Seattle Art Museum

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Seattle Art Museum, viewed from First Avenue

The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as "SAM") is an art museum located in downtown Seattle, Washington USA. Admission is free on the first Thursday of each month.

The Seattle Art Museum opened on June 23, 1933 in an Art Deco building designed by Carl F. Gould of the architectural firm Bebb and Gould in Volunteer Park. The building was donated to the city by Richard E. Fuller and his mother, Margaret MacTavish Fuller. The starting collection was from the Art Institute of Seattle, of which Richard Fuller was president, and the Art Institute was responsible for managing art activities when the museum first opened. The Art Institute had housed its collection in Henry House, the former home, on Capitol Hill, of the collector and founder of the Henry Art Gallery, Horace C. Henry (1844-1928). The Art Institute in turn traced its origins to the Seattle Fine Arts Society (organized 1905) and the Washington Arts Association (organized 1906), which merged in 1917.^[1]

The museum's main collection moved to its present location at 100 University Street in December 1991, at which time the old building was renamed the Seattle Asian Art Museum. The new building at University and First Avenue was completed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates at 150,000 square feet with a 28,100,000 dollar budget.^[2]

Directly in front of the museum is Hammering Man, a 1994 sculpture that also appears in other cities around the globe.

The "Art Ladder": the main staircase of the 1991 Venturi building, now integrated into the expanded SAM as a free public space.

Seattle Art Museum expansion

In 2006, the Seattle Art Museum began expanding its 1991 location in a joint effort with Washington Mutual (WaMu). In addition to reworking the Venturi building, SAM now takes up the first four floors of a 16-floor building designed by Portland, Oregon architect Brad Cloepfil. SAM also owns the next eight floors, which WaMu rents. Washington Mutual owns the top four floors. As SAM expands in the future, it can take over one or more of the rented floors.^[3]

Because of the construction, the museum's downtown location was closed from January 5, 2006 to May 5, 2007. The expanded building offers 70 percent more gallery space, an expanded museum store, and a new restaurant. In anticipation of the expansion, over a thousand new pieces, with a total value over a billion dollars, were donated to the collection.^[4]

SAM also runs the Olympic Sculpture Park on the Seattle waterfront, which opened on January 20, 2007.