Fishtown (art colony)

Fishtown was an informal artists' community housed in a cluster of old cabins and fishing shacks on the Skagit River delta in Skagit County, Washington, USA, from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s. It was part of the larger Skagit Valley arts community, centered on the town of La Conner, but was rustic and isolated, without electricity or plumbing, and tended to attract younger and more eccentric artists. It was home to several noted painters, poets, and sculptors. Charles Krafft, who went on to international attention and controversy as a ceramicist, was for over ten years the "self-proclaimed Mayor of Fishtown"; another longtime resident was Robert Sund, who, along with several other poets, developed a recognizable Pacific Northwest style of poetry. Scholar, painter, and poet Paul Hansen, who became a professor of Chinese languages and noted translator of early Chinese poetry lived in Fishtown for several years, and best-selling author Tom Robbins was a frequent visitor.

Billing themselves as The Asparagus Moonlight Group, the Fishtown artists held successful exhibitions of their work in Seattle in 1971 and 1974. These helped establish the commune as a countercultural mecca of the Pacific Northwest.

With changing lifestyles and increasing pressure from the land's owners, the Fishtown artists' community gradually dispersed, beginning in the late 1970s. In 1988, most of the original fishing shacks and the boardwalks that connected them were demolished, amid protests by remaining residents and their supporters. A few "Fishtown artists", such as painter Maggie Wilder and sculptor Bo Miller, continue to live and work in the area.

A desire to live a more natural and simple lifestyle was an important aspect of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s; this impulse lead to the creation of hundreds of new co-operative communities in the United States. These communes had a variety of different intents and structures, ranging from carefully organized religious or agricultural communes to more relaxed artists' colonies, of which there was already a long history in the U.S.

In the Pacific Northwest there were a number of established artists living or working regularly in Washington's Skagit Valley (about 60 mi. north of Seattle), an area where mist-filtered sunlight brought soft illumination to river-crossed farmland ringed by forested mountains, marshes, coastal tidelands, and the expanse of Puget Sound. This landscape had been an inspiration to artists of the internationally renowned 'Northwest School', particularly Guy Anderson and Morris Graves. Both had grown up nearby, and lived in or near Skagit Valley at various times. Anderson had permanently moved to the town of La Conner, on the Swinomish Channel, in 1959.

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