Seattle Art Museum

History

The SAM collection has grown from 1,926 pieces in 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.

In 1917, the Seattle Fine Arts Society (organized 1905) and the Washington Arts Association (organized 1906) merged into a single unified organization, keeping the Fine Arts Society name.

In 1931, the Fine Arts Society group renamed itself to 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).

In 1931, during the Great Depression, Richard E. Fuller, president of the Seattle Fine Arts Society and the animating figure of SAM in its early years, and his mother, Margaret MacTavish Fuller, donated US$250,000 (equivalent to $5.3 million in 2025) to build an art museum in Volunteer Park on Seattle's Capitol Hill. The city provided the land and received ownership of the building, which was to be an Art Deco/Art Moderne building designed by Carl F. Gould of the architectural firm Bebb and Gould.

On June 23, 1933, the new museum opened. 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.

In 1969, 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.

In 1983 to 1984, the museum received a donation of half of a downtown city block, the former J. C. Penney department store 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.

On December 5, 1991, SAM reopened in a downtown facility designed by Robert Venturi; the cost of the build was US$62 million (equivalent to $147 million in 2025)

Main 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, a limestone-covered rectangle with a streak of tile and terra cotta around its outside, is located at University Street and First Avenue, and was completed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates at 150,000 square feet (14,000 m2) with a $28.1 million budget.

In 2006, the Seattle Art Museum began expanding its 1991 location in a joint effort with Washington Mutual (WaMu); the enlarged building was originally known as the WaMu Center. The expansion actually began in July 2004. Several pieces had to be temporarily moved to prevent them from being damaged due to vibrations during construction. This would have been the initial foundation phase of the WaMu Center. 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 originally rented; Washington Mutual owned the top four floors. As SAM expands in the future, it can take over one or more of the rented floors.

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.

Washington Mutual's 2008 failure and subsequent acquisition by JPMorgan Chase resulted in Northwestern Mutual purchasing WaMu's share of the building September 9, 2009, and renaming it the Russell Investments Center. Currently, Russell Investments, a Northwestern Mutual subsidiary, is headquartered there, having relocated from Tacoma, Washington.