Dick and Jane's Spot

The guest book hangs at the southeast edge of the fence, and the fence is as far as a visitor goes. Dick and Jane’s Spot, at the corner of First and Pearl in Ellensburg, is the home and studio of the artist Jane Orleman. Its own website says it is “never open and never closed.” The yard behind the fences is private, and the Spot’s older web page states the terms plainly: “Generally, what you see from outside the fence is what you see.” The Spot places the house across from the fire station and asks that no one park in front, so the trucks can get out. John Bennett’s 1992 account and a 2026 ABC10 segment both put it across from the police station. A public lot lies on the north side.

Along the fence at First and Pearl

The Spot’s own tally is more than 10,000 bottle caps and thousands of reflectors. Bike wheels spin in the wind. On the façades, the perimeter fences, and the yard, the SPACES archive lists hubcaps, glass insulators, buckles, chains, and keys. Metal electrical insulators hang like bells from a wooden framework around the back of the yard, and clear and aqua glass insulators line the top of that fence. A dragon made of bottle caps runs along the tall wooden fence on the alley side. It is the work of Justin Martin, one of Orleman’s studio assistants. Nearby, a garage wall is covered with hubcaps, and large electrical insulators salvaged from the Grand Coulee Dam stand near the garage door.

The Yakima Herald-Republic walked the perimeter in August 2017 and recorded more. It found a tall tin man and a yellow bear holding an armful of wooden human heads, by the sculptor Richard Beyer, which stand for Beyer and the Seattle Arts Commission, “a longtime nemesis.” It found a mannequin-like figure with a camera for a face, a far larger than life human hand reaching out of the house near the front door, and reflector panels by Orleman’s late husband, Richard C. Elliott. “Some of the coolest things are seen from the outside,” Orleman told the paper.

On the north side, a ten-foot easement runs between the house and the municipal parking lot, and a row of totems stands along it, each one different. In 2017 Orleman said there were 24, with four left unfinished until a city grant let her and her studio assistants complete them. One holds painted teddy bears against the pole with netting. “The kids aren’t sure if they like it,” Orleman said, “if they should free the teddy bears or be afraid of them.” After dark, Elliott’s reflector work on that wall scatters the light from cars pulling into the lot.

The sources do not agree on how many hands made all this. The Spot and most accounts say more than 40 Northwest artists. A résumé kept by the couple says over 35. The 2017 Herald article says roughly 45, and a photo caption in the same article says more than 50. Elliott described the effect in words the Hallie Ford Museum of Art later printed: “Until you actually see it and have the light work magic on you, then you say ‘Ah ha! Now I get it!’ Things blow in the wind and the flowers are as much a part of the whole unit as individual art pieces.”

Big Red, the Tower, and Sammy

Inside the fence, a path winds through found-object pieces and flowers to a twisting brick spire. Davy Simpkin built the Tower in 1985. “A friend of ours built that tower. He spent three summers on it,” Orleman said in 2017. “He’d work on it in the mornings and in the afternoons would find things to put in it.” In the 1990s she and Dick added mannequins they found in Soap Lake. The Lady in the Tower got a makeover in 2020.

That makeover was by Karl Schwiesow, whom the Spot lists as assistant curator, restorer, and artist on site. Much of the yard has passed through his hands. Big Red, a figure Jane first made in 1983, was in danger of falling by 2020, her skin damaged by years of sun, and Schwiesow and Jane gave her a major restoration. A standing figure by John Harter, dated about 2008, became Uncle Sam when Dan Donavan reworked it in 2010. In 2023 Schwiesow primed and repainted it again, and the Spot’s page now reads “Uncle Sam no longer!” The SPACES archive says Uncle Sam “morphed over time into Aunt Sammy.”

The front walk has a record of its own. Don O’Conor painted it in 1984. John Harter painted it in 2004, and it was restored every spring after that. In 2017 Denny Alickson and Mark Tarabula laid a new sidewalk, Justin Martin painted the steps, and the yearly repainting stopped. Schwiesow painted the steps in 2023.

The garden changes with the season and with Orleman’s thinking. In 2017 the Herald found a fountain splashing into a small brick pool with several koi, and bushes closing around a bench and table that gave shade on a 100-degree day. There is a gazebo, and the Spot photographs the garden from inside it. “It’s always different. It changes all the time; my thoughts about it change,” Orleman said that year. Her stated aim then was to make the garden “something that will take care of itself more and still be colorful.” In September 2026 the Spot posted delphiniums and hibiscus. That same autumn Schwiesow was making a kinetic piece of buffing pads covered in bottle caps.

A dog from a Badger Pocket barn

Jane Orleman grew up in upstate New York and came to Central Washington as a young woman at her brother’s invitation. “I was a senior in geography and I met all these artists and changed my major to art,” she said. “Dick was an economics major.” Elliott, born in Portland in 1945, had come to Central Washington State College in 1963. He left to serve with VISTA, a year in Alaska and a year with the Makah, and then came back to finish. The accounts of their meeting differ. HistoryLink says a friend introduced them after Elliott returned to Ellensburg in 1968. Bennett, a friend of 36 years, says mutual friends brought them together in 1970, and that on their first date they sat in Jane’s kitchen and made a drawing together. Both took a BA in art in 1971 and married. They spent about a year in Portland, where Dick worked in his father’s business-machine company, then returned to Ellensburg to live as artists.

Their friends joked that all they needed now was a dog named Spot. In 1973, Bennett writes, a rancher in Badger Pocket, eight miles out, advertised ten blue heeler pups in the local paper. Dick and Jane circled the ad and called. The pup they chose had a black spot around one brown eye. They named their cleaning business after him, Spot Janitorial, and it kept them “independently poor,” as Dick’s family put it. When Bennett arrived in 1974, the couple lived in an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Jane was painting small interiors, and Dick was drawing the Kittitas Valley and selling cars to pay the rent.

The house came in 1978. Orleman said it appears on an 1890 map of the city and began as a small wooden cottage. Bennett recalled its windows and doors boarded over and hard-packed bare ground around it. HistoryLink calls it a former drug house so filthy and run-down that the city considered tearing it down. “This ... came within a hair’s breadth” of being demolished, Orleman said. “The city wanted it for a parking lot.” The owner grew frustrated in negotiations with officials, raised the price to $18,000, and listed it in the paper. She and Elliott called as soon as they could and made the deal.

After cleaning and shoring the place up, they began on the yard. HistoryLink says they took their lead from a whirligig display a self-taught artist had built near Grand Coulee Dam. The fence came first. A 1980 photograph shows Dick sinking its first pole and talking to Spot about it. The two stand beside the first piece of yard art, which came from a yard sale in Dog Town.

Spot, by Bennett’s telling, was a wanderer. He took a bullet in the stomach one spring on a rancher’s land. In 1981 he came home with another blue heeler, Sally, and the couple kept her. One day the dog catcher lured Sally into his van. Spot ran home, tugged at Dick’s pant leg, growled, and barked at the door. The two of them went down the street, across Main to the railroad tracks and south along them, the dogs’ route to the animal shelter. They arrived as the van pulled up, and Sally was let go. Spot deferred to her in everything, even giving up the navy-blue wool blanket he chewed when she growled at him for it. Jane believed he needed that blanket to digest his food after the shooting, and he declined quickly and died. The couple put a weather vane on the peak of the roof in his memory, a wrought-iron dog jumping over a wrought-iron moon.

Chief Lunatic on Pearl Street

Reporters and television cameras soon followed. The couple’s résumé lists a United Press International story in 1982, a front-page Seattle Times story in 1985, and a 1990 KING-TV feature by Laddy Kite, the first of dozens. The Spot took as its creed “one hearty laugh is worth ten trips to the doctor.” Orleman remembered a ten-year-old boy who knocked on the door one day and asked, “Is this what you call imagination?”

Elliott’s own work moved fast in those years. At a 1982 “Rock Festival” near Bothell, he wore a painted and feathered hardhat, was anointed Chief Lunatic, and performed some sort of ritual. Bennett traces his path from pen-and-ink dots to bottle caps nailed by the thousands, then to reflectors ordered by the boxful. In 1992 he glued nearly 50,000 of them around the rim of the Yakima Valley SunDome. A Times Square mural followed in 1993. At home, the couple added a studio to the north in 1990 and another to the west in 2004. In 1991 the city granted the ten-foot easement for a tourist walkway, and in 2001 an Artist Trust grant of $1,400 paid for the walkway’s totems. Every year for more than 30 years they hosted a rodeo party, which often fell on Dick’s birthday. “Shawne & Mary at the original Vinman’s Bakery made him some amazing cakes!” the Spot recalled in 2026.

Elliott was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on September 17, 2007. In the 14 months that followed, he made his last body of work, the “Vibrational Field Painting Series.” “It’s maybe not what you’d expect from a man who knows he’s going to die,” Orleman told the Daily Record. “He really believed in the concept that we’re all part of a pattern.” He died at home on November 19, 2008, after 38 years of marriage. His obituary in the Ellensburg Daily Record called the Spot “a labor of love created with his wife simply for the fun of it.” It closed with a message for the town: “when he walked down the street he felt surrounded by family.”

A will drawn in 1998

In 1998 the couple had quietly arranged with John Baule, then executive director of the Yakima Valley Museum, to leave the Spot and their whole collection to the museum. The gift was announced only in 2017, at the museum’s Red Into Black auction. “It wasn’t really a secret,” Orleman said. “But I don’t even think anybody on the board knew about it.” Two years earlier, the city’s arts commission had named her the 2015 Ellensburg Arts Treasure. “My dream, hope, wish is that some day this could be an artists’ residence,” she said. A 2026 ABC10 segment says she plans eventually to give the property to the community.

The work goes on in the meantime. In September 2026 Schwiesow repaired the pond with orange reflector inserts that had sat in the couple’s stash for about 30 years. By the Spot’s account, there were exactly as many as the job needed.