, forms and textures. While his installation at Midtown Square is figurative, with recognizable faces and symbols, the majority of his work is abstract and geometric, seemingly obsessed with lattices, lines, curves, light and tension. With these linear installations you feel an immediate awareness of where your body is in space — whether that’s looking up, taking an extra-large step to cross a grid, or holding arms close so as not to bump into taut wires.

In “Sight Lines,” his 2019 installation at the subterranean Method Gallery in Pioneer Square, Jackson-Spieker wove together lengths of neon pink and yellow paracord to create sightlines that stretched from the gallery’s sidewalk-facing window to convex glass mirrors on the opposite side of the space. The result was an installation that transported pedestrians “into” the gallery without them having to step one foot inside. It also forced anyone inside the gallery to navigate the lines stretched from the windows above.

His 2017 piece “Lattice” — installed outside the entrance of the now-closed Bellevue Arts Museum — features a bright magenta glass cone, delicately suspended above the pavement by a series of criss-crossed steel cables hanging from the outdoor overhang. It’s as if Jackson-Spieker turned a raindrop into a perfect glass form, suspending it from above for the world to see. And, in a sense, this frozen raindrop hanging just above makes you feel as if you’re being pointed at, preemptively flinching for when the drop may eventually fall.

All this emphasis on spatial awareness reflects his experience as a Black person navigating public and private spaces. Sometimes walking through a gallery or a sidewalk or a classroom can be as simple as moving from point A to point B. But other times, various contexts force Black people to rethink their stance, gait and movement.

“There’s this balance I’m trying to play. How much can I bring everyone to this idea of hypersensitivity of their body in relation to space? And, what was the original intent of this space, versus how is it actually utilized within society?” Jackson-Spieker says. “I think it’s different depending on your own lived experience. I’m trying to make sure everyone has something that you can take away from it.”

Born in 1990, Jackson-Spieker grew up in Mount Baker with his mom and dad (a UW researcher and a librarian, respectively) and three older sisters. Always interested in working with his hands, at age 11 Jackson-Spieker started hanging out at Coyote Central, an arts organization in the Central District, making soapbox-derby cars and taking robotics classes. At 13, he took a welding class with his father at Pratt Fine Arts Center, also in the Central District, and glimpsed Pratt glass technician Che Lopez at work in the glass studio.

“He was doing work in the studio and had the lights all down. He was gathering some [molten] glass that looked like this flowing mass,” Jackson-Spieker remembers. “I was just mesmerized.”

From then on, he nurtured a love of glass. He took both glassblowing and welding courses at Pratt alongside adults, long before Pratt had a youth program. Throughout his teens, he balanced his love of art with a love of bikes, getting involved at Bikeworks, a youth-empowerment nonprofit in Columbia City. For him, tinkering with bikes and making art with glass and metal had a lot in common.

“That idea of working with your hands and the technical aspect I really like. But also, a lot of the art forms I do are all very much based on this idea of muscle memory. There’s a lot of dynamic movements and using your body a lot,” he says. “Biking … has a very similar feel of constantly moving, this dynamism that I have that is similar to the art work.”

After graduating from Aviation High School in Tukwila in 2008, Jackson-Spieker attended Western Washington University in Bellingham, earning his BFA in sculpture in 2013. He then moved back to Seattle, getting involved in the institutions and arts community that had helped raise him. Among other endeavors, he served as a glass and metalwork instructor at Pratt (a full-circle moment) and was a studio manager for Marela Zacarias’ monumental installation “Chalchiuhtlicue” at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

In 2020 he left the city to get his MFA in sculpture and dimensional studies at Alfred University in upstate New York. There he not only honed his craft, but also helped push other young artists of color to advance their own.

For glass artist Adeye Jean-Baptiste, an undergrad at Alfred at the time, having someone like Jackson-Spieker as a mentor was a godsend in the overwhelmingly white environment of upstate New York. Jackson-Spieker maintained an open-door policy for students of color and helped Jean-Baptiste gain her footing in creating art with different materials. From translating his technical know-how to connecting Jean-Baptiste with glass resources to supporting her visiting Black glass-artist series at the university, Jackson-Spieker had a big impact.

“We need more people like Henry. He’s so kind, and — I always use this word to describe him — soft. He’s soft but not vulnerable, in the sense that he’s a really powerful force and very gentle,” Jean-Baptiste says. “He’s one of those people who is an incredible educator, he’s an incredible artist and multitalented in so many different ways. But as a person, the way he’s thinking about things, the way that he interacts with the people and goes about his life is just really beautiful to see.”

In 2023, Jackson-Spieker became the Dale Chihuly Endowed Chair of Glass at the University of Washington. Since then, he’s been instructing students on the fundamentals of glass and overseeing the grad-student glass studio. He hopes to eventually incorporate neon-bending into the school’s program. Teaching has become a fundamental pillar of his art practice.

“I have been so supported by the art community here that it has felt very natural to want to give back and emulate that support I received and pass that on,” he reflects. “Being able to show support for other emerging artists and students at any stage of their career … is really important to me to be a supportive person who can help facilitate a new iteration of their art practice or identity.”

The same year he started teaching at UW, Jackson-Spieker debuted Interstitial Volume at the now-defunct Seattle gallery MadArt Studio, a huge exhibition that featured three installations meant to create visual blind spots for the viewers to navigate.

In “Configuration,” he threaded black string in a parabolic shape from the floor to ceiling, making the sculpture nearly invisible depending on the viewer’s angle. Composed of shifting-color dichroic film, “Colonnade” formed a row of columns viewers had to carefully traverse to cross the gallery. And in the back, “Oculus” — made of dark paint and neon — transformed the gallery’s skylight into a vacuum of space and time by using curved inserts, black paint and neon light.

Navigating these installations felt like a full-body art immersion with a question: Which materials were real and which were part of some optical illusion?

“It really allowed me a chance to play with scale,” he says of the MadArt show. “One thing I’m really interested in trying to play around with is this idea of what becomes a dominant presence within space. I think this goes back to that idea of lived experience of a Black person or person of color, like, how much space do they feel comfortable, or are they allotted to, within society?”

MadArt’s former curator Emily Kelly worked with Jackson-Spieker on the exhibit. “Having the viewer think about those themes in a physical way — like moving through the space and being kind of controlled in how you’re able to move and your perception being changed by where you are in the space — it’s just so conceptually rich and technical,” she says. “The aesthetic output feels directly in conversation with the concepts.”

Moving forward, Jackson-Spieker wants to make his work even bigger. In 2024 he received a commission from Sound Transit and is in the process of designing a work for a new transit station in Federal Way. In summer 2025 he will be in residence at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, exploring large-scale glass casting and its relationship to light, space and the body. While he’s continuing to make smaller-scale pieces, his outward work will always reflect a deeper inward journey.

“I don’t shy away from having more conceptual or philosophical questions within my work. When I first started out, I was like, ‘I am all about the material and I am all about technique and I don’t want to engage with these, potentially, deeper or broader ideas,’” Jackson-Spieker says. “As I’ve grown as an artist and as a person, I’ve realized, no, I do actually want to engage with those deeper ideas behind the work.”