Olympic Sculpture Park
— Calder's red bird above the bay.
Not only on a wall.
“Nine acres of outdoor sculpture above the Seattle waterfront, on the site of a former petroleum storage yard cleaned up and reopened by the Seattle Art Museum in 2007. The path zigzags down from Western Avenue to the rail line and the rocks, with Elliott Bay below and the Olympic Mountains across it. Alexander Calder's red Eagle stands at the top. A length of Richard Serra's weathering steel waves through the middle. Roy McMakin's elm sits on a small green island near the bottom. The whole park is free to walk and open from dawn to dusk.
Olympic Sculpture Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Olympic Sculpture Park is a free, nine-acre outdoor art park on the Seattle waterfront, opened by the Seattle Art Museum in January 2007. The site was a Unocal petroleum storage and transfer yard for most of the twentieth century. The soil was remediated and the topography rebuilt by the New York architects Weiss/Manfredi as a zigzag of landscaped terraces stepping down from Western Avenue to Elliott Bay and the BNSF rail line. Permanent installations include Alexander Calder's painted-steel Eagle (1971), Richard Serra's Wake (2004), Louise Bourgeois's Father and Son fountain, and Roy McMakin's Love and Loss. The park draws several hundred thousand visitors a year.
Admission is free and the park is open every day from sunrise to sunset, with all permanent sculptures accessible without a ticket. The PACCAR Pavilion at 2901 Western Avenue, at the top of the campus, holds restrooms, a café, and rotating exhibitions and is open during Seattle Art Museum hours. SAM offers free guided tours on Saturday mornings during the warmer months. The main path is a Z-shaped descent of about a third of a mile from Western Avenue down to the Elliott Bay seawall, ADA-accessible the whole way, with benches at each landing and clear lines of sight to most of the sculptures.
The park sits directly on Elliott Bay, with the BNSF mainline running between the lower sculpture meadow and the seawall and a pedestrian overpass crossing to a small shoreline beach. From the upper terraces the view runs west across the bay to the Olympic Mountains, a sixty-mile horizon of snow well into early summer. Washington State Ferries cross north and south on schedule out of Colman Dock, about a mile and a half to the south. On a winter morning a low marine layer fills the bay and Calder's red Eagle stands out against grey water and white sky like a flag.