When Luke met Ginger: Spokane couple breathe life into local arts scene

The 10th anniversary of Terrain is remarkable for many reasons.

The annual downtown arts show has been a catalyst – maybe the catalyst – for renewed energy and creativity in Spokane. Terrain and its various offshoots have planted a garden that is blooming alongside a host of other developments: a booming downtown, rising neighborhoods, smart civic investments, a great food scene, a palpable rise in the unmeasurable but crucial quality of civic faith …

The story of Terrain coincides with a pretty great decade in Spokane.

It also coincides with a pretty great love story.

Call it “When Ginger Met Luke.”

Ginger Ewing and Luke Baumgarten met right before the initial talks for the first Terrain. They quickly became a couple, and then domestic partners, and then married, all while working to establish and build Terrain from a one-night event into a nonprofit organization that is a year-round octopus of Spokane arts, with tentacles waving everywhere you look.

Along the way, they have become ubiquitous as a twosome. In the city’s arts scene, Luke and Ginger simply go together – no surnames required. Seattle’s alternative newsweekly, The Stranger, profiled them earlier this year: “A Spokane Power Couple Builds an Arts Scene.”

“People think we are joined at the hip,” Baumgarten said this week, as he and Ewing walked through the vast Jensen-Byrd Building, which will host Terrain 10 on Oct. 5 and 6.

“To a certain degree, we’re aware of our identity as a couple in the community,” Ewing said. “In a lot of ways that’s been a blessing, and in other ways … it’s been more of a – what’s the opposite of a blessing?”

Though they are undeniably central to the project, Ginger and Luke’s twinned public profile sometimes leads people to think they do it all – an impression they are eager to dispel. They rely heavily on fellow organizers and volunteers, ranging from fellow co-founder Patrick Kendrick to operations director Jackie Caro to the 11-member board of directors, which includes president Brian Estes, Bazaar organizer Diego Sanchez and Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart.

The couple met in 2008, when Baumgarten, then the arts editor for the Inlander, interviewed Ewing for a “20 Under 30” issue on young people in Spokane. Ewing was then the curator for cultural literacy at the MAC. They were both native to the area, both interested in the arts and both looking to find ways of building community and an arts scene – of acting to create what they wanted to see in their city.

Their interview was scheduled for a half-hour, and lasted three times that long.

The Inlander issue was something of a seed catalog for Terrain. Ewing was featured, as were Terrain co-founders Kendrick and Mariah McKay. It was McKay’s initial idea to do something Terrain-ish here, based partly on a show she’d seen in Portland.

As the initial founders began to meet in June 2008, Luke and Ginger were falling fast and hard for each other.

“She is just a really, really beguilingly positive person – and positivity about Spokane itself was really strange to me,” Baumgarten said.

Ewing said to him, “Our second meeting, you held my hand under the table. I was like, ‘Don’t let other people see.’ But ‘Keep on holding my hand.’ ”

They weren’t a secret for long.

“As soon as we caved in to a first date, we pretty much spent every day with each other since,” Baumgarten said. “It was pretty fast.”

They moved in together in less than a year, and bought a house – and pushed forward with Terrain. For several years, it took place in the former Music City building, where it grew and grew. It was a lot of hard work and late nights, and a whole lot of togetherness for Luke and Ginger.

“There are no lines between our personal lives and marriage, and the work we do,” Ewing said.

That would be difficult for anyone. They don’t pretend they haven’t had hard times or conflicts, as any couple have. They are famously busy, involved in their own enterprises and other civic events, and Terrain has been a never-resting enterprise. Not everything in their lives is tied together – Ewing is primarily responsible for the Window Dressing project, which puts art into abandoned storefronts, and Baumgarten is an owner of Treatment (creative services) and Fellow Coworking.

Still, Terrain sits at the center of their union.

Baumgarten said, perhaps half-jokingly, that they sometimes wonder: “Is Terrain tearing us apart, or is it the thing keeping us together?”

But he and Ginger both talk repeatedly about the good fortune of their lives. They use the word “blessed” repeatedly – to refer to themselves, their projects, Terrain’s burgeoning success and their marriage.

“We’ve had this really, really blessed life – as individuals but also as a couple,” Baumgarten said.

They were married a couple of weeks after Terrain 7 in 2014. You might think they’d have taken a break from event planning just then, but Ewing had her heart set on an autumn wedding. Baumgarten quotes her this way: “ ‘I’m not going to let (bleeping) Terrain destroy my dreams!’ ”

Their wedding had to rank among Spokane’s most creatively extravagant, complete with a secret society, elaborate masks and masques, performers, secret histories – and pugs. They are definitively pug people.

As Terrain 10 approaches, they are in a familiar place: scrambling through the sea of a million daily details. As the event and organization has grown, as it becomes more formalized and official, they’ve begun to think about the day when it isn’t so closely tied to them. When Terrain no longer means Ginger and Luke – as it does to so many people, and with respect to all the other people who make it happen.

Ewing said they’re looking ahead to a time when they’re less involved – even “possibly, at some point, walking away.”

“When we become the least important thing about it,” Baumgarten said, “we’ll have succeeded.”