seattle art museum

seattle art museum

The Evolution of the Seattle Art Museum: A Comprehensive Study

1. Introduction to the Seattle Art Museum

Relativity is particularly beneficial to art museums. Unlike so many other aspects of our man-made culture, art, sculpture, and painting are not subject matters for scientific quantification. When separated, prior associations between things change in quality, even in kind. Art literally is not thought of as art without the juxtaposition of one idea against another. Thus, each museum can develop distinguishing characteristics by interpreting different principles of relatedness: aesthetic, message, or historical context, for example. Granted, works of art/prices might have been of great use to the viewer, though he would soon become bored by static exhibit random associations. As a point of departure, works must be manipulated so that their quality is revealed. On display, a collection becomes dynamic, provokes, and is shaped by the observer and the setting of the moment. Only when situated so as to expose connoisseurship, perspective, and insight do great collections encourage intimate understanding and reflective contemplation.

Only museums free of the heed of mounting the platforms of public office and public enterprise could occupy this frontier. With dedication, enthusiasm, and naivety, the pioneers strove to bring beauty and charm into their daily life and began to relinquish to those who followed the further role of didacticism entrusted extensively by civilization’s preeminent museums, its schools, its cathedrals, and its congresses. Who performed this role of interpreters of beauty? In one respect, the answer is a simple one: the wealthy could afford cultivation and culture could afford beauty, and great museum collections were formed. Connoisseurs’ galleries were established at home or they traveled abroad; they had only the occasion and reasons to see their treasures there in vivid colors. But profoundly important forces pushed the arts also from another direction: those whose status was not high placed the arts within reach. A marketing pattern that moved in accordance with consumer choices was formed. In brief, the entertainment business was born. So in each period of stress and enlightenment, when the mood of the majority of people was in the doldrums or when human rights were triumphant, collections, more important museum collections, were established. They were formed by individuals seeking to protect the beauty in the world around them.

In January 1949, the Seattle Art Museum started seeing itself as an institutional family rather than a single institution. The location of a new building, apart from its museum of Oriental art and in proximity to its future downtown museum, suggested that museums of art in the city were entering a new relationship. Up to this point, the obligation of a family had been met by the Seattle Art Museum with one structure, a relatively small structure. The institution could not grow because there was no more space to enclose the growth. By acquiring property elsewhere, and by agreeing upon a location of a new museum within the available acreage, the Art Institute, the Volunteer Park Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum together then satisfied the first essential of institutional development: expansion in both size and complexity. Two years later, the long, tedious task of securing funds started, to be completed in June 1953 by the unanimous action of the electors of the City of Seattle in approving a bond issue of $1,525,000.

2. Historical Development and Growth

A code of ethics was established and a determination made that the South edge of Volunteer Park would be the present site. Since the land was a gift to the city from the Dunbar Family, the Mayor, the Park Board, and the Art Commission liked serving Seattle like a “smaller Social Register.” Money was appropriated from city and Federal sources and 1933 found construction underway on the magnificent Art Deco building, designed by Seattle architects Bebben and Nearing, housing the Seattle Art Museum. Today there is a third gallery building under construction on the same site. These are the simple facts of the Seattle Art Museum’s birth and transition from that period to the present has been smooth by comparison with the troubled history of museums where inflexible governmental necessity limits patrons’ ability to support them. Throughout these times of great stress, the museum has done remarkable things about which no one seems to know. For example, the format of the low-cost exhibitions originated during the late 1930s by Dadabean is being followed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pasadena Art Museum.

When Seattle was young, the land was natural. The primary colors were the blue and green of sky and water, the evergreen of the forests, and the spectacle of the Olympic Range. But the wilderness yielded to settlement, and man began to build in a new and high visual form. Since then, changes have taken place. The Spokane Exposition in 1974 was a vital factor in stimulating interest in the fine arts. A Seattleite, Ellenhorn, went to the Exposition and particularly the Israeli Art Exhibition and decided upon the return to Seattle that it was time for “due the West, the fine arts.” There rapidly developed a cultural group led by Dr. Warren to explore the possibility of a city museum. They invited a representative of the American Museum and Historical Association to visit Seattle (February 22 and 23, 1932) and the community was informed by their report at a meeting. The response was enthusiastic enough to spring the movement into active being, a museum staff was appointed to collect a surrogate institution.

3. Notable Collections and Exhibitions

No other institution of higher learning, no other art gallery or group of private collectors here in the West have the financial resources to prepare exhibitions of European masterpieces on the scale usually associated only with the larger institutions located in eastern cities. At the same time, apart from the few worthwhile exhibitions that appear from season to season on the art horizon, the opportunities of being in the presence of the Gauguins, Rembrandts, van Goghs, the Monets, the Titians, the Rubenses are woefully limited in museums on the Pacific Coast from San Francisco north to Vancouver. It is due to the Seattle Art Museum that that situation is no longer hopeless.

From the mid-1930s on, Seattle Art Museum’s big period of expansion began. The host of exhibitions by European masters, in addition to the SAM’s own important collections, has made the museum a well-known and important center of the Pacific Coast, and one that is attracting more and more attention at the national level. The fact that Seattle has entered this traffic of art so actively is due largely to the Seattle Art Museum, and this powerful stimulus has been lavished upon the artistic and cultural heritage of the community and the region.

4. Community Engagement and Impact

This past year, on First Thursday, nearly 30 of the Museum’s docents decked out in festive, Southwest decorated hats, handmade from paper bags, offered Free Day tours, while 15 other docents provided Western Bridge staff and patrons with a tour of SAM’s new interactive family gallery, “The Talking Room.” Currently, on the drawing board is a potential collaboration with a commercial property owner to upgrade an adjacent public alley into a landscaped pedestrian corridor at the center of Belltown. A similar alliance of the Seattle Art Museum – with technical and financial assistance from the city and several private sector partners – has been credited with transforming the downtown/waterfront area to the current home of the Museum. With its diversity and perception as a new or alternative museum of contemporary art, SAM – as city art museum – has quite a different impact on the dynamic and expanding neighborhood.

Now in its 57th year at its “current” downtown site, SAM has been a key factor in making the neighborhood what it is today. Belltown Arts Revival, a proactive alliance of neighbors and galleries, takes a leadership role in revitalization efforts, in partnership with the city. Activities include gallery walks, promoting art in affordable housing projects, neighborhood marketing and networking. SAM partners include a wide variety of neighbors and schools, the Japanese Consulate, A Contemporary Theater, the Children’s Museum, Western Bridge, the Multnomah patent law firm, Seattle University, Pacific Northwest Ballet, KCTS, Diamond Parking, Thursday Rotarians, over forty arts organizations, the YMCA, the One Reel office, numerous arts agencies and real property interests which include assets in the vicinity acquired with the help of the mayor’s accommodation fund.

5. Future Directions and Challenges

The focus of future study, beyond the need for actual performance measurement, is to establish constructs that unify the results from the case studies, refine the approach used, and then test the relationships between selected SAM constructs in a longitudinal study. Ongoing research is using the survey and Garvin studies to trace the development of quality in US art museums. Preliminary results associate the SAM transition with other forms of effective organizational transition. These results suggest some SAM constructs we can follow to explore the current barriers to arts innovation in a stakeholder setting and over time in order to identify constructs for effective museum growth and development in a highly competitive organizational setting.

The history of the SAM reflects the evolving political and business climate. Its original growth was tied to resources and the need for Seattle to establish a cultural and intellectual reputation in the 1920s. The next phase of SAM’s growth was tied to a need to preserve Seattle’s heritage in the 1950s. SAM’s third major growth period was tied to the need to attract business interests to the downtown area in the period 1969-1973. The very radical SAM of the period 1983-1991 saw growth tied to the desire to establish the arts as an agent of economic change. The study provides an analytical framework and some support suggesting that the most rapid expansionary periods for art museums might be linked to business cycles and other economic change associated with community growth.