Tacoma Museum of Art-JB Lewis-McChord

The Tacoma Art Museum is a museum in Tacoma, Washington emphasizing art and artists from the Northwest and broader western region. Founded in 1935, the museum has strong roots in the community and anchors Tacoma’s downtown university and museum district.

HistoryThe Tacoma Art Museum developed out of the Tacoma Art League, an informal gathering that began around 1891. In the 1930s, it was renamed the Tacoma Art Society, before finally becoming the Tacoma Art Museum in 1964. The museum is dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the visual arts of the American Northwest, with the mission of bringing people together through art. The museum’s permanent collection includes the premier collection of Tacoma local Dale Chihuly’s glass artwork on permanent public display. In 1971, the L. T. Murray family (owners of the Murray Pacific Northwest timber company) gave the Tacoma Art Museum a three-story building at 12th Street and Pacific Avenue. Built in 1922, the building at 1123 Pacific Avenue previously housed the National Bank of Tacoma.

Nearly twice the size of its previous location, the new $22-million steel and glass structure provided the space to exhibit more of the permanent collection. In designing the building, Predock drew inspiration from the region’s light, its relationship to the water, the neighborhood’s industrial history and character, Mount Rainier, the Thea Foss Waterway, and the surrounding structures in what is now known as the Museum District. Completed in November 2014, an additional $15.5-million building project has added approximately 16,000 square feet (1500 m²), and houses the new Haub Family Collection of Western American Art. This collection establishes the Tacoma Art Museum as the only major museum of Western American art of this caliber in the Northwest. It also enables the museum to fully explore the art history of the West while integrating its Western and Northwest collections.