The Life Eclectic The Life Eclectic The Life Eclectic

When artists Demi Raven, ’02, and Janet Galore, ’89, went looking for a live-work space, the couple wanted something unconventional, a place where they could be inspired by different ideas and hold big gatherings. A place where they could paint large canvases, edit film, modify toasters and design cool things, a place they could fill with art and books, a place where they could host art exhibitions, workshops and salons. In 2015, they found it: an old grocery store on Seattle’s Beacon Hill that they named The Grocery Studios.

Raven, a visual artist and archivist, and Galore, an interdisciplinary artist and designer, are multifaceted polymaths, dedicated collectors and community conveners. Like Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician and writer, Leonardo DaVinci and glass artist Dale Chihuly, ’65, a longtime collector of objects like fishing lures and accordions, they revel in the process of learning, collecting, creating and sharing. They join a group of obsessive collectors and people with expertise in things relatively obscure. They know the dopamine rush of finding or creating something particular and are happy to “geek out” with fellow collectors or fans. Some people might call them enthusiasts or aficionados. In local parlance, they’re deep nerds.

Galore and Raven embrace the “deep nerd” description. Raven, who studied computer science at the UW, has been driven as a visual artist since adolescence. Galore’s studies of pure and applied mathematics at the UW led to a vocation designing and producing virtual reality games as well a myriad of less practical artistic explorations and collections—like her tiny terrariums. While having long professional careers at companies including Google and Amazon, they’re devoted to following their unique interests and their collecting and creative adventures.

Influenced by punk rock, Dada and the Situationist art movement, Galore wanted her home to shatter norms. “I’m interested in anyone who has decided how they want to live and aren’t just accepting what someone gave to them,” she says. “I was open to being molded by the space. But if we’d chosen a big warehouse, or a church or a boat, we’d have a different life. So many of the living spaces that people are offered are very cookie cutter. It’s assumed that everyone wants to live the same way.”

Raven also liked pushing against conventional ideas of a home. He was invigorated by places he’d lived before, like a laundromat in Loyal Heights and the Diller Hotel, where he was able to customize his space—as long as he paid his rent. Raven enjoys hands-on work, and his fine-arts background allowed him to apply his experience with construction to renovating their new grocery-home—and carving out space for his collecting.

As an undergraduate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Raven studied photography and oil painting. He lived near the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which frequently hosted William S. Burroughs as a visiting writer. Raven got hooked on Burroughs and other artists associated with the Beat Generation, like Brion Gysin, and started collecting their writing. He focused on Burroughs’ publications in periodicals, which were more affordable, and he eventually amassed nearly 1,300 items. “It’s the largest collection in the world that I know of,” Raven says. Galore notes that her partner has “an interest in completeness.” He approaches his work as an archivist as a sleuth finding answers and seeing connections no one else has noted.

As an independent archivist, Raven has meticulously catalogued and shared his collections online. In October, he co-published a book related to his archive of the writings of Roger Knoebber, who lived among the Beat artists in Paris. “Hysteresis: A Profile of Brion Gysin” involved sorting through roughly 600 individual items from the author’s collections, which were stored in plastic bins in a non-climate-controlled space. Raven labored to classify them and put them in plastic sleeves.

Eventually, Raven would like to transfer his collections to an institutional archive where they can benefit more researchers. “I’ve been able to help grad students,” says Raven. “That brings me great joy. The work I do is for free, yet people benefit from it and gain access to materials that would be otherwise hidden.”

The joy this brings is what Dr. Delancey Wu, an assistant teaching professor at the UW and expert in social psychology, describes as a facet of goal striving. “There’s a theory called self-determination theory that basically says humans are motivated to feel competent, autonomous and connected to others,” she says. “In the case of collecting, it can satisfy the need to feel competent in particular because it takes effort and work to amass a collection or to complete a project to the end, so being able to look back and say ‘Wow, I did all that!’ can be very satisfying, especially if it’s collecting or creating something you (and others) have a passion for.”

Janet Galore’s terrarium project.

The Pacific Northwest is full of deep nerds with UW connections.

“People collect what is meaningful to them,” says Jacob McMurray, ’95, chief collections and exhibitions officer at the Museum of Pop Culture. In his role at MoPOP, McMurray played a part in advancing the vision of Paul Allen, one of Seattle’s most celebrated deep nerds and the founder of the museum.

The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist—who grew up hanging around the UW campus—had amassed 80,000 individual objects related to American music and pop culture. These include the guitar Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock and Captain Kirk’s command chair from “Star Trek,” which he gifted to the museum and made available to fellow music, sci-fi and pop culture fans.

“When we have objects up in the museum, it’s less about looking at something from a temporal remove of hundreds of years,” McMurray says, as pop art, “it has a personal impact on you … in your recognition of a wider world beyond yourself to now.”

In 2022, Allen’s private art collection sold at auction for more than $1.6 billion. As with his other passions, Allen’s private collection reflected his wide-ranging interests with paintings from Van Gogh and Cézanne alongside work by contemporary artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, who created the iconic “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” sculpture that was once on view at the Olympic Sculpture Park.

“To a certain extent, collecting can be kind of a fixation,” says McMurray, a collector in is own right who has described himself as “delightfully eccentric and deeply weird” and whose own interests include designing and printing cards and other ephemera on a 1912 Chandler & Price letterpress.

Demi Raven got hooked on artists associated with the Beat Generation during his undergrad days at CU Boulder.

“There’s a huge sense of satisfaction and accomplishment when you feel like you are digging into something that isn’t common knowledge,” he says, “knowledge that isn’t oriented toward anything marketable or sustainable. There’s something about the difficulty of it. The niche aspect of things.”

For him, collecting involves maintenance and curation—which are key to collecting rather than hoarding. “I love going through and every year cleaning out all the stuff that doesn’t speak to me,” he says. “Everything that’s left over feels so much more valuable and impactful. I don’t need this material—everything is a memory. Everything provides a sense of place and cements me in providing comfort and a sense of connectedness to something larger than myself.”

Back at The Grocery Studios, Galore’s aesthetic interests come out of her own eclectic experiences. At the UW, she studied pure and applied mathematics through three years of graduate school. She thinks of herself as an “incurable generalist” with a voracious curiosity. Among her myriad projects, Galore fills her home with glass terrariums that house different mosses, lichens and ferns, and springtails—tiny arthropods that help break down matter and prevent mold. Her two microscopes allow her to go on “micro safaris.” “You can take any kind of moss and squeeze out the water and view the tardigrades and take video,” she says.

Galore indulges her interests in ceramics, perfume-making, screen printing and sewing. Her art integrates media with physical elements in interactive pieces. Her installation of river rocks at the now-defunct Museum of Museums in Seattle used software to project animated eyes on the rocks that opened when visitors entered the gallery.

The Grocery Studios, where Galore and spouse, Demi Raven, live and host events.

Psychologists like Wu look at “nerding out” and nerd culture as often positive and therapeutic, particularly when people create and share their passions with others. A strong sense of social integration arises and has been shown to increase people’s well-being. “It not only feels good to be included by others, but also, neurologically, we’re motivated to do so,” Wu says.

To further their community connections, Galore and Raven have partnered with Seattle Art Fair to produce and host offsite performances and programs at The Grocery. Two years ago, they brought together painter Jason Puccinelli and Sasha Styles, an AI poet.

The couple also produced a series called “The Academy of Reason and Wonder.” “People would come and talk about an obsessive involvement with something outside of their primary vocation,” Raven says. Artist Jed Dunkerly gave a multimedia presentation on paleontology and dinosaurs. Afterward, the audience had access to a curated library of books drawn from his references. Professor Adrienne Fairhall, an expert in computational neuroscience at the UW, spoke on theories of cognition and intelligence in the microbe world. And Douglas Wacker, associate professor of biology at UW Bothell, shared his perspective on corvid research and language.

Raven revels in gathering wild thinkers together in the intimate space of his home. “The way the communities fan out—it’s like neurons,” he says. “One community attaches to one community that attaches to another. We come one step closer to that distal community,” bringing others further away closer and spreading feelings of engagement and belonging.

To learn more about salons and other events at The Grocery, visit thegrocerystudios.com.