February 2008
Issue 02-08

The Seattle Art Museum

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Sam
The Seattle Art Museum

The Seattle Art Museum is on several campuses, other than the sculpture garden, one building is downtown on First Street, within easy walking distance of Pike's Market and the other is in Volunteer Park, some distance away.

Stepping into the downtown building, the first piece one sees is "Inopportune: Stage One" by Cai Guo-Qiang. I had just seen this large 3D work on the PBS program "Art: 21: Art in the 21st Century" along with other pyrotechnic works by Cai Guo-Qiang, if you wish to introduce a middle-school boy to art this is the way to go. Filling the entire reception area is a series of automobiles forming a strip that mimics a car spinning through space with light strips imitating an explosion from inside the car.

The exhibit includes a very short video of an actual car that was filled with fireworks and driven through New York blazing.
The SAM is a wonderful museum with a collection ranging from ancient Egyptian to Post-Modern, but the best collection and my major reason for this visit was to see the most recent acquisitions, the SAM has recently acquired a comprehensive collection of work from the second half of the Twentieth Century including work by Liechtenstein,
Edward Hopper, O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Helen Frankenthaler and Donald Judd, among others.

Edward Hopper (The Seattle Museum of Art)
The upstairs gallery just above the reception has examples from most all the greatest artists of the last 50 years.

Parking is always a problem in downtown Seattle but the bus service is excellent with a bus stop on First Street just in front of the museum. Several parking structures are behind the museum within a very short walking distance. The museum has recently been renovated and a new restaurant added, Taste, with a full bar and an excellent menu of gastro-pub food this is the definite place to eat during your visit.

The Seattle Asian Art Museum

Located in Volunteer Park, the SAAM is a wonderful Art Deco building surrounded by gardens and lawns. The permanent collection is small but exquisite with the central gallery filled with statuary from South Asia and a small gallery containing wooded, fabric and metal work from East Asia. The special exhibitions take up three galleries in the museum and are rotated frequently, perhaps due to the restrictive size of the building and the extensive size of the collection.

Parking is free and plentiful, there is a small coffee and tea kiosk in the central gallery and place to sit. The SAAM is an easy place to visit, a small museum that will not take a great deal of time to view. Our recommendation is to visit the SAAM in the morning and head downtown for the much larger and more extensive SAM and plan on eating at the Taste cafe.

Next time: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

Previous profiles:
Museums and Galleries of Mumbai, India
British Museum, London
The Getty Center, Los Angeles
The Getty Villa, Malibu, California