The Seattle Art Museum’s growing collection contains over 25,000 works of art from around the world, with additional rotating exhibits bringing even more pieces to Seattle art enthusiasts. Stop by today to check out these temporary exhibits before they’re gone or check out the permanent offerings. View more at SAM.
Honoring 50 Years of Papunya Tula Painting – open through April 28
50,000 years of Indigenous knowledge were largely ignored until 1971, so elders in the central deserts of Australia began to paint. Their results are both contemporary and ancient, encouraging outsiders to see their country as full of eternal vitality.
Diego Cibelli: The Triumph of Nature Over Man’s Folly – open May 8, 2024-May 10, 2026
Contemporary artist Diego Cibelli presents a site-specific response to the ceiling fresco in SAM’s ornate Porcelain Room, The Triumph of Valor over Time by Giovanni Tiepolo. This project is guest curated by Christian Larsen, a cultural historian and independent curator.
Memory Map – open through May 12
One of the most innovative artists of her generation, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has forged new paths for contemporary art by interrogating American life and identity from a Native perspective. Explore five decades of her barrier-breaking artwork in Memory Map, her most comprehensive retrospective to date.
Elizabeth Malaska: All Be Your Mirror – open through June 16
Portland artist Elizabeth Malaska’s grand tableaux respond to a history of Western painting and power dynamics that often assigns women the roles of submissive accessories. In search of more potent and less pleasing feminine subjects, her tour de force paintings unpack historical genres—such as the reclining nude—and offer up challenging and introspective visions.
Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture – open June 21-Sept. 2
This exhibition celebrates an alternative and oft-overlooked story in art history: the aesthetic practices that emerged in the West Coast in the 1960s and ‘70s as counter to the New York-centric avant-garde. This exhibition will present a broader, more inclusive view of these overlapping countercultural art movements.
Jacob Lawrence: American Storyteller – open June 28-Jan. 5, 2025
One of the 20th century’s most impactful American artists, Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) is celebrated for his deftness as a visual storyteller. This focused exhibition brings together works by Lawrence from SAM’s and local collections in a series of case studies that survey themes that inform the artist’s works.
Calder: In Motion, The Shirley Family Collection – open through Aug. 4
American artist Alexander Calder 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.
Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams – open Oct. 17, 2024-Jan. 19, 2025
Co-organized by the Seattle Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, this exhibition will be the summative career retrospective of one of the most prolific and boundary-breaking artists of our time. For fifty years, she has upended hierarchies of art and craft, insisting that artistic expression is that “extra inch of life” that nourishes the soul even in the most challenging circumstances.
Remember the Rain – open through Oct. 28
A popular Haitian proverb says: “Remember the rain that makes your corn grow.” This expression of gratitude, remembrance, perseverance and an understanding of the connectedness between heaven and earth resonates across the works in this gallery.
Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize Winner: Bethany Collins – open Nov. 14, 2024-May 4, 2025
Bethany Collins is the recipient of the 2023 Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, awarded by SAM to an early career Black artist. Collins’s conceptually driven work uses language as both subject and medium to explore the nuances and intersections of language, racial identity, and American history.
