Art Submission Guidelines

If you are an artist and would like to introduce SAM’s curators to your work, please follow the guidelines below.

• Include a message introducing yourself and the images you are submitting for review. If you are submitting information about a specific project, please include the proposed dates and scope of work.
• You may submit art work in the form of JPGs or a URL where we can view the work online. Please ensure that your images are clearly labeled with the artist’s name, title of the work, date and dimensions. We cannot accept actual works of art or materials sent by mail.
• Send your material to the Seattle Art Museum Curatorial Division: submitting@seattleartmuseum.org.

If you are a collector who would like to offer works of art from your collection to the museum, please follow the guidelines below.

• Please provide us with as much information as possible about the work, including artist, date, medium, size and provenance information (history of ownership).
• Please state explicitly if you are offering these works for loan (temporarily sharing them with the museum for exhibit), for sale (please include your asking price and date by which you need a decision), or for donation.
• Please note, the museum cannot identify, authenticate, or appraise your collection.
• Send your material to the Seattle Art Museum Curatorial Division: submitting@seattleartmuseum.org, or 1300 First Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101. Please note, the museum cannot return materials sent by mail.

Additional information:

• The Seattle Art Museum as an institution cannot perform appraisals or authentications of any works of art.
• The process of reviewing your images may take several weeks. It may not be possible to reply to every submission.
• We cannot make studio visits, see the work in person or make visits to private collections during the initial phase of the review. If there is sufficient interest from a curator, we will contact you about any further steps.
• Please note that while we are happy to review your work, our exhibition schedule is planned approximately two to three years in advance, and is carefully balanced to present our viewers with a varied artistic program. Therefore, we are rarely able to accommodate unsolicited submissions for exhibitions.
• The Seattle Art Museum is not currently seeking artists’ submissions for the Olympic Sculpture Park. The sculpture at the park is a combination of works from the Seattle Art Museum’s permanent collection, loans and site-specific works designed
  at our request for the park. If we ever have open calls for artists, they will be posted on our website.
• An excellent opportunity for emerging artists to introduce themselves and their work to SAM museum curators is to present images of their work in the Annual Betty Bowen Memorial Award Competition.