The “welcome to immigrants” mural that was removed from International Arrivals at Sea-Tac

This vinyl mural was installed in 2023 outside the International Arrivals door. At the beginning of July I was at International Arrivals and noticed the mural was gone. I pinged the original artist on Instagram and she said she didn’t know it had been removed. When I emailed Port of Seattle, they said it was always intended as a temporary installation, and they left it up longer than planned but then it started “peeling” so they had to take it down for safety.

But right now it’s just a blank wall and this seems like a wasted opportunity to keep it up, since they’ve already paid for the artwork and the printing, and right now the wall is just empty. Worst case, couldn’t they just glue it back up the same way they did the first time? The artist said that if the vinyl has deteriorated, she’d let them use the digital file for free to print another one (but even that’s probably unnecessary, it sounds like the vinyl itself hasn’t deteriorated, it was just peeling off of the wall).

And if there’s some reason they can’t do that (maybe they are contractually obligated to put someone else’s art there soon), at least they could sell it, or lend it, or donate it to some other place that could display it, instead of just sitting in storage somewhere.

I emailed Sea-Tac customer service to ask if they could at least tell me if it was sitting in storage or if they had thrown it away, and after two AI-generated responses I finally got a human who told me that I would have to contact the art department, and they have no public-facing email address so I’d have to send a letter to their PO Box which is what I’m doing now. (The third response did look like it was written by a human, mainly based on the typos and non sequiturs in the email, unless maybe their AI is smart enough to start inserting typos if a customer types the word “human”.)

But I don’t know how any of this works; all I know is that it seems like a waste for the artwork to be sitting in storage when it could be somewhere that people are looking at it. The original announcement said the artwork was sponsored by “The Bezos Family Foundation”; maybe that means they legally own the vinyl after it gets taken down. Any other suggestions on what leads to chase to try and make some headway?