The Frye Art Museum is an art museum located in the First Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, USA. The museum emphasizes painting and sculpture from the nineteenth century to the present. Its holdings originate in the private collection of Charles and Emma Frye. Charles, owner of a local meatpacking plant, set aside money in his will for a museum to house the Fryes' collection of 232 paintings. The Frye Art Museum opened to the public in 1952 as Seattle's first free art museum. The museum building was originally designed by Paul Thiry, although it has since been considerably altered.Charles Frye's will required that the majority of the Fryes' own collection continue always to be on view in rooms of a certain size; stipulations were also made about lighting conditions and specifically concrete floors . He also required that admission always be free. These conditions were enough to keep the Seattle Art Museum from being interested in his collection.The Fryes' collection consisted entirely of representational works, with a tendency toward "the dark, the dramatic, and the psychological" rather than "the genteel". The museum's permanent collection reflects Charles Frye's relatively conservative artistic tastes, and the museum continued to be dedicated exclusively to representational art, both in its acquisitions and its exhibits. This conservatism reflected the artistic and social values of its first director, Walser Greathouse and of his even more conservative widow and successor Ida Kay Greathouse, who ran the museum until 1993.However, exhibitions under new, professional management in recent years have been far more venturesome, eliciting comparisons to Seattle's Henry Art Gallery. Exhibitions in recent years have included "Subspontaneous: Francesca Lohmann and Rob Rhee," featuring sculptures involving natural forces and ecological growth, "Agnieszka Polska: Love Bite," and "Unsettling Femininity: Selections from the Frye Art Museum Collection." The museum often redeploys its permanent collection, experimenting with exhibiting it in different arrangements. In 2018, the museum had 109,249 total attendees and a membership base of 2,383.In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum temporarily closed for in-person visits and now offers online art viewing and educational opportunities through the Frye From Home program. On August 28, 2020, the museum announced its expectation to reopen for in-person visits in October 2020.
