Storme Webber is a Two-Spirit Sugpiaq/Alutiiq, Black, and Choctaw poet, interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and performer based in Seattle, Washington. Her cross-disciplinary practice brings together poetry, performance, archival photographs, audio, altar installation, text-based work, and collaboration to explore lineage, gender, race, sexuality, memory, spirit, survivance, and decolonization. Her work is often rooted in blues and jazz traditions, including experimental vocal performance and a cappella singing.
Born in Seattle in 1959, Webber’s life and art are deeply connected to the city’s Black, Indigenous, queer, and Two-Spirit histories. Her family history is central to her work, especially the stories of her Sugpiaq grandmother and her parents’ connection to The Casino, one of the oldest gay bars on the West Coast. Through this personal archive, Webber transforms family memory into a wider record of community survival, cultural continuity, and histories often left out of official archives.
Webber’s first solo museum exhibition, Storme Webber: Casino: A Palimpsest, was presented at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle in 2017. The exhibition combined family photographs, archival records, poetry, and installation to recover the layered history of The Casino as a gathering place for queer, Black, Indigenous, working-class, and marginalized communities. The Frye described it as Webber’s first solo museum exhibition and a major presentation of her work as a performance artist and poet.
Her work has also been featured in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s online exhibition Ancestors Know Who We Are, which explores the histories and contemporary experiences of Black-Indigenous women artists. The exhibition title comes from Webber’s 2016 letterpress print Ancestors Know Who We Are, created in response to being told she was not “Black enough” or “Native enough.”
As a performer, Webber has created and presented solo and collaborative works including Buddy Rabbit, Wild Tales of a Renegade Halfbreed Bulldagger, and Noirish Lesbiana. Her performances blend poetry, storytelling, theater, song, and embodied memory, extending her visual and archival practice into live forms. She has also appeared in documentary films including Venus Boyz, Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story, What’s Right with Gays These Days?, and Living Two Spirit.
Webber is also the founder of Voices Rising: LGBTQ of Color Arts & Culture, a Seattle-based project supporting LGBTQ artists of color. Through Voices Rising, she curated and led Home of Good: A Black Seattle Storyquilt, a collective community artwork honoring Seattle’s historically Black Central District. The project was installed at Washington Hall from 2021–2022 and was supported by the James W. Ray Foundation, 4Culture, the Reopen Fund, the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, and Historic Seattle.
Her public collection and commission-related work includes My Beloveds (2017), a drypoint etching acquired for the Washington State Art Collection in partnership with Federal Way Public Schools. The work is installed at Star Lake Elementary in Kent, Washington, as part of a curated collection selected by Asia Tail for schools in South King County. The artwork explores history, lineage, gender, race, and sexuality, themes central to Webber’s broader practice.
Webber’s honors and residencies include recognition from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Banff Arts Centre, the Jack Straw Writers Program, the Pride Foundation, the James W. Ray Venture Project Award, and Seattle arts institutions. In 2019, she was named a Seattle Living Legacy for her work bringing visibility to LGBTQ+, Indigenous, Two-Spirit, and Black communities through art, poetry, performance, and multimedia exhibition.
Selected exhibitions, performances, and commissions/public collections
Exhibitions
- Casino: A Palimpsest, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, 2017.
- Ancestors Know Who We Are, National Museum of the American Indian, online exhibition.
- Home of Good: A Black Seattle Storyquilt, Voices Rising project, Washington Hall, Seattle, 2021–2022.
Performances
- Buddy Rabbit.
- Wild Tales of a Renegade Halfbreed Bulldagger.
- Noirish Lesbiana.
- Uncollectable Treasures, performance with Storme Webber and Ernestine Hayes, Frye Art Museum, 2017.
Commissions / public collections
- My Beloveds, 2017, drypoint etching, Washington State Art Collection; installed at Star Lake Elementary, Kent, Washington, in partnership with Federal Way Public Schools.
- Home of Good: A Black Seattle Storyquilt, community-based artwork led/curated by Webber through Voices Rising; installed at Washington Hall and later referenced in Seattle Public Library materials for the African American Collection.
Sources
- Frye Art Museum — Storme Webber: Casino: A Palimpsest.
- National Museum of the American Indian — Artist Storme Webber / Ancestors Know Who We Are.
- Washington State Arts Commission — My Beloveds.
- Historic Seattle — Home of Good: A Black Seattle Storyquilt.
- Artist Trust — Storme Webber artist profile.
- Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth — Storme Webber event profile.