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 Seattle, Washington, USA. It maintains three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill, and the Olympic Sculpture Park on the Seattle waterfront, which opened on January 20, 2007. Admission to the sculpture park is always free. Admission to the other facilities is free on the first Thursday of each month; SAAM also offers free admission the first Saturday of the month.

[edit] History

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

The SAM collection has grown from 1,926 pieces 1933 to nearly 25,000 as of 2008. Its original museum provided an area of 25,000 square feet (2,300 m²); the present facilities provide 312,000 square feet (29,000 m²) plus a 9-acre (3.6 ha) park. Paid staff have increased from 7 to 303, and the museum library has grown from approximately 1,400 books to 33,252. While the number of visitors has grown, the pattern is more complicated: 346,287 people visited the museum in its first year; in 1978 the traveling exhibit Treasures of Tutankhamun (shown in the facility at Seattle Center) drew 1.3 million visitors in a mere four months; 2007 attendance was 797,127.^[1]

SAM traces its origins to the Seattle Fine Arts Society (organized 1905) and the Washington Arts Association (organized 1906), which merged in 1917, keeping the Fine Arts Society name. In 1931 the group renamed itself as the Art Institute of Seattle. The Art Institute 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). ^[2][3]

Richard E. Fuller, president of the Seattle Fine Arts Society, was the animating figure of SAM in its early hears. During the Great Depression, he and his mother, Margaret MacTavish Fuller, donated $250,000 to build an art museum in Volunteer Park on Seattle's Capitol Hill. The city provided the land and received ownership of the building. Carl F. Gould of the architectural firm Bebb and Gould designed an Art Deco / Art Moderne building for the museum, which opened June 23, 1933. The Art Institute collection formed the core of the original SAM collection; the Fullers soon donated additional pieces. The Art Institute was responsible for managing art activities when the museum first opened. Fuller served as museum director into the 1970s, never taking a salary.^[2][4]

Among the museum's notable exhibitions (besides the aforementioned Treasures of Tutankhamun) were a 1954 exhibition of 25 European paintings and sculptures from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; these pieces were donated to SAM in 1961. A 1959 Van Gogh exhibit drew 126,100 visitors. That same year, SAM organized a retrospective of the work of Northwest School painter Mark Tobey that traveled to four other U.S. museums. Tobey's works and highlights of SAM's Asian collection were featured under the museum's aegis at the Century 21 Exposition (the 1962 Seattle World's Fair). A Jacob Lawrence retrospective in 1974 honored a giant of African American art who had settled in Seattle four years earlier. Leonardo Lives (1997) featured the Codex Leicester, the last manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci in private hands, which had then been recently purchased by Bill Gates.^[5]

SAM joined with the National Council on the Arts (later NEA), Richard Fuller, and the Seattle Foundation (in part, another Fuller family endeavor) to acquire and install Isamu Noguchi's sculpture Black Sun in front of the museum in Volunteer Park. It was the NEA's first commission in Seattle.^[6]

In 1983–1984, the museum received a donation of half of a downtown city block, the former J. C. Penney department store^[7] on the west side of Second Avenue between Union and Pike Streets. They eventually decided that this particular block was not a suitable site: that land was sold for private development as the Newmark Building, and the museum acquired land in the next block south.^[8] On December 5, 1991, SAM reopened in a downtown facility designed by Robert Venturi.^[9] The next year, Jonathan Borofsky's Hammering Man (one of several such pieces by Borofsky) was installed outside the museum as part of Seattle City Light's One Percent for Art program.^[10] Hammering Man would have been installed in time for the museum's opening, but on September 28, 1991, as workers attempted to erect the piece, it fell, was damaged, and had to be returned to the foundry for repairs.^[11] In 1994 the Volunteer Park facility reopened as the Seattle Asian Art Museum. In 2007 the Olympic Sculpture Park opened to the public, culminating an 8-year process.^[12]

[edit] Collection

As of June 2008, the SAM collection includes nearly 25,000 pieces, which still falls far short of the 40,000 in the Portland Art Museum, Seattle's rival to the south. Among them are Alexander Calder's Eagle (1971) and Richard Serra's Wake (2004), both at the Olympic Sculpture Park; the aforementioned Hammering Man; Cai Guo-Qiang's Inopportune: Stage One (2004), a sculpture constructed from cars and sequenced multi-channel light tubes on display in the lobby of the SAM Downtown; The Judgment of Paris (c. 1516-18) by Lucas Cranach the Elder; Mark Tobey's Electric Night (1944); Yéil X'eenh (Raven Screen) (c. 1810), attributed to the Tlingit artist Kadyisdu.axch'; Do-Ho Suh's Some/One (2001); and a coffin in the shape of a Mercedes Benz (1991) by Kane Quaye of Ghana. While SAM's collections of modern and ethnic art are notable, its collection of more-traditional European painting and sculpture is quite thin, and the Museum relies on traveling exhibitions rather than its own collection to fill that notable gap. It remains to be seen how much this will be affected by any loss of funding due to the failure of Washington Mutual, the primary corporate sponsor of the Museum in recent years.

[edit] Present downtown facility

The museum's main collection moved to its present location on First Avenue in December 1991; the museum's original building became the Seattle Asian Art Museum in 1994. The building at University Street and First Avenue was completed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates at 150,000 square feet (14,000 m²) with a $28,100,000 budget.^[13]

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.^[14]

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.^[15]

[edit] Modern Art Pavilion

After the Century 21 Exposition, the fairgrounds became Seattle Center, and the UK Pavilion became the Modern Art Pavilion of the museum. It remained in use until 1987.^[16]

[edit] Seattle Asian Art Museum

Main article: Seattle Asian Art Museum

The Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM)) has been located since 1994 in the original 1933 Deco/Moderne SAM facility in Volunteer Park on Seattle's Capitol Hill.

[edit] Olympic Sculpture Park

Main article: Olympic Sculpture Park

The Olympic Sculpture Park is a 9-acre (3.6 ha) public park on the Seattle waterfront just north of downtown. It opened on January 20, 2007.^[17][18]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• "SAM at 75", in the unnamed newsletter of the Seattle Art Museum, June 2008, 10–15.

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Seattle Art Museum

• Official website
• Olympic Sculpture Park Construction An unofficial journal

Coordinates: 47°36′26″N 122°20′17″W / 47.60722°N 122.33806°W / 47.60722; -122.33806 (Seattle Art Museum)