The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) is the city’s most prestigious art exhibition building, featuring a variety of exhibits and retrospectives that highlight well-known classic and contemporary artists. SAM contains an impressively large collection, totaling over 23,000 artifacts, including a 3,000-piece African art collection and a comprehensive Asian Art collection. The museum is located in the heart of downtown, just blocks from Rainier Square and the Seattle Aquarium.

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From their website:

“Located on Seattle’s First Hill, the Frye Art Museum first opened its doors in 1952 [and] since that time, works from the Frye Founding Collection of 232 paintings by Munich-based artists have continuously been on view. The Museum also hosts notable exhibitions of works by recognized and emerging artists from around the world.”

Best of all? You don’t need to wait for first Thursdays, because The Frye is ALWAYS free!

Free ONLY from 5-8pm on first Thursdays

Experience Music Project (EMP) has gotten a lot of hype, but can thankfully live up to most of it. Through a blend of interpretative, interactive exhibitions with loads of technology involved (Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has a large stake in this place), EMP aims to captures the essence of rock ‘n’ roll, but dares not to ignore its roots in in and influence on other genres. There are rare artifacts and memorabilia on display, plus you also get a behind-the-scenes look at the ins and outs of creating and recording music.

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The Museum of History and Industry’s core exhibit is “Essential Seattle”, a walking tour that begins with the arrival of Captain George Vancouver in 1792, and explores the lives and events that created the history of Seattle through the present. Within this exhibit is a series of smaller exhibits that use film, photography, and artifacts to educate on important eras and events in the city’s history, including Boomtown: Seattle Before The Great Fire.

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Recording the rich history of the Pacific Northwest, the Burke Museum includes an extensive series of displays which speak to the past and present of 17 different Native American tribes that occupied the region. One of the facility’s most important roles is as a storage area for preserving artifacts, holding over 12 million archaeological, ethnological and paleontological items in total. The museum is located on the northwestern end of the University of Washington campus.

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From their website:

“The Museum’s exhibits and programs feature the visual arts, music, crafts, literature and history of African Americans in the Northwest. Cognizant of the Black community’s continuous evolution, NAAM will focus on African Americans whose route to the new world was through slavery as well as recent immigrants arriving from places such as Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia.”

Free first Thursdays, 5-9pm ONLY.

Holding an extensive collection of aerospace and aviation artifacts, The Museum of Flight features an amazing array of historical and modern aircraft, along with fascinating exhibits about the history of space travel. Board a British Airways Concorde plane, see authentic and replica pieces from various spacefaring nations, and walk around and underneath more than three dozen modern aircraft. Interactive activities at the museum include rides aboard the 13-person 4D-X flight simulator and space shuttle simulator.

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Built in 1927, the Henry Art Gallery was Washington’s first public art gallery, and currently has over 25,000 pieces of art held in its permanent collection. The original gothic brick architecture of the 1920s gallery still exists, but today it has been combined with glass, textured stone, and steel, to form an innovative new look celebrating its lengthy history.

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The oldest neighborhood in the city, Pioneer Square is a local hub of social life and activity, famous for its nightclubs, restaurants and art galleries. Architecturally, the neighborhood is characterized by Victorian Romanesque styles, with lovely open spaces, like Occidental Park and the Waterfall Garden, and monuments, such as the Fallen Firefighters’ Memorial, providing further scenic and artistic beauty. Located just south of the Central Business District in downtown, the neighborhood is best toured on foot.

A branch of the Seattle Art Museum (and housed in their original building), the Seattle Asian Art Museum features such highlights as a wonderful collection of Chinese terra-cotta funerary art, rooms dedicated to Chinese and Japanese ceramics and stone religious sculptures of India.

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Pursuing the concept that play is an educational activity for children, the Children’s Museum of Tacoma contains a variety of themed exhibits that challenge children to play, invent, and interact. Areas allow children up to the age of 12 to explore the arts, physical science, human health and commonplace social interaction through activities like climbing a miniature rock wall or using varied supplies to create works of art.

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The Bellevue Art Museum is one of Washington’s premiere venues for contemporary art by national and international artists, including permanent pieces by famed glassworker Dale Chihuly. Every year, the museum puts on the wildly popular Bellevue Arts and Craft Fair, which welcomes over 300,000 visitors to view the showcase of more than 300 regional artists’ wares.

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A hands-on, interactive children’s museum, KidsQuest encourages a love of learning through play while emphasizing the sciences, art and technology. Here you’ll find exhibits geared toward children from birth to age ten that are also aimed at engaging the entire family.

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The Museum of Glass offers its patrons a chance to view an always changing, always delightful series of exhibitions of contemporary glass sculptures and art from around the world.

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The Hands On Children’s Museum features six galleries, with more than 55 entertaining exhibits aimed at endowing children with a love of learning. Kids can tool around a working waterfront, load and drive a replicated delivery truck, and even do some planting in the Garden and Orchard area.

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Free every THIRD Friday, 5:30-9 pm ONLY. Tickets half price starting at 3pm each Thursday.

The Imagine Children’s Museum offers fun exhibits and activities for children of all ages to explore through play. The unique museum is laid out like a miniature town, allowing kids to interact with different businesses, such as a ferry, a bank, a clinic, and a construction zone.

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