Through Colored Glass

Visitors of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport may notice something new in the main terminal’s check-in area. Instead of plain beige walls, they’ll be greeted by a striking stretch of large, jewel-toned glass artworks. Travelers pass Mount Saint Helens, defined by soft geometric lines of blue, pink, and creamsicle orange. Nearby, Outer Coast features overlapping greens and blues that evoke rugged waters, while Shrub Steppe captures the richness of the earth—dense brush meeting a bright, clear sky.

In summer 2023, Morgan Madison learned he had received a commission as part of the SEA Gateway Project, the airport’s reconfiguration and expansion of the North Main Terminal. The installation, titled Wish You Were Here: 13 Faces of Cascadia, was completed in December 2025. It’s composed of 39 panels of kiln-formed, laminated glass in 13 floor-to-ceiling artworks—each representing a different ecological zone in the region.

Inspired by Place

Before coming to Lewis & Clark, Madison had never been to the Pacific Northwest. His initial attraction to the area came from watching The Goonies, an ’80s adventure comedy set in Oregon, and the desire to venture out from his hometown, the suburbs of Denver. In college, he combined his art major with a well-rounded liberal arts education, using his time as a student to consider what kind of artist he wanted to be.

Madison cites his overseas study program to Cuenca, Ecuador, as a creative turning point. “I spent a lot of time there with just a sketchbook and a camera,” he says. “I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but that was when the idea of place became paramount for my practice.” His senior thesis, supervised by Debra Beers, ended up being a series of oil bar portraits of people he crossed paths with during the program.

After graduating, he returned to South America, traveling for six months around Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia before the realities of adulthood set in. He returned to Portland, patching together a series of odd jobs. Construction work. Bicycle messaging. One morning, while flipping through the pages of Willamette Week, Madison saw an ad seeking help at Bullseye Glass Company, a local manufacturer that had been around since the 1970s. After reaching out, he discovered a fellow L&C alum working at the company: Ted Sawyer BA ’92, now the company’s longtime director of research and education.

Discovering Glass

Bullseye was an unfamiliar environment for Madison, who had no prior experience working with glass. Eighteen furnaces lined both sides of the casting floor, each roaring with heat at 2,500°F, resembling a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. Madison was working in production making glass sheets, not fabricating art pieces, but he had access to the company’s “wealth of knowledge”—and scrap materials. He started making simple, functional pieces, such as plates and coasters. Madison took those early creations to the Pearl District, where he set up shop on a curb with a folding table. From then on, glass became his primary artistic medium.

“Alone, glass is so eye-catching that it almost feels like cheating to make art with it,” Madison says. “It has great depth and nuance. It can be translucent and allow light to pass through it. It can be opalescent, refracting light. And in certain works, it can do all of these things at the same time.”

Over the years, Madison’s career has evolved from selling glass on street corners to exhibiting at art fairs, making large commissioned work, and teaching at craft centers nationwide and around the world. In recent years, he began asking himself, “How can I get this work in front of more people?” In 2023, the call went out for artists to submit their qualifications to create new art installations for the airport project.

In the first stages of ideation, Madison relied on his own personal experiences of the Pacific Northwest and looked through books, photographs, and journal articles—all the site-specific materials he could get his hands on. He stumbled across the Cascadia Field Guide, a peculiar compilation of poems, drawings, and scientific records, which ended up guiding the project. He was also influenced by his memories of the stained glass windows of his childhood church. The windows in the terminal, he realized, could house the installation, capturing the natural light and illuminating the glass from within.

Luminous Puzzle Pieces

From the beginning, Madison knew he would need a team to realize the large-scale vision of the project, and the natural choice was to return to Bullseye Glass. The first renderings of 13 Faces of Cascadia were mocked up on an iPad, where Madison was able to experiment with color and depth. Those digitizations were then shared with the team at Bullseye Studio, who converted them to CAD files that could be read by their scoring machines. From there, the glass puzzle pieces were assembled, fired, and laminated before being installed. Madison was in constant contact with Bullseye, as well as the Port of Seattle, Alaska Airlines, and other stakeholders, to reach the finish line.

The first panel set installed was Eastern Rivers. “It gave me goosebumps,” Madison remembers. His small-scale initial designs had been transformed into striking triptychs—works that offer travelers a first glimpse of the Pacific Northwest or a familiar reminder of home. “The airport is a transitional space,” Madison says. “It’s where people say goodbye or welcome people back. I wanted the work to celebrate the region the airport serves.”