HistoryLink Tours

This tour provides a glimpse into the City of Seattle’s civic art collection, highlighting several works in the central downtown area. Seattle’s foray into establishing a public art collection began in 1907 when a commission was formed to create a sculptural monument of Chief Seattle (Si’ahl, ca. 1780-1866), Chief of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes, who greeted the city’s first white settlers in the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, the city has committed to building a civic art collection by creating a city department dedicated to the arts and culture and enacting one of the country’s first public-art ordinances that dedicates at least one percent of funds for construction projects to art. Since its beginning, the collection has grown to over 400 publicly sited/integrated works and nearly 3,600 portable works.

The art experienced on this tour spans nearly a century and feature artists from all around the United States, around Washington, and right in Seattle. This group of works highlights the diversity of the civic art collection with art created in many media: ceramics, glass, painting, wood carving, light art, sculpture, fiber art, and site-integrated work. These works are sited in or near Seattle cultural and civic institutions — a library, a concert hall, a museum, a small city park, and a convention center — highlighting the variety of spaces that public art can occupy. We hope you enjoy this peek into one of the country’s finest civic art collections. Let’s get walking.

From our starting point at the Seattle Public Library this walk covers a distance of 1.4 miles. The terrain includes city sidewalks, an urban park, some hills, and a steep grade between 4th and 1st Avenues.