During the Great Depression, he and his mother, Margaret MacTavish Fuller, donated $250,000 to build an art museum in Volunteer Park on Seattle's Capitol Hill.

[4] In 1983 to 1984, the museum received a donation of half of a downtown city block, the former J. C. Penney department store[5] on the west side of Second Avenue between Union and Pike Streets.

[8] The next year, one of Jonathan Borofsky's Hammering Man sculptures was installed outside the museum as part of Seattle City Light's One Percent for Art program.

[9] Hammering Man would have been installed in time for the museum's opening, but on September 28, 1991, as workers attempted to erect the piece, it fell, was damaged, and had to be returned to the foundry for repairs.

[10] Hammering Man was used in a guerrilla art installation on Labor Day in 1993 when Jason Sprinkle and other local artists attached a 700 lb (320 kg) ball and chain to the leg of the sculpture.

[14] Soon after, in October 2021, SAM Director and CEO, Amada Cruz, signed onto a letter on behalf of the museum in support of increasing the city's police budget.

[15] The letter also advocated for subsidized security for nonprofit institutions, despite the recent termination of SAM's contract with Star Protection Services due to employee misconduct and the continued opposition of staff and community members.

The National Labor Relations Board certified the SAM VSO Union as the security officers' representative on June 8, 2022.

Tobey's works and highlights of SAM's Asian collection were featured under the museum's aegis at the Century 21 Exposition (the 1962 Seattle World's Fair).

A Jacob Lawrence retrospective in 1974 honored a giant of African American art who had settled in Seattle four years earlier.

[20] Among them are Alexander Calder's Eagle (1971)[21] and Richard Serra's Wake (2004), both at the Olympic Sculpture Park; Cai Guo-Qiang's Inopportune: Stage One (2004), a sculpture constructed from cars and sequenced multi-channel light tubes on display in the lobby of the SAM Downtown; The Judgment of Paris (c. 1516–18) by Lucas Cranach the Elder; Mark Tobey's Electric Night (1944); Yéil X'eenh (Raven Screen) (c. 1810), attributed to the Tlingit artist Kadyisdu.axch'; Do-Ho Suh's Some/One (2001); a Supermatist composition (1924) by Anna Kogan; and a coffin in the shape of a Mercedes-Benz (1991) by Kane Quaye.

The building, a limestone-covered rectangle with a streak of tile and terra cotta around its outside,[7] is located at University Street and First Avenue, and was completed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates at 150,000 square feet (14,000 m2) with a $28.1 million budget.

[4] The Asian Art Museum has been located since 1994 in the original 1933 Deco/Moderne SAM facility in Volunteer Park on Seattle's Capitol Hill.

[32] The Seattle Art Museum only receives 4% of its funding from the government; the rest of its operating costs are covered by ticket fees and its membership base.

[33] As a result of the banking crisis, the museum in 2009 lost $5.8 million in annual rental and related income from its tenant Washington Mutual.

It faced an accumulated debt of $56 million dating back from when the museum and Washington Mutual partnered on a new downtown building they intended to share.

After the bank was sold to JPMorgan Chase in 2008, it left the museum with eight floors of office space, at a cost of about $5.8 million a year.