Enter the mind of modernist sculptor Alberto Giacometti in his search for a new vision of the human form. Featuring more than 100 bronze portrait busts, towering statuettes, paintings, sketches, and prints, Alberto Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure documents the iconic explorations and visionary achievements of this internationally celebrated artist of the postwar era. Visit Giacometti in his famed Paris studio in scenes captured by noted photographers including Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Gordon Parks, and Irving Penn, offering glimpses into his life and tireless pursuit to reveal our fragile yet resilient humanness. Co-organized by the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, this special exhibition marks Giacometti’s first showcase in the Pacific Northwest and the only West Coast stop on its North American tour.

Alberto Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure is co-organized by the Seattle Art Museum and the Fondation Giacometti.

Alberto Giacometti: Verbal Descriptions

Alberto Giacometti: Audio Guide

Jaume Plensa's "Echo" is a 46-foot-tall sculpture installed on the shoreline, made from resin and steel, and coated in marble dust. Rising from the center of the park with eyes closed, its stunning surface is luminous in daytime and at night.

Image: "Echo", 2011, Jaume Plensa, Spanish, Born 1955, Polyester resin, marble dust, steel framework, Height: 45 ft. 11 in., footprint at base: 10 ft. 8 in. x 7 ft. 1 in., gross weight: 13,118 lb, Gift of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2013.22, © Jaume Plensa, photo: Benjamin Benschneider.

Olympic Sculpture Park Audio Tour: "Echo" by Jaume Plensa

"Seattle Cloud Cover," by Teresita Fernández, connects the upper park area to the stunning waterfront. Her work incorporates images of the changing sky discovered in nature and art, and offers a beautiful view of downtown and the park. 

Image: "Seattle Cloud Cover" (detail), design approved 2004; fabrication completed 2006, Teresita Fernández, laminated glass with photographic design interlayer, approx. 9 ft. 6 in. x 200 ft. x 6 ft. 3 in., Olympic Sculpture Park Art Acquisition Fund, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006.140, © Teresita Fernández, photo: Benjamin Benschneider.

Olympic Sculpture Park Audio Tour: "Seattle Cloud Cover" by Teresita Fernández

Carefully restored in summer 2020, "The Eagle," is once again its original and stunning Calder red, making it impossible to miss on a walk through the park. "The Eagle" displays its curving wings, assertive stance, and pointy beak in a form that is weightless, colorful, and abstract.  

Image: "The Eagle", 1971, Alexander Calder, painted steel, 465 x 390 x 390 in., Gift of Jon and Mary Shirley, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2000.69, © Calder Foundation/Artist’s Rights Society, NY, photo: Benjamin Benschneider.

Olympic Sculpture Park Audio Tour: "The Eagle" by Alexander Calder

"Wake" is located in the park's valley, in the Northeast corner. For artist Richard Serra, space is a substance as tangible as sculpture. He uses materials and scale to alter perception and to engage the body, encouraging consciousness of our relation to space. 

Image: "Wake", Richard Serra, 2004, 10 plates, 5 sets of locked toroid forms, weatherproof steel, each set, overall: 14 ft. 1 1/4 in. x 48 ft. 4 in. x 6 ft. 4 3/8 in.; overall installation: 14 ft. 1/4 in. x 125 ft. x 46 ft.; plate thickness 2 in.; weight: 30 tons (each plate), Purchased with funds from Jeffrey and Susan Brotman, Virginia and Bagley Wright, Ann Wyckoff and the Modern Art Acquisition Fund, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2004.94, © Richard Serra to Wake, photo: Stephanie Fink.

Olympic Sculpture Park Audio Tour: "Wake" by Richard Serra

Welcome to the Olympic Sculpture Park! Covered in monumental artworks, this award-winning nine-acre sculpture park on the waterfront is Seattle's largest downtown green space. Enjoy this special tour of the park with Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Carrie Dedon.

Photo: Benjamin Benschneider.

Olympic Sculpture Park Audio Tour: Introduction to the Park

Monet at Étretat: Letters Waves At The Manneport

"Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective" showcases the endless innovation and profound influence of this remarkable photographer who pushed the boundaries for both women in the arts and photography as an art form. Nearly 200 of Cunningham’s insightful portraits, elegant flower and plant studies, poignant street pictures, and groundbreaking nudes present a singular vision developed over seven decades of work. The first major retrospective in the United States of Cunningham’s work in 35 years, the exhibition examines on the artist’s Seattle upbringing and includes works by female artists such as Ruth Asawa and Martha Graham who Cunningham championed, as well as works by Group f/64 which she helped found with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and others. Cunningham’s spark of creative possibility asserted photography as a distinct and valuable art form in the 20th century.

Imogen Cunningham: Ruth Asawa Family And Sculpture #1106

Imogen Cunningham: Magnolia Blossom #1103

Imogen Cunningham: The Unmade Bed #1101

Alberto Giacometti Verbal Descriptions: Annette Standing

Alberto Giacometti Verbal Descriptions: Head of a Man in Profile

Alberto Giacometti Verbal Descriptions: Head of Diego

Alberto Giacometti Verbal Descriptions: Tall Thin Head

Alberto Giacometti Verbal Descriptions: The Mountain Road

Alberto Giacometti: The Cage

Alberto Giacometti: Tall Thin Head

Alberto Giacometti: Head Of A Man In Profile

Alberto Giacometti: Reliquary Figure

Alberto Giacometti: The Mountain Road

AUDIO GUIDE TRANSCRIPT 

NARRATOR:
Boafo painted Reflection I in 2018, after leaving Ghana to study in Vienna, Austria. The radiator under the mirror deliberately points out the change to a European setting. 

The new environment sparked a period of self-evaluation for the artist: it led him – for the first time – to paint himself. 

AMOAKO BOAFO:
Working with myself helped me understand who I am as an artist and a human being. Making that image also help others look at themselves and think of things differently.  

It is a way that I wanted to experience my masculinity myself and not what society sees to be normal. I wanted to see how it looks like when you explore more of the flesh.

NARRATOR:
As part of this exploration, Boafo has developed a distinctive skin color palette of umber brown and ultramarine blue. He applies the paint directly to the canvas using his fingers.  

AMOAKO BOAFO:
I wasn’t able to move forward with the brush painting the way I wanted my characters to feel, the way I want to express their feeling, because for me, painting is just more than capturing the perfection of a person. There is character. There is feeling. There is energy. The brush could not give me that kind of feeling. And so I arrived at painting with my finger.  

NARRATOR:
Here, the artist meets his own gaze in the mirror.

AMOAKO BOAFO:
I think sometimes we look away from our experiences, and painting being a tool for me to express myself, I don’t want to shy away from the experiences. I want to look at it. I want people to see me looking at it because for me I feel like that’s the space where I get to be myself.

Reflection 1, 2018

Under The Wave Off Kanagawa

Fine Wind, Clear Weather. Mount Fuji. White Fujiyama Ski Gelande

American artist Alexander Calder (1898–1976) is celebrated for revolutionizing sculpture with his renowned mobiles and stabiles, which range from the miniature to the monumental. This exhibition traces Calder's career, highlighting his most important themes, styles, and materials from the 1920s through the 1970s. Calder's dynamic abstract mobiles mingle with an array of his stationary stabiles of various scales, including notable works such as Gamma (1947), Bougainvillier (1947), and Toile d'araignée (1965). In Motion spans several of SAM's galleries, including its double-height gallery, a unique space in the museum designed for large-scale works that features several overlooks from the floor above. The exhibition demonstrates Calder’s unique vision, one that stands apart in the history of modern art and has left a profound legacy on American art and culture.

In spring 2023, SAM announced the generosity of patrons Jon and Kim Shirley in gifting the Shirley Family Calder Collection to the museum. The collection—one of the most important private holdings of Calder's art—is the result of 35 years of thoughtful collecting. In Motion reflects the depth and breadth of this collection in a non-chronological narrative that covers Calder's career throughout the decades featuring many significant examples from his production: mobiles, stabiles, a constellation, paintings, illustrations, and prints.

This inaugural exhibition also sets in motion a new era at SAM, introducing ongoing exhibitions and programs centered around Calder and his legacy taking place in downtown Seattle, the Olympic Sculpture Park, and through local and national partnerships. These efforts are supported by a generous endowment and annual financial commitments from Jon and Kim Shirley.

Mountains (1:5 intermediate maquette)

Listen to the exhibition audio guide featuring artists' commentary on 18 highlight objects. Speakers include Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Neal Ambrose Smith, Marie Watt, Andrea Carlson, Jeffrey Gibson, and G. Peter Jemison.

Warrior for the Twenty First Century

Trade Canoe (Gifts for Trading Land with White People)

Transcript:

By 1993, after 12 years in the United States, I made a final decision to go back to China. I went back and immediately my brother brought me to the antique market. That's why I have to come back to these vases. So I started collecting. I'm so drawn by so many antiquity in the flea market. That time, maybe it was the last chance so many antiquity ever being in flea market because the whole of China started digging and building highways and households. A lot have since been discovered. 
 
Yeah, we did the photo. I asked my brother, I said, I'm going to drop this one, can you catch it with my F3 camera, Nikon. So I said, are you ready? He said, yes, so I started to drop it. You hear the crack and you have to clean up the dust. Ironically, this later being seen as some kind of iconic image of me. They call me some kind of, I don't know, icon against authority or culture, which is okay, but that's the story.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn

Transcript:

My name is Ai Weiwei. I'm 67 years old,, nationality, I'm Chinese.  I live in Europe. This work is probably one of the most popular impressionist works by Monet and surprisingly, he spent his last 20 years painting about 250 works like this. About this water lily pond. So it's really a kind of epic type of work. To structure it, I need 650,000 Lego pieces.
And my relation to it is , one, we live in Xinjiang. My father was exiled in this underground dugout. And you see the image here, the black hole, it's the black hole there. So, I integrated my youth and my father's exiled situation into this, because my father, in that particular time when I was 10, he told me the story. He was in Paris, and his artworks was selected by Monet's independent salon, which was a big deal for a young artist. So, this work, basically, wrapped up my father's tragic life. Studied in Paris, come back to China, joined the revolution, then, being exiled. And I grew up in there. And that experience made me today.

Water Lilies #2 - Seattle Asian Art Museum

Transcript: 

I gave up painting about 20 years. I don't do paintings anymore. I hate the smell of the painting.  And I'm a very good painter. So, I think, okay, Lego may be a good approach. Lego is an interesting media, because it relates to human history. Like in Greek time or Romans, they use mosaic. And, today, actually, all our images from the computer is a pixel, it's digitally dots. So, I think it connects our modern technology to the variation of the way of expression. I just designed... I don't even have to physically touch it. I give to anybody in anywhere, they can structure exactly the same. That's the beauty of it. I think it's perfect for me.

Illumination

Transcript: 

Double stool is a pair of stools connected and through its own logic, its own angle and the craftsmanship and being finely constructed by classic furniture makers. So those stools are Ming or Qing Dynasty stools that are a few hundred years old, very common at that time and have a perfect structure, three legs. 

And that time, of course, I'm very used to understand Marcel Duchamp’s ready made. But I still think I need to go one step ahead of it, so I needed to give a little bit more of my cultural background understanding. So the ready-made is no longer objects, but a cultural heritage. So I take China's culture or Chinese politics as a ready-made. So I restructure it and then make a commentary and very often it's kind of humorous and critical at the same time. So I developed this in more stools with no added elements and developed it into a self formed circle and it's very strong structurally and again, no nails. It takes a profound knowledge about furniture making and only Chinese can do that.

Stool

Transcript:

The bicycle is a few objects when we grew up every household has in China. When I was a child, the whole society is very poor. To have a bike is a very luxury item. And the Forever bicycle was the best brand at that time.  It's very durable and it's very practical matter and build very strong for the countryside. But in China, it's changing. More cars are being bought and the air is very polluted. So it's really related to people and citizens. And today, when I started architecture to teach the students how to build, I tell them you can build with any material, not just bricks and concrete. I said let's use daily objects to build a structure. So, after discussion, we managed to use bicycles, because you see everywhere. But you never think to use bicycles to structure something else. It's very much like the stools, same kind idea. Use its own logic to destroy itself to become something new.

Forever Bicycles

Transcript: 

Well, this is Rubens' work. My father loves Rubens. I think he just loves those very strong physical muscles and the nudities of those, you know, beautiful compositions. And for me, it's the perfect piece to structure a Lego work, but I have to add some personal touch on it. So, I put a panda behind this, a horse. Panda in China, nickname of the secret police. So, we will say, oh, he's a Panda, that means he works undercover. So, I use that to describe China and Europe's relations. It's just, with some personal, even family influence of classics, of the western art, and also, with modern China's connection.

The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus in Green

Transcript:

It started around 2019. So I want to do a set of zodiacs which relate to every viewer in Chinese understanding. The background of zodiacs is the Qing Dynasty in the Imperial Palace. Actually, it's kind of fixtures in the garden. By 1840, the British has twice invaded China, second time with the French, so they looted the palace and took all those sculptures back to Europe. Years later, about 7 of them appeared in the market. So, China said we will buy it back. You know, it's basically, it's not a Chinese treasure, it's really made in Qing Dynasty by an Italian minister and I think a casted by French. So, it's such a colorful story. I think because there's no complete set, I have to create the other five: dragon, snake, lamb, dog, rooster. So I made those in the same style, then a set of zodiac comes out.

Circle of Animals

Transcript:

Snake Ceiling is a product after my deep involvement with one earthquake. 2008, right before Olympics. May 12th, Sichuan had a devastating earthquake, which made about 80,000 people dead. Among them, there's a lot of students. So, I questioning the government, first, how many students are dead? Second, school building are built by government. It should pass a regulation of earthquake.
So, how come so many school building collapsed, but the building next to it, residential are not collapsed, and the hospital not collapse. But just school buildings. So, I really think there's a huge corruption among these contractors and government officials. Because nobody give us clear answers, so we go through a very basic research to go to the location to find out who was killed, and what's their name, birthday and location. Gradually, with a long, very difficult research, we found 5,219 students' name and birthdays. I post it on my blog. The whole nation was surprised, this guy is crazy. Because nobody can ever question the government. So, that really is become a live social, political movement.
This Snake Ceiling we used these kind students' backpacks, because when I visit those locations, I see everywhere is students' backpacks. So, I used that as a symbol, structured snake, which, in China, means unpredictable danger.

Snake Ceiling

On the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth, Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect examines the American master’s 75-year career.

Presenting 110 of Wyeth’s finest paintings and drawings, this first major retrospective since the artist’s death challenges long-held critical notions of Wyeth as a realist and offers unexpected perspectives on his art, legacy, and influences.

Organized by the Seattle Art Museum in partnership with the Brandywine River Museum of Art, and including rarely seen loans from the Wyeth family, the exhibition follows the evolution of one of America’s most famous painters to reveal a deep well of humanity and imagination.

Andrew Wyeth: Snow Hill

Andrew Wyeth: Black Velvet

Andrew Wyeth: Coming Storm

Andrew Wyeth: Intro

Asian Art Museum Tour: Bewitched #2 Seoul #2234

One great museum. Three awesome locations: the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the Olympic Sculpture Park.

Seattle Art Museum

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks