Andrew Chinn

born Seattle, Washington, 1915; died Seattle, Washington, 1996

BiographyAndrew Chinn was a Chinese-American artist and art educator, active in the Pacific Northwest from the early 1930s through the 1990s. He is known for his distinctive style of watercolor painting and printmaking, and is associated with the Northwest's Asian-American arts community, the WPA artists of the Great Depression/World War II era, and, peripherally, the Northwest School of painters.

Chinn moved between China and Seattle as a younger man, learning calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting. He settled permanently in Seattle in 1933. He enrolled at the University of Washington studying under Ambrose Patterson and Walter Isaacs. In 1941 he joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project and in 1945 he began a 31-year career as a technical artist at the Boeing company. In 1946 he began teaching evening classes in watercolor painting at Seattle Central Community College (originally Edison Technical School), which he continued to do for over 45 years.

[source: Oral history interview with Andrew Chinn, by Matthew Kangas, Aug. 9, 1991; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution]

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