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MANILA, Philippines - Who designed the Seattle Art Museum?
The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as “SAMâ€) is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, USA. It maintains three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill, and the Olympic Sculpture Park on the central Seattle waterfront, which opened on Jan. 20, 2007.
The “Art Ladderâ€: the main staircase of the 1991 Venturi building, now integrated into the expanded SAM as a free public space. 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; the present facilities provide 312,000 square feet plus a nine-acre park. Paid staff have increased from seven to 303, and the museum library has grown from approximately 1,400 books to 33,252.
SAM traces its origins to the Seattle Fine Arts Society (organized 1905) and the Washington Arts Association (organized 1906), which merged in 1917, keeping the Fine Arts Society name. In 1931 the group renamed itself as 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).
Richard E. Fuller, president of the Seattle Fine Arts Society, was the animating figure of SAM in its early years. During the Great Depression, he and his mother, Margaret MacTavish Fuller, donated $250,000 to build an art museum in Volunteer Park on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. The city provided the land and received ownership of the building. Carl F. Gould of the architectural firm Bebb and Gould designed an Art Deco/Art Moderne building for the museum, which opened June 23, 1933.
Among the museum’s notable exhibitions (besides the aforementioned Treasures of Tutankhamun) were a 1954 exhibition of 25 European paintings and sculptures from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; these pieces were donated to SAM in 1961. A 1959 Van Gogh exhibit drew 126,100 visitors. That same year, SAM organized a retrospective of the work of Northwest School painter Mark Tobey that traveled to four other U.S. museums. Tobey’s works and highlights of SAM’s Asian collection were featured under the museum’s aegis at the Century 21 Exposition. A Jacob Lawrence retrospective in 1974 honored a giant of African American art who had settled in Seattle four years earlier. Leonardo Lives (1997) featured the Codex Leicester, the last manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci in private hands, which had then been recently purchased by Bill Gates.
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.
On Dec. 5, 1991, SAM reopened in a $62 million downtown facility designed by Robert Venturi. The next year, one of Jonathan Borofsky’s Hammering Man sculptures was installed outside the museum as part of Seattle City Light’s One Percent for Art program. Hammering Man would have been installed in time for the museum’s opening, but on Sept. 28, 1991, as workers attempted to erect the piece, it fell, was damaged, and had to be returned to the foundry for repairs.
As of June 2008, the SAM collection includes nearly 25,000 pieces. Among them are Alexander Calder’s Eagle (1971) and Richard Serra’s Wake (2004), both at the Olympic Sculpture Park; the aforementioned Hammering Man; Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune: Stage One (2004), a sculpture constructed from cars and sequenced multi-channel light tubes on display in the lobby of the SAM Downtown; The Judgment of Paris (c. 1516-18) by Lucas Cranach the Elder; Mark Tobey’s Electric Night (1944); Yéil X’eenh (Raven Screen) (c. 1810), attributed to the Tlingit artist Kadyisdu.axch’; Do-Ho Suh’s Some/One (2001); and a coffin in the shape of a Mercedes Benz (1991) by Kane Quaye of Ghana.
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Last weeks’ question: Who is the architect of Cuadra San Cristobal in Mexico?
Answer: Luis Barragan
Winner: Gerard Gabriel of Lagro, Quezon City
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Text your answer to 0915-6486414 with your name and address. One winner will be chosen through a raffle of texts with the correct answer. The winner will receive P2,000 worth of SM gift certificates for use at Our Home, SM Department Store, or SM Supermarket. They can claim their prize at Our Home in SM Megamall. Call the store manager at 634-1951.Bring photocopies of two valid IDs and a clipping of the Design Quiz issue in which you appear as winner.
