Maque daVis didn’t intend to be part of the inaugural Fremont Solstice Parade in 1989. But there he was, designs painted on his chest, piloting an Egyptian barge alongside costumed artists through Fremont’s streets. 

The day prior, he had visited the Fremont Arts Council warehouse on a whim, and parade cofounder Peter Toms promptly put him to work. Toms and fellow Santa Barbara transplant Barbara Luecke missed the artistic solstice celebration they’d each left behind in California. But the Seattle of the late 1980s was a place where they knew they could create their own version. The city was “a gathering place for people who were interested in building community and interested in making the world a better place by working together,” Luecke remembers. And Fremont in particular was the perfect spot for a solstice parade. 

The neighborhood boasted plenty of creatives like daVis, and lots of empty warehouses where artists could build parade elements together. Some of his neighbors in the apartment-studio spaces of Fremont Fine Arts Foundry—a live-work cooperative—crafted Capitol Hill’s Jimi Hendrix statue and assembled Fremont’s Lenin. He even helped build the Troll under the Aurora Bridge. 

In 1989, a handshake deal with the company redeveloping Fremont’s waterfront warehouses into the Google and Adobe offices that stand today landed the parade a free space to launch its first iteration. Decades later, daVis still helps organize the parade that weaves through a neighborhood vastly different from the one it started in.

“The big tech industry moved in, and that gentrified our area,” daVis says. “And the Troll, holding a Volkswagen, is supposed to represent a protest against the gentrification of Fremont. We lost that battle. We just lost it.” Gone are the communal art spaces where creatives lived and worked together, including the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry, which shuttered in 2012. Luecke witnessed a “huge diaspora” of artists in the following years. 

But despite shifting neighborhood dynamics and dwindling funds, the parade persists. Every June, about 20,000 spectators line Fremont’s streets to witness giant puppets, intricately costumed ensembles, bands atop boat trailers, and painted au naturel cyclists. Roller Derby skaters and a giant inflatable Earth have rolled down the route. One year, daVis crafted a 40-foot slug puppet complete with a trail of cellophane slime. In its heyday, the parade would end with a quirky pageant at Gas Works Park.

The Fremont Solstice Parade breaks the mold of traditional parades—literally. That slug slithered up to spectators, and viewers ran to lie in the street ahead of the inflatable Earth, letting it roll over their bodies. Interaction—both in the open workshop model ahead of the parade (“We want people really to be a creator, to put your hands on it and get your hands burned by hot glue guns,” daVis says) and the day-of audience participation element—is baked into the parade’s ethos. 

“Art is subversive,” daVis says, so it follows that the parade sometimes gets political. Cofounder Toms once crafted a crouching Trump character. The audience participation it invited? “You could come out and kick it in the rump,” daVis remembers. 

Artists routinely tell Luecke that “the presence of the parade is kind of a bellwether to the health of Seattle.” As long as there are puppets to kick and quirky ensembles strutting through Fremont once a year, we might just be OK.