The sun beat down on the Capitol Hill gatehouse structure as the temperature slunk toward 90 degrees. Pigeon behinds butted over the lip of the building’s roof, pooping with abandon. A person named Bug stood on the small walkway jutting into the park’s reflecting pool and scraped at one of the arched windows, attempting to free Seattle’s new favorite art piece, a guerilla mosaic known as Saint Rat or Hot Rat Summer, from the prison of paint slapped on by the maintenance team at Seattle Public Utilities (SPU). Another person, Cyanasen (the unofficial custodian of the saintly rat), kept watch while smoking a joint.
“I come here daily. I hang out with the rat wall and I clean up a lot of stuff and help maintain it,” Cyanesen says. (She says the mosaic is different from Saint Rat, a familiar graffiti tag around town. She calls it Hot Rat Summer.)
No one can say exactly when, but sometime last summer a mystery artist cemented the mosaic of a rat standing in profile on multi-hued green grass, a flaming heart near its paw and a halo behind its head, onto the SPU building. Beneath its feet, under the grass, on a background of fire, are the words “Hot Rat Summer.” Seattle University art history professor Ken Allan writes that the piece “refers to Byzantine mosaic tradition in a fun way” and “the use of architecture nicely echoes this.” (Allan told The Stranger that he wants to examine Hot Rat Summer in person and will send more thoughts.)
The public loves Hot Rat Summer. It’s a celebration of weird Seattle, of life in the city. Tripadvisor now lists it as a thing to do. The trans community particularly loves the piece. Rats are downtrodden, rejected by society, and harmed for being what they are. That resonates, Cyanesen says.
Yet, since the mosaic’s (immaculate) conception, the city has waged holy war against it.
According to Cyanesen, the rat steward, the city has painted over the piece “eight or nine times,” which Hot Rat Summer enjoyers have scraped off again and again.
This battle has seemingly come to an end. After the most recent rat erasure, a public commenter dressed as Saint Rat/Hot Rat Summer showed up to City Hall. City Council Members Joy Hollingsworth and Alexis Mercedes Rinck announced they would personally remove the paint covering the art.
@zonedoutpnw Today (7/15) at Seattle city council, St. Rat gave public testimony showing his appreciation to the Seattle Redditors that removed the paint covering his mosaic. That same day, the parks department ignored the will of the people and covered the rat mosaic with white paint. A couple council members stated they would help remove the paint off the mosaic. Source: The Seattle Channel #seattle #citycouncil #hotratsummer ♬ original sound – Zoned Out PNW
At around 2:00 p.m. Wednesday, Rinck and Hollingsworth arrived with a Lowe’s bucket filled with supplies and a ladder to do a job already well underway. Bug had been scraping for an hour and a half, and would stay hours after others left (at 5:30 p.m., Bug was still scraping). And before Bug got there, a “different guy” had put paint stripper on the wall.
“This is a beautiful expression about what this neighborhood is all about and this neighborhood has been through it recently,” Rinck says. “These are dark times. Let the people have rats.”
Rarely does anything this gold stay in a city hellbent on eradicating unsanctioned public art. Seattle City Council recently passed a law that both raises fines against frequent graffiti taggers to $1,500 and allows the City Attorney to bring civil penalties against them. Rinck was the only one on the council to vote against it.
According to Rinck, whether or not this mosaic is different from the graffiti the current mayoral administration and city council majority hates is, like art, subjective. But the only one who can make that determination is Mayor Bruce Harrell, she says.
However, it seems like City Attorney Ann Davison and the city council get their say as well. Davison proposed this new graffiti crackdown initiative, but only asked for $1,000 fines. The council’s Public Safety Committee, which includes Bob Kettle, Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Council President Sara Nelson, and Vacant (the ghost of Cathy Moore), were not satisfied with that sum. It was too low. In the committee meeting, Saka said he proposed his amendment to raise the fine to $1,500 “to make [taggers] hurt financially.” It passed out of committee. Saka and Kettle voted for it, while Hollingsworth and Nelson abstained.
Hollingsworth, who voted to pass the bill with the increased fine, says the legislation won’t apply to Hot Rat Summer because it’s public art and “very different from tagging.”
“This isn’t someone’s name,” Hollingsworth says. “This is a mosaic.” She then explained what a mosaic was, which The Stranger knew, The Stranger was there. “It reminds me of a stained glass window.”
There’s no distinction between mosaics and graffiti in the Seattle Municipal Code, where graffiti is defined as any “unauthorized markings visible from premises open to the public, that have been placed upon any property through the use of paint, ink, chalk, dye or any other substance capable of marking property.”
In spite of that, Hollingsworth says she’s been supportive of “stuff like this” since she was elected. Rats?
No, no, public art. Last year, she allocated $225,000 in the budget to fund a mural walk (not quite the same thing as a guerilla rat mosaic, but go off). But she says she plans on introducing new legislation that would designate certain city-owned spaces for people to make art. She also wants to repaint the Cal Anderson bathroom in the colors of the trans flag, which was painted to protest the Christian Supremacist rally at the park in May, and zhuzh up the Black Lives Matter memorial on Pine Street.
Hollingsworth says Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) “came and covered [Hot Rat Summer] up” multiple times without the council’s knowledge. The Cal Anderson gatehouse is its responsibility, not the responsibility of Seattle Parks and Recreation, which took heat for this.
Ultimately, Hollingsworth blames bureaucracy for Hot Ratgate, both why SPU covered the mosaic and why nobody listened when she tried to raise the issue last year. She says she didn’t come out with a paint scraper and ladder because people are mad. She cares.
Whatever her motivation, Hollingsworth says Hot Rat Summer is here to stay.
“The Parks Department gave me their word, and so did the Mayor’s office, that they’re gonna send a crew out to restore this in the next couple days and professionally seal it,” Hollingsworth says.
SPU won’t be fucking around with it anymore either.
“Make sure you print this,” she says.
“[SPU] have told me that they will do every window on here,” gesturing to the blank gatehouse windows “with some type of work from the community. And the city will pay for it because we’ll pay those artists.”
There’s still one important question Hollingsworth wants to know. Who made Hot Rat Summer? Cyanesen just wants them to do a crow mosaic next.
Corvid Spring?
