Lighthearted artwork installed around city

If one Mukilteo Lighthouse has been good for 100 years, how about 15 more lighthouses?

But let's make them 6 feet tall instead of 38 feet. And 285 pounds each instead of several tons.

Fifteen lighthouse reproductions have been installed around the community and will be on display through September. A few may even ride a parade float Sept. 9 during the Mukilteo Lighthouse Festival.

Art exhibits like this caught on nationally after Chicago's Cows on Parade put 300 model cows on city streets in 1999. Seattle has done pigs. Lighthouses had been done before, most notably in Portland, Maine, but they weren't reproductions of a particular lighthouse, said John Collier, a Mukilteo resident.

"This is the first time I know a historical icon has been used in a public-art symbol," he said.

Collier and wife, Ann, the 2005 Mukilteo Citizen of the Year, got the idea for the project from Gig Harbor's popu-

lar six-month fish display, "SalmonChanted Harbor." An eight-person volunteer group helped the lighthouse idea catch on around Mukilteo.

The Mukilteo Lighthouse Quilters created "A Quilter's Haven," with flying geese, a mariner's compass, and a pincushion and bobbin at the top. Yenny Broadie did "Music of the Sea," with sea creatures as musical instruments.

Michelle Gengnagel at Kamiak High School came up with "A Knight at Sea," naming it after the school mascot. Kamiak art teacher Deborah Barten did "Mukilteo in Motion," reflecting Mukilteo as "the hub of movement, with the ferry, the waterways, the Boeing industry, the Speedway, the bike path," she wrote in her artists' statement.

Lisa Alden made "Orcas Dream Salmon." Alden, in her art proposal, saw the project as "a three-D blank canvas that I would paint my design of orcas, salmon and graphic landscape on." Artist Peter Max, a pioneer of pop art, was an inspiration for her.

Working with Jake Schultz, a technical analyst at Boeing, the Snohomish County Air-

port led a design session and sponsored two lighthouses.

One, "Beacon of Flight," is dedicated to general aviation and was co-sponsored with the Washington Pilots Association. It looks like an airplane and includes wings, a tail, a propeller and a pilot's head coming out of a cockpit.

The other, "Future of Light," looks like the airport's control tower, complete with two circling airplanes. Both model lighthouses will be at the Future of Flight Aviation Center.

"People are just starting to notice them, and a lot of people are getting the drift of what's going on," said Fred Baxter, a Mukilteo architect who did sketches for the reproductions.

The undecorated models were fabricated by HMC Industries in Lynnwood in a durable, exterior hardboard called MDX and built for about $1,500 each.

A panel chose from designs that artists had submitted. Sponsors paid $1,800 for the lighthouses, which covered construction and expenses, as well as part of the $500 artist stipends. Donors from the community also contributed toward the stipends.

"We truly think it's going to be just a delightful thing for a small, local community to have pulled off. We're really pleased," said Elizabeth Erickson, a member of the volunteer planning committee.

She bought a permanent lighthouse — artist Ken Morrison's "The Lighthouse Family: 100 Years, 100 Houses" — for her real-estate office.

Since 1906, the Mukilteo Lighthouse has been regarded as a prime navigational aid, the Coast Guard says, and in 1977, the building at 608 Front St. was put on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 2001, the Coast Guard gave the lighthouse to Mukilteo. The Coast Guard still runs the working lighthouse, and the Mukilteo Historical Society operates a gift shop and exhibits on the grounds.

Morrison, who advised Mukilteo Elementary School's third-grade Lighthouse Club in producing a model lighthouse titled "Quantum Leap," went to the source for his inspiration.

"I went down and sat in front of that lighthouse down there, and I thought, a hundred years and what that lighthouse has actually seen," Morrison said. "It's become a monument, more than just a historical thing."

Diane Wright: 425-745-7815 or dwright@seattletimes.com