Don’t worry if you missed out on the giveaway. The Asian Art Museum is generous with its free days: admission is free for everyone on the first Thursday, first Saturday and second Thursday of every month. And the big open secret is that admission is always “suggested,” which means it’s by donation. You have to give something to get in, but you can decide how much.
I know this because in a previous life, I worked at the Asian Art Museum’s front desk. I loved my shifts there. Visitors who came in the door were always relaxed and genuinely happy to be there. Volunteer Park is so peaceful and the Asian Art Museum is such a jewel it’s hard to be grumpy there.
The Asian Art Museum is the original home of the Seattle Art Museum (which is now spread across three locations in the city). The 87-year-old Art Deco building needed things like seismic retrofitting, climate control, all the electrical redone. The historic building closed in February 2017 and much of the interior was gutted to bring it up to modern standards. The exterior was bumped out to add a freight elevator and a 2,650-square-foot special exhibition gallery.
You will definitely want to bring the family to check out this renovated museum. Here’s how I’d do it:
Personally I’d wait a few weeks, at least, for the hullabaloo to die down. As for opening weekend, I don’t know where 10,000 people are going to park (there’s a handful of free parking spots in front of the museum) and I don’t want to think about 10,000 people using the one restroom.
The Asian Art Museum I love is a serene gem in the oasis of Volunteer Park. I’d pick a weekday morning, when I know the museum will be quiet, and when the weather is decent so we can combine a museum outing with playground time. There’s an excellent playground in Volunteer Park, plus the beautiful Volunteer Park Conservatory is just down the drive.
What is different about the new museum? A lot of that $56 million got spent on stuff you can’t see, structural and mechanical upgrades. There’s a somewhat-controversial glass-enclosed addition jutting out the back of the building. Downstairs, you can peek into the new Asian paintings conservation lab, the first of its kind on the West coast. I heard a woman in the lobby tell her friend she was going to look for “the ladies’ room,” and her friend leaned in to correct her: there’s just one restroom for everyone. Which is progressive, I suppose, but… ick.
I was really disappointed that the children’s play room, which used to cap off one wing of the building, is now a meditation room featuring three large Buddhas. I get that the young families aren’t the only people who use the museum, but it was awfully nice to have a little break room that was always stocked with dress-up clothes, puppets and books. Inside the galleries, there are a few nods to the youngest visitors. We found some shapes on a table to arrange into faces, and a somewhat-glitchy game where you can strike poses to match the statues.
What’s unusual about the galleries is that the art isn’t organized by country or time period, but by broad themes, like “divine bodies” and “color and play.” You’ll see contemporary objects plunked next to really old stuff, a little hodge-podgy but fun to look at. Explore the galleries and you’ll discover all kinds of neat treasures. Here’s a few that caught our eye:
- Tiny Japanese netsuke in funny shapes: three puppies, a cow and her calf, a dog scratching its neck.
- A fireman’s quilted coat from 19th century Japan, featuring rabbits pounding mochi on the back.
- An ultra-modern, bright orange bull made of plastic. (It’s Nandi, the sacred bull that’s a vehicle of the Hindu god Shiva.)
- A Guanyin from 16th century China with 11 heads!
There’s a new education lab downstairs that will be an open drop-in studio anytime a school group isn’t using it. When we visited on a preview day, the room was still pristine. “It’ll never be this quiet, it’ll never be this clean,” said Regan Pro, the museum’s deputy director of education and public engagement. “And that’s glorious.”
And one more piece of terrific news for kids: All public school trips to the Seattle Art Museum are now free. For Title 1 schools, where a high percentage of the students live in low-income households, that even includes free transportation. Way to go, SAM!