The Reason for SEATTLE ATELIER

After having been a full time professor at a technological institute for digital art and in the usual atelier scene, I opened my classroom on 10/9/2014 and gave a talk on how developing people’s objective analytical abilities through painting could help eliminate fanaticism and prejudice in the world. 

I was concerned about how life lived online had already begun degrading how we see (and see each other) at the same time that the repopularization of an obsolete 19th century method of making art was validating predetermined, limited ways of seeing (and thinking) for art students.  I talked to them about not consciously moving backward into propaganda making, about not creating carefully crafted visual lies and about resistance to so-called opportunities to make art that justifies and serves extremists or the self-appointed leaders of movements and cults.

On that night, the SA was founded for dissenters in culture wars that take place on digital platforms. As dissenters, we take pride in being useless to all sides.

Michael Lane

Founder of Seattle Atelier

Alumnus of The Pennsylvania

Academy of the Fine Arts

October, 2025

“To give a sincere and truthful representation of a portion of the beauty of Nature in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality.”

Clarice Beckett

Degenerates’ Art

SEATTLE ATELIER NAME TAKEN BY WHITE NATIONALISTS

The connection between the classical ateliers, Nazis and big tech. Is anyone surprised?

The Guardian story about the principal benefactor of the new Seattle Atelier, 

Andrew Conru 

LINK TO THE STORY (Oct. 16, 2024) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/16/revealed-international-race-science-network-secretly-funded-by-us-tech-boss 

“What is white identity?”

CONRU 

 

Link to the story: https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/27/trumps-war-on-woke-and-dei-incubated-by-a-nazi-eugenics-foundation/

Conru continued:

White Nationalism and Racist Eugenics 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity_Foundation

(Aporia Magazine)

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/what-historical-event-should-all

Violent Opposition to Free Speech 

https://metro.co.uk/2024/10/19/director-furious-lff-pull-far-right-documentary-safety-fears-21827138/?ico=trending-post-strip_item_4

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/19/undercover-film-exposing-uk-far-right-activists-pulled-from-london-film-festival

Complete Hope Not Hate Investigation

 https://investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/race-science-inc/?utm_source=debrief-newsletter.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=year-of-the-rat-the-journalist-who-exposed-the-new-supremacist-right 

American Renaissance 

https://www.amren.com/

Center for Immigration Studies 

https://cis.org/

Note: Gage Academy of Art in Seattle which has tried everything to put me out of business as a teacher and as an artist has come to this, taking the name.

Proving what corrupt bullies they’ve been the whole time. Staffing this bizarre “school” founded in my stolen business name from the classical ateliers at Gage.

Here is a quote from them about the superiority of Europeans compared to Africans, using art to demonstrate.

This publication was entirely made possible by a “generous grant” from Andrew Conru

From: “Why Ideology and not Science Dominates Debate on Ethnicity and Race in the Modern World” by Simon Webb

'Within a few thousand years, the blink of an eye, compared with the time scale to which past changes had been measured, the hybrids had become transformed into what was almost a new species. The difference between this emergent breed and those which had gone before was breath-taking. Looking at Illustration 21, we can see the sort of art produced by the Homo sapiens before they left Africa. These are nothing more than doodles, consisting of scratches which signify little other than a vague awareness of the concept of symmetry. In what will one day become Europe, the Neanderthals who lived there before the coming of the hybrids were also producing nothing more than similar random scratches and the occasional pattern of straight lines on the wall of a cave. Within a few years of the arrival of what we might as well call Homo sapiens + in Europe, works of art like that seen in Illustration 22 were being crafted. It is obvious that whoever made this strange object was quite simply on a different intellectual plane from those who had gone before. For one thing, this figure, known as the lion man, is representative, rather than merely decorative. It is meant to portray something. Not only that, it is meant to show us something not in the real world, but a figure which existed only in the mind of the creator. Neither he, or she, had ever seen a man with the head of a lion; it had been imagined and then the pure thought had somehow been made manifest for all to see. This achievement, showing in solid form an image which had been conjured up in another person’s mind, showed the immeasurable gulf which separated Homo sapiens + from their ancestors.” (Page 385- 386, The Equalitarian Dogma, Simon Webb, 2021).

Conru’s fully funded experiment along these lines is called Seattle Atelier under which The Seattle Prize is housed. This is being done at the same time that he is removing Queer and BIPOC voices from the culture.

From their philosophy https://seattleprize.org/philosophy

In light of the art theory funded by Conru (by Webb) who makes the assertion that Africans are not human, not Homo sapiens, and therefore incapable of making human art, Conru’s touting of a philosophy called “Rehumanism” suggests that it is an attempt to prevent a slip into a subhuman state culturally via his program. 

Fascists are as Fascists do.

Brett Holverstott (L.) Andrew Conru (R.) 

Seattle Atelier name taken and promoted by NeoNazis and their collaborators as a grass roots art revival. 

Tenaya Sims of Gage Academy

“For the first time since the great patrons and the church supported artists.”

Read the article about the “revolution” they’re staging together in Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, July/August 2025 issue.

“My greatest curatorial achievement…was inspired by Andrew Conru's vision.” -Brett Holverstott

Holverstott has described Conru as a “cultural visionary.” 

Link to Movie. 8 mins

Nazi Art Theory Reborn

Kunst Dem Volk Reborn 

Conru’s philosophy, from his Seattle Prize site. 

Brief Analysis:

From the Seattle Prize site. 

Brief Analysis:

Kunst Dem Volk

Translated as Art for the People in Nazi Germany but with Volk having a special meaning which is based on so-called aryan bloodlines (genetics) with mystical connotations. 

The alt right is obsessed with uniting and healing this presumed shared spirit as well as seeing it expressed once again in art which they believe demonstrates their natural superiority (which they claim is shown through a grotesque weaponization of art history). 

I believe the "people" this art is really meant to serve, heal, unite are Conru and his ilk, i.e., 

white nationalists. 

It is at times like these, as with the revival of Nazi eugenics, that they and their real beliefs come out into the light.

My school opened on October 9, 2014

Brett Holverstott actively tried to erase my business and then also went out of his way to pretend their SA opened on the anniversary of mine, in an attempt to confuse search engines.