Go on a Walk and Check Out Gallery Bunkawitz in the Central District

As the days turn warmer and longer, the Central District transforms into a grassy, verdant oasis in the middle of Seattle. Irises and California poppies beam out at you along quiet, hilly side streets, and sometimes when the air hits just right, you can smell the salty Puget Sound. June is truly the perfect time to go on a long afternoon walk through the neighborhood to see the old houses and notice gardens, parks, and dead ends that have perhaps gone unremembered during the coldness of winter.

Enter Gallery Bunkawitz, which calls itself "Seattle's tiniest gallery." Nestled behind a giant mosaic tiled fence and leafy trees is a free, walk-up window gallery curated by fiber artist and designer Dani Blackwell, wood carver Tim Fowler, and multimedia artist Ezra Dickinson who all live at the property. Fowler made the fence and sculptures located around the house, and is frequently working on many of the old cars and motorcycles parked outside the residence. And you may have seen Blackwell's fiber works inside issues of Public Display Art and Dickinson's large-scale murals at places like the Quality Flea Center.

Founded in 2022, Gallery Bunkawitz isn't a white-walled gallery in the traditional sense. Rather, the artists built a large 2-foot-by-3-foot white box (no bigger than a small aquarium) behind one of the house's front windows for a self-contained space for art to be displayed inside. "Bunkawitz" comes from the name of an old black-and-white cat that used to live around the property, who died in 2022 at the ripe old age of 21. The gallery's first exhibition was dedicated to the memory of the old kitty with watercolors and embroidery made by Blackwell and Fowler displayed in Bunkawitz's honor. Ever since then, Gallery Bunkawitz rotates in works made by one of the three artists every two months or so. You're just as likely to catch one of Blackwell's mini quilts as you are Dickinson's thumb-based ceramic installations.

This month, Fowler is the featured artist with his wood-carved diorama, "Another day at the motor clinic," on display in the window until June 30. The diorama depicts what the title says — a typical day at an auto repair shop, replete with a wooden pickup truck, a decked-out garage, and a mechanic in a white jumpsuit on a car creeper. Fowler — an artist whose work usually consists of salvaged materials depicting famous buildings, freaky figural sculptures, and wooden political cartoon sculptures — drew on a memory of visiting an old car repair shop in the University District when he was in his 20s. The guys working there had parts lying around they were desperate to get rid of and would let young Fowler dig through their piles of stuff for whatever he needed, coaching him on how to fix cars himself.

"The guy in the carving, Joe, was zooming across the shop floor, almost the whole width of the garage on a mechanic's creeper," Fowler remembered in a recent phone interview. "He did the whole length of the shop on this thing with a big smile on his face, like a kid on a skateboard. It just stuck in my head! I was taking apart an old wooden cartoon carving in 1979 … and I thought it'd be a good time to do [that scene] from the motor clinic."

The small diorama captures the exuberant weirdness of what Fowler saw that day in its loving attention to the tiny details of the memory with tiny versions of mallets, paint cans, jacks, motors, and other shop ephemera rendered in wood form. The show will be up for another month — catch it!

Gallery Bunkawitz is located on 26th Avenue and East Howell Street. There are no set hours, but be respectful!