SAM's origin story begins not with wealth but with generosity during scarcity. In 1933, at the pit of the Great Depression, Richard E. Fuller and his mother Margaret MacTavish Fuller donated $250,000 to build an art museum in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill. The city contributed the land; architect Carl F. Gould of Bebb and Gould designed an Art Deco building that opened on June 23, 1933, with a collection of 1,926 pieces. Fuller served as the museum's director for the next four decades, never accepting a salary. The roots ran even deeper: SAM traces its lineage to the Seattle Fine Arts Society, organized in 1905, which merged with the Washington Arts Association in 1917 and eventually renamed itself the Art Institute of Seattle in 1931. The Institute's collection, housed in the former Capitol Hill mansion of collector Horace C. Henry, formed the core of what the Fullers built upon.

By the late 1980s, the Volunteer Park building could no longer contain what SAM had become. After acquiring and then discarding a downtown block once occupied by a J. C. Penney department store, the museum settled on a site one block south. In December 1991, SAM reopened in a $62 million facility designed by the postmodern architect Robert Venturi. The original Capitol Hill building was reinvented as the Seattle Asian Art Museum in 1994, and following a $56 million renovation it reopened in 2020. The third campus, the Olympic Sculpture Park, opened in January 2007 as a free public space on the central waterfront just north of downtown. Three locations, three distinct identities -- Asian art in a hilltop park, contemporary work on First Avenue, monumental sculptures on the shores of Elliott Bay -- and all of them SAM.

The collection has swelled from fewer than 2,000 pieces in 1933 to roughly 25,000 today, yet the museum regularly displays only about 4.5 percent of its holdings. What it does show ranges from the reverent to the startling. A Tlingit Raven Screen carved around 1810, attributed to the artist Kadyisdu.axch', hangs near Do-Ho Suh's Some/One, a suit of armor made from thousands of military dog tags. In the downtown lobby, Cai Guo-Qiang's Inopportune: Stage One suspends cars mid-explosion, threaded with sequenced light tubes. Out at the Sculpture Park, Alexander Calder's Eagle and Richard Serra's Wake preside over Puget Sound views. And then there is Kane Quaye's coffin shaped like a Mercedes-Benz, a Ghanaian fantasy casket from 1991. Blockbuster exhibitions have punctuated SAM's history: a 1959 Van Gogh show drew 126,100 visitors, and the 1978 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at Seattle Center pulled 1.3 million people in four months -- still the museum's all-time attendance record.

SAM's most harrowing chapter began with ambition. In 2006, the museum partnered with Washington Mutual to expand the Venturi building into a shared 16-story tower designed by Portland architect Brad Cloepfil. The expansion added 70 percent more gallery space, and donors contributed over a thousand new pieces valued at more than a billion dollars. Then Washington Mutual collapsed in 2008 -- the largest bank failure in American history at the time -- leaving SAM with eight floors of empty office space and $5.8 million in annual costs it could not cover. The museum absorbed an accumulated debt of $56 million. Grants from JPMorgan Chase and the Gates Foundation helped stabilize the institution, and Northwestern Mutual eventually purchased the building's upper floors. SAM receives only 4 percent of its funding from government sources; ticket sales and memberships carry the rest.

The museum's story also includes moments of moral consequence. In 1997, SAM became the subject of the first lawsuit against an American museum over Nazi-looted art when the heirs of French-Jewish dealer Paul Rosenberg sought to recover a Matisse painting, Odalisque, stolen during World War II. Museum director Mimi Gardner Gates brokered a settlement returning the work -- only the second such restitution by a U.S. museum. More recently, SAM's security officers voted in 2022 to form the SAM Visitors Service Officers Union, and labor tensions over wages and working conditions have continued to shape the institution's internal life. Through controversy and financial crisis alike, SAM's collection has kept growing, its doors have kept opening, and Hammering Man has kept swinging -- a fitting emblem for a museum that has always found a way to get back on its feet.