SEATTLE— Before the newly refurbished Seattle Art Museum (SAM) opened to the public on May 5, a festive pre-opening event drew many people to the city. In addition to local supporters and donors, art-world luminaries seen at the party on April 28 included Douglas Baxter, president of Pace Wildenstein; Dominique and Nicole Chevalier, Paris dealers in tapestries who are known to have sold to Bill Gates; old master paintings dealer Bob Haboldt; and John Walsh, director emeritus of the Getty Museum.

The real star, however, was SAM itself—one museum with three sites. First is the Olympic Sculpture Park, which opened in January 2007, transforming downtown Seattle’s largest remaining waterfront property into a showplace for modern and contemporary art by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Richard Serra, and Mark di Suvero. There is also the beautiful art deco building in Volunteer Park, which was built in 1933 and was home to the SAM collection, until it moved to a newly constructed building downtown, at which time the Seattle Asian Art Museum was created and opened at the site in 1944. The building needs some renovations.

But the most exciting component of SAM—and the one that bought out-of-towners for the grand opening weekend—is the museum’s expanded downtown museum, designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture and developed in conjunction with Washington Mutual’s new headquarters. During the building’s first phase, which has just been completed, 118,000 square feet of vertical space has been built; SAM owns 12 floors, but is leasing eight of them to WAMU to use as office space. The museum now occupies only four floors, but after ten years it will occupy the additional space. WAMU’s building is 42 stories overall, and the museum can expand upward as its needs as its needs dictate, including removing floors to build double-height galleries.  This flexible approach guarantees the future existence of a museum of 450,000 square feet in the heart of Seattle.

Coinciding with the opening of the downtown museum and SAM’s 75th anniversary was an unprecedented number of donations from museum patrons and collectors. In order to fund the expansion, the museum raised more than $173 million of its $180 million capital campaign goal, which also went toward the waterfront Olympic Sculpture Park and renovations to the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Now that the downtown space is complete, the museum should have no trouble filling it. The expansion and the upcoming 75th anniversary have spurred a series of gifts—nearly 1,000 works from over 40 donors.

“This is a landmark commitment for SAM and our community,” says Mimi Gates, SAM director. “The private art collections in Seattle have evolved and grown over the last two decades. Great works of art, art of international significance, have been finding a home in Seattle, and it is very important to SAM and the community that these collections stay in Seattle for the benefit and enjoyment of our community and beyond.”

The gifts include such landmark works as Constantin Brancusi’s Bird In Space (1926), Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Green Red II (1965), and Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey (1929). In addition to modern and contemporary works, gifts were given in fields such as Native American art, American silver, Old Master paintings, African and Oceanic Art, contemporary Australian Aboriginal paintings, and Asian art

The opening night party was spectacular. Upon entering the building, guests encountered Cai Guo-Qing’s Inopportune: Stage One (2004)—an installation of nine white Ford Tauruses embellished with flashing LED lights, most of which are suspended from the 39-foot-high ceilings so that they seem to tumble through space. The opening exhibition, “SAM at 75: Building a Collection for Seattle,” is on view from May 5 through September 9, and showcases major gifts made to honor the occasion.