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Art of today in Seattle
Performing arts
Seattle today is a significant center of the performing arts. The century-old Seattle Symphony Orchestra is among the world's most-recorded orchestras. The Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet are comparably distinguished; the PNB School (founded in 1974) ranks as one of the top three ballet training institutions in the United States.
In addition, Seattle has about twenty live theater venues, a slim majority of them being associated with fringe theater. It has a strong local scene for poetry slams and other performance poetry, and several venues that routinely present public lectures or readings. The largest of these is Seattle's 900-seat, Roman Revival Town Hall on First Hill.
In popular music, Seattle is often thought of mainly as the home of grunge rock, but it is also home to such varied musicians as avant-garde jazz musicians Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz, rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot, and such poppier rock bands as Goodness, the Presidents of the United States of America, and Smoosh.
Visual arts
Seattle is home to five art museums (and several other museums with notable art collections), well over 100 commercial art galleries, at least a dozen non-profit art galleries, and perhaps a hundred artists' studios that are open to the public at least once a month. About half of these galleries and studios are concentrated in one neighborhood, Pioneer Square. See Museums and galleries of Seattle.
In recent decades, Washington State, King County, and Seattle have all allocated a certain percentage of all capital budgets to the arts. Several neighborhoods have also raised funds for art installations, usually sculptures. Among the results are massive murals by Fay Jones, Gene Gentry McMahon and Roger Shimomura in the Westlake Station of the Metro bus tunnel; pieces by Ross Palmer Beecher in such unlikely locations as the Safeco Field hallways or a men's room at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. A magnificent glass tile mosaic mural by Paul Horiuchi forms a backdrop to the stage of the Mural Amphiteater at Seattle Center.
Seattle was home of Jacob Lawrence from 1970 until his death in 2000. He is well represented in local corporate collections; several of his pieces are prominently displayed at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, as is a piece by one of his colleagues from the U.W. art faculty, Alden Mason , and works by other artists associated with the Pacific Northwest.
Probably the most visible public sculpture in Seattle is Jonathan Borofsky's 48-foot kinetic sculpture "Hammering Man", outside the Seattle Art Museum; probably the most unusual and popular are several pieces in the Fremont neighborhood, including a massive sculpture of a troll , a bronze statue of Lenin (formerly in Slovakia), and Richard Beyer's "Waiting for the Interurban"