Glenn Kaino’s powerful aerial sculpture Bridge is comprised of 200 golden arms hanging from the ceiling of SAAM’s Luce Foundation Center. Each is a casting of the outstretched right arm of Tommie Smith, the American winner of the men’s 200-meter race at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. During the medal ceremony, Smith bowed his head […]

Frye Salon is both a fixture and a living experiment—an ever-evolving installation that invites fresh perspectives on the museum’s founding-era collection. The gallery features more than one hundred paintings in a floor-to-ceiling presentation mode known as “salon style,” recalling the striking displays once found in Charles and Emma Frye’s First Hill home. In Frye Salon + […]

For over five decades, American artist Jonathan Lasker has approached the elements of painting like a puzzle—taking it apart, turning the pieces, and putting it back together in new ways. Drawings and Studies offers a close look at how his ideas take shape, featuring works on paper that Lasker created from the 1980s to the 2020s, tracking […]

Not simply users of technology, women have played vital roles as inventors and makers across the history of technology. Yet their contributions aren’t always acknowledged in popular and official histories of technological innovation. Motherboards brings together artists whose work foregrounds the many ways that women have shaped the technology industry. Motherboards highlights the central role of women in […]

Chloe King’s vividly layered, monumental compositions project a surreal vision of contemporary existence. For their Boren Banner—the artist’s first museum presentation in Seattle—King extends their ongoing inquiry into the politics of the dance floor, exploring Queer nightlife as a site of both refuge and risk. Drawing on the dilapidated, improvised, and occasionally illicit spaces that […]

Artist, activist, and community organizer Tom Lloyd (1929–1996) was an early pioneer of using electric light as an artistic medium. Working in collaboration with an engineer at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Lloyd developed a radically experimental practice in the 1960s that fused art and technology to dazzling effect. His electronically programmed sculptures—featuring rhythmic […]

See selections from the Frye’s collection in a new light. For Artists’ Choice, we opened the vault to five local creatives working across music, dance, poetry, theater, and beyond—asking which objects resonated with them from their diverse artistic perspectives. Their selections gather around themes of representation and identity, grief and love, solitude and isolation, and even […]