The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as SAM) is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, United States. It operates three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle, the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill, and Olympic Sculpture Park on the central Seattle waterfront, which opened in January 2007.
History
The SAM collection has grown from 1,926 pieces in 1933 to above 25,000 as of 2022. Its original museum provided an area of 25,000 square feet (2,300 m2); the present facilities offer 312,000 square feet (29,000 m2) plus a 9-acre (3.6 ha) park. The paid staff has increased from 7 to 303, and the museum library has grown from approximately 1,400 books to 33,252.
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 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).
Richard E. Fuller, president of the Seattle Fine Arts Society, was the animating figure of SAM in its early years. 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 on 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. Bed Bug Exterminator Seattle
Exhibitions
Among the museum’s notable exhibitions was 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 artists 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 Bill Gates had recently purchased.
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