Bellevue Arts Museum
Encyclopedia
Street fair
A street fair is a fair that celebrates the character of a neighborhood. As its name suggests, it is usually held on the main street of a neighborhood....
art in 1947. After several temporary locations, it moved to the third floor of Bellevue Square
Bellevue Square
Bellevue Square is a shopping center in Bellevue, eight miles east of Seattle. The mall has 180 retail stores, including anchors JCPenney, Macy's, and Nordstrom, specialty stores like LEGO, Tiffany and Co. the Apple Store, Armani Exchange and Williams-Sonoma, Lacoste, and restaurants like P.F....
, a large shopping center in the center of downtown Bellevue, Washington
Bellevue, Washington
Bellevue is a city in the Eastside region of King County, Washington, United States, across Lake Washington from Seattle. Long known as a suburb or satellite city of Seattle, it is now categorized as an edge city or a boomburb. The population was 122,363 at the 2010 census.Downtown Bellevue is...
in 1983. In 2001 the museum finally moved into its own building.
Located just across the street from Bellevue Square, the distinctive new building was designed by noted architect Steven Holl
Steven Holl
Steven Holl is an American architect and watercolorist, perhaps best known for the 1998 Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland, the 2003 Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the celebrated 2007 Bloch Building addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City,...
. It is seen by many residents of Bellevue as playing a role in the transformation of the downtown from series of suburban strip malls to a sophisticated city with a variety of cultural attractions.
The museum subsequently ran into financial difficulties and was forced to close to the public in 2003. After a lengthy fund raising campaign, extensive interior remodeling, a slight change in name and a new focus on crafts and design, the museum re-opened on June 18, 2005 with an exhibition of teapots.
In contrast to conventional art museums, Bellevue Arts Museum has no permanent collection. Rather, it emphasizes education and hands-on involvement through an extensive selection of classes and workshops.