Seattle Art Museum

The original Robert Venturi–designed building of limestone and ornamented terra-cotta (with Jonathan Borofsky’s enormous moving sculpture, Hammering Man, at its front door) contains 150,000 sq ft of space. Architect Brad Cloepfil’s design expanded the museum in 2007 into the adjoining Washington Mutual building, adding 118,000 sq ft, including a number of new spaces that are free to the public.

The sense of excitement is palpable from the museum’s entrance up to the main floors. Above the ticket counter hangs Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune: Stage One – a series of white cars exploding with neon. Between the two museum entrances is the ‘art ladder,’ a free space with various art installations cascading down a wide-stepped hallway.

Moving up into the galleries, two of the first things that you will see are Andy Warhol’s painting of Elvis and an enormous sculpture by Korean artist Do-Ho Suh, Some/One, a cloak made of thousands of dog tags. Nearby is a room that’s dedicated to the work of Harlem Renaissance painter Jacob Lawrence, who spent his last 30 years in Seattle, and to Gwendolyn Knight, his wife and fellow painter. There are also now dedicated spaces for the museum’s impressive collections of masks, canoes and totems from Northwest coastal Indian tribes, as well as collections of Australian Aboriginal art and American and Native American textiles. There’s a huge glass and porcelain showroom, and, on the top floor, the Italian Room – an entire reassembled room of carved wood and leaded glass from Chiavenna, northern Italy, originally built around 1600. And, of course, there’s also a chic museum restaurant.

If you’re thinking of multiple visits, consider a museum membership, which includes unlimited free admission to SAM, the Seattle Asian Art Museum and the Olympic Sculpture Park; travelers from 60 or more miles outside Seattle get a $10 discount.