The museum spaces upstairs are so large that one might prefer to do a series of visits and nibble away at the collection which numbers over 23000 pieces. For the 75th anniversary, it has received 1000 new pieces through donations and gifts. Some 200 of them are now on display.

The visit begins in the Wright Galleries for Modern and Contemporary Art. The space allotted to the genre is the largest in the museum which is appropriate considering the size of some of the works. As much as we enjoyed these galleries, there were others that we preferred. The American Art collection is a representative collection of some of the country’s finest art, silver, and furniture. Also particularly fine are the galleries for Native Art of the Americas. Here, the dominant field (as in all the museum) is in North-west work, but there is good representation from societies as diverse as Peru, Central America and New Guinea.

Upstairs, the permanent collection of African Art is particularly interesting in its study of dress and masks. We were, however, most taken with the Porcelain Room where a collection generally dating 1740 - 1760 is particularly well displayed. The European section with its emphasis on Renaissance art is fairly predictable; there are the requisites; a Reubens and a Van Dyke, but there are also a number of unattributed works.

The Simonyi Special Exhibition Galleries are more eclectic and contain many of the recent gifts, many of which are modern pieces. It’s quite a collection. SAM goes the distance to make your visit as interesting as possible. Descriptions of the works tend to be thorough, an audio guide is available and there are touch-screen kiosks where you can watch interviews with artists, listen to music or discover the history behind the work. You will need at least two hours to explore the space.

I thought the exhibit in February consisting of a great many Asian artists was really interesting. It was large and included many types of art including multimedia presentations, photography, paintin,g and sculpture. My favorite parts of this exhibit were the collages of unknown women created after the 1998 Women's Summit in Beijing and a trio of movies that showed different parts of Asia and its urban areas. There was a really interesting photography project (within the exhibit) that compared the ancient and modern types of architecture in Asian cities and a number of other photo projects in the exhibit that showed the artists and their relation to their work as they were somehow installed within the photographs.

Another exhibit that occurred at the same time was a history of glass in the Pacific northwest. This was very small and absolutely beautiful.

The permanent collection at the SAM is a little disappointing and I know I went into it, but I don't remember any of what is there.

Throughout the next year and-a-half, the SAM and its collaborator the Seattle Asian Art Museum (which I did not visit) are going through a major expansion project. I'm not sure of all of the details and I hope it does well for the art scene in Seattle in general.

My boyfriend still lives there, so I will be going back at some point.