The largest visual arts institution in the Pacific Northwest comprises three entities: the main museum downtown (aka SAM), nine-acre Olympic Sculpture Park, and Seattle Asian Art Museum, which underwent an extensive renovation and curatorial reimagining in 2020. SAM has both the resources and scope to host exhibitions on a grand scale of celebrated international artists; it’s the Big One. The museum’s 2017 Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, a trailblazer in the now wildly popular genre of immersive art installations, exemplifies its ambitious global reach, while its Indigenous Matrix of Northwest women printmakers speaks to its enduring local commitments.

Established in 2000 by the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen (whom we can also thank for KEXP as we know it), MoPop’s purview has always been a delightfully broad and nebulous thing. Conceived as the Experience Music Project, you can now expect the museum to host everything from an exploration of tattoo culture to a journey into the world of indie video game development. A uniting premise is legitimizing and paying homage to forms of expression—science fiction, popular music, horror movies—that aren’t considered “high art” and might traditionally be excluded from a museum.

MOHAI, fittingly wedged in South Lake Union, presents the history of Seattle and the larger Puget Sound region primarily through the lens of its technical and commercial innovations. The museum’s extensive collection—from a Boeing B-1 commercial airplane to an ample trove of clothing items that lend shape, color, and cut to Seattleites of the past—generates just the right amount of awe to occupy the younger set.

What began as a small collection of flight paraphernalia, saved from the ravenous jaws of time by a few aviation enthusiasts in the 1960s, has ballooned into the world’s largest nonprofit air and space museum (and one of our city’s most beloved field trip destinations and reliable family outings). Entering the museum’s main showroom, the behemoth aircraft looming above are like the skeletons of prehistoric beasts, immense and seemingly ready to roar back to life at the lightest touch.

Every Seattleite, we’d venture to speculate, can identify a Chihuly by age five. The undulating lines and tentacle-like wisps of his radiantly colorful “baskets” and chandeliers are, after all, both unmistakable and omnipresent—and this museum in Seattle Center holds some of his largest and best-known works. The Glasshouse, reminiscent of a conservatory or terrarium, contains a 100-foot-tall froth of cascading glass that beams with inner light on a sunny day and pulses like embers on a cloudy one. The garden is an entirely different place, worthy of another visit to observe the sculptures aflame in the dark, after nightfall. 

Big museums can be awe-inspiring, but they can also be overwhelming. Sometimes—maybe late afternoon on a Saturday, during that liminal malaise between a post-brunch snooze and cocktail hour—you’re craving a more manageable art experience. That’s the Frye. The modest size of this First Hill institution belies the impressive amount of artistic ground it covers. Curators pair heady contemporary art exhibits (Anastacia-Reneé, Diane Arbus, group shows) with the robust and somewhat curious collection of the museum’s founders, Charles and Emma Frye; an animal painting could mingle with a Warhol film here. A lap around won’t suffice, but you’ll feel satisfied for the day. Free admission means you can always come back for more.

Ballard’s National Nordic Museum covers far more than the neighborhood and its Scandinavian roots: Granted federal status in 2019 by an act of Congress, it features modern art and historic artifacts with an emphasis on native and bicultural identities and social justice. Whether you’re looking to connect with your own family’s immigration story (a la the old Nordic Heritage Museum before it went national), see a thought-provoking photography exhibit, or just sip a København latte from Freya cafe, this small-but-mighty gallery provides a place for Ballard’s past—and an optimistic vision for its future. 

For all its dusty, musty charm, memories of the old Burke quickly fade inside the Olson Kundig–designed space that opened on the University of Washington campus in 2019, costing almost $100 million in construction and moving costs. Beyond halls populated with Indigenous artifacts, dinosaur fossils, or evolution-explaining sculptures, the building houses laboratories and workrooms populated with actual scientists. Placards explain their work ("Rob is curating spiders!"), while the exhibits themselves include context and admissions of no-longer-kosher acquisition styles. A T. rex skull on the third floor is the most complete in the world, and the Off the Rez cafe dishing frybread and Indian tacos rounds out the university’s standout museum.

Weekend crowds waiting for dim sum spill onto the sidewalk a block away, but inside this 191o building sit three stories of history- and culture-spanning photography, artifacts, and art. Wing Luke, named for a boundary-breaking Seattle politician, traces the minority experience here, delving into just what it means—and once meant—to be Asian Pacific American. The building’s architecture blends modern elements (like that epic staircase) with spaces preserved from decades ago. Exhibits rotate regularly, but if you have time and forethought, book one of the guided tours through the neighborhood. 

An eight-year occupation of the abandoned Colman School—the first in the city attended by Black students—willed it into being. A three-year Covid closure necessitated a pivot to virtual programming. Today, 15 years into its existence, Northwest African American Museum embodies the hard-fought, ever-evolving journey of being Black in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond the historic photos and abstract art, virtual exhibits and robust educational programs (interactive story times; a history-delving descendants series) extend its mission of celebrating and preserving Black culture.

Contemporary art has both the burden and blessing of a multifaceted existence, one unbound by historic constraints, that makes it all that much harder to define—and, at times, justify. That's perhaps what makes Henry, located on the western edge of the University of Washington campus, all the more remarkable. Founded in 1926, the gallery has steadfastly remained devoted to the genre from local and international artists alike. Meditative "Light Reign" is both architecture and permanent piece, while Kelly Akashi's upcoming exhibit featuring wax, glass, rope, bronze, and silicone examines the tactile perceptions of permanence through touch.

On a busy stretch of Broadway facing a concrete Seattle University parking structure, an angular, all-white former medical building houses one of the city's newest art institutions. Founder Greg Lundgren, an artist himself, launched MoM in 2019 as a way to "increase the artist population of Seattle and inspire our local arts ecosystem." Airy gallery spaces punctuate the displayed works, allowing for unbridled curiosity and creativity: One month, bedazzled SPAM cans and buckets of fried chicken. The next, a collection of shag carpets, woven curtains, futon mattresses, and soft reimaginings of textile art.