Seattle Art Museum

Frommer's Review

Bigger sometimes is better. In 2007, the Seattle Art Museum reopened after a huge expansion and remodeling, and the museum now verges on world-class. With acres of gallery space and cutting-edge exhibit designs, this is definitely not your typical, stodgy art museum. Before you even step inside the museum, you'll come face to faceless silhouette with Jonathon Borofsky's shadowy Hammering Man, an animated three-story steel sculpture that pounds out a silent beat in front of the museum. Inside the museum, white cars go tumbling through the air with colored lights shooting out of them in Cai Guo-Qiang's sculpture Inopportune: Stage One. Once you finally get inside the museum proper, you'll find one of the nation's premier collections of Northwest Coast Indian art and artifacts and an equally large collection of African art. The museum is particularly strong in modern and contemporary art, but there are also good collections of European and American art ranging from ancient Mediterranean works to pieces from the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque periods. Of course, the Northwest contemporary art collection is also quite extensive. (The museum also has a smattering of Asian art, but the city's major collection of Asian art is at the affiliated Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park.)

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