Seattle Art Museum

Seattle's art museum began in the 1930s largely through one collector, Richard Fuller, who gave both his Asian art and the money for a building, and then ran the place for decades. That founding gift is why the museum has always been strong in the art of Asia, unusually so for an American city.

Today it spreads across three sites. The main downtown building, from 1991, is marked by a giant moving sculpture out front, Jonathan Borofsky's 'Hammering Man', a black steel figure four storeys tall whose arm slowly beats all day. Inside are galleries of African, Native American and Northwest Coast art, and European and modern painting. A separate art-deco building in Volunteer Park holds the Asian collection, and down on the waterfront the Olympic Sculpture Park runs free and open over a former industrial site.

The Northwest Coast holdings, carved masks and house-posts from the Indigenous peoples of this coast, root the collection in the very ground it stands on.