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USA Today
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
10 epic things to do in Seattle with kids for guaranteed family fun
Pike Place Market is a family-friendly farmer's market in the heart of Seattle – Photo courtesy of Allison Tibaldi From museums that explore pop culture and pinball to a ride to the top of the towering Space Needle, there's something for everyone in Seattle — kids and adults alike. A Pacific Northwest panorama of evergreens, majestic mountains, Elliot Bay, and the Puget Sound makes it easy to enjoy fresh air fun while staying within the city limits. I first discovered Seattle when our family's cruise to Alaska departed from the busy port, and I was instantly smitten. My children and I return often, forever discovering new fun things to do in Seattle with kids, including iconic attractions, outdoor adventures, and more. Here are 10 of our favorites. Space Needle The Space Needle is a must-see for kids and adults alike – Photo courtesy of Space Needle Built for the 1962 World's Fair, the Space Needle observation tower is an icon of the Seattle skyline. Located in the heart of City Center with numerous other main attractions, you can ride the lightning-fast elevator for impressive views of the cityscape, Olympic and Cascade mountains, and Puget Sound islands from your perch 520 feet above ground. Advertisement Just below the observation deck is The Loupe, the world's first revolving glass floor with a slow spin that makes you feel like you're a record on a turntable. Olympic Sculpture Park Olympic Sculpture Park is a low-stakes way to introduce kids to art – Photo courtesy of Allison Tibaldi I introduced my children to the Olympic Sculpture Park along the waterfront when they were very young. Even if they don't appear interested, kids absorb color, form, and the ever-changing dialogue between art and the environment as they run and play outdoors. It's a low-stakes activity because it's free of charge. Works include Alexander Calder's immense "The Eagle," a 6-ton steel sculpture with soaring curves and spikes that somehow manages to capture the delicacy of an origami bird. When little legs need a rest, they can sit on a series of granite "Eye Benches," surrealist eyeballs that double as surprisingly comfortable benches. Advertisement Chihuly Garden and Glass Chihuly's glass works have loads of kid appeal – Photo courtesy of Greg Balkin / State of Washington Tourism Dale Chihuly has been expanding the boundaries of glass as an artistic medium for decades. His imaginative glass sculptures and installations are on display indoors and outdoors at Chihuly Garden and Glass. Chihuly's bold interplay of whimsy and luminous color is a winning combination for many children. Glassblowing demonstrations throughout the day are captivating, and young visitors can touch real tools and materials used in the glassblowing process at the hands-on Curiosity Station. Seattle Pinball Museum The Seattle Pinball Museum offers retro fun for kids – Photo courtesy of Alabastro Photography/Visit Seattle Families can spend hours enjoying unlimited play for one price on dozens of vintage and modern pinball machines at the Seattle Pinball Museum in the International District. My kids love the machine's low-tech flippers and retro arcade setting. Order a soda in a vintage glass bottle to complete the throwback experience. Advertisement Museum of Pop Culture The Museum of Pop Culture pays tribute to Seattle's seminal role in pop culture – Photo courtesy of Allison Tibaldi If you're traveling with a tough-to-please teenager, the Museum of Pop Culture is an oasis of cool that should appease even the moodiest. The Frank Gehry-designed building is a testament to rebel architecture at its finest, wrapped in shimmering sheet metal that resembles a smashed electric guitar. Permanent and temporary exhibits explore the influence of pop culture in music, film, fashion, sports, and gaming. Seattle's role in music, particularly grunge and alternative rock, is evident in the Guitar Gallery, an homage to the instrument and the musicians who play it. Glimpse the guitar of hometown rocker Jimi Hendrix and clothing worn by Washington-born Kurt Cobain. The Sound Lab lets kids create music with real instruments, while the Next Gen Gamers exhibit tests their skills as they play trailblazing video games. Pike Place Market The Gum Wall at Pike Place Market is quirky fun thing to do with kids in Seattle – Photo courtesy of Alabastro Photography / Visit Seattle Since 1907, Pike Place Market has supplied farm-fresh produce and boat-to-table seafood to generations of Seattleites and hungry tourists. Hundreds of farmers, fishermen, and artisans sell their goods in the heart of downtown. Watch the fishmongers throw fish into the waiting arms of customers — an entertaining and unusual market ritual. If you're visiting in summer, sample yellow-hued Rainier cherries, a Washington treat. More than a marketplace, it's a community center. Public art, including the Instagram-favorite Gum Wall, adds quirky eye candy. Kids particularly enjoy exploring the Magic Market Shop (the third oldest magic shop in the country) and eating mac and cheese from Beecher's while watching cheese get made. Advertisement Seattle Aquarium The Seattle Aquarium has interactive exhibits with a conservation message – Photo courtesy of Allison Tibaldi The Seattle Aquarium combines dazzling sea life with a conservation message. Over 10,000 animals live here — from seahorses to a Giant Pacific Octopus — with an emphasis on those from the Pacific Northwest. Interactive touch tanks, a hands-on play space, and a crawl-through coral reef encourage kids to become stewards of the sea while having a ball. Seattle Great Wheel The Seattle Great Wheel has views for days – Photo courtesy of Rachael Jones/Visit Seattle Hop in a climate-controlled pod and take a sky-high ride on the enormous Seattle Great Wheel on Pier 57. On a clear day, this 175-foot Ferris wheel presents stunning vistas of the skyline and Mount Rainier. At night, it's illuminated with a half-million LED lights. A ride lasts for approximately 15 minutes. When you've landed back down to earth, take a spin on a painted pony at the carousel just a few steps away. Golden Gardens Park Seattle's Golden Gardens Park's sandy beach and tide pools are fun for kids – Photo courtesy of Rachael Jones/Visit Seattle If your family craves an afternoon at the beach, Golden Gardens Park in the Ballard neighborhood is a jackpot. This one-mile stretch of soft sand along the Puget Sound is perfect for Frisbee and beach volleyball, while the clear, cold water may tempt the brave to go for a summertime swim. At low tide, rocky sections at either end are a great place to view tide pools teeming with sea creatures, including anemones and starfish. Pacific Science Center Seattle's Pacific Science Center is a great place for curious kids – Photo courtesy of Rachael Jones/Visit Seattle Over the years, I've taken my kids to numerous science museums. As they grew older, they were often bored, as many catered to young children. Advertisement
CairoScene
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Jeddah Lake Transformed Into Open-Air Sculpture Gallery
Al-Arbaeen Lake in Jeddah has been transformed into a stunning open-air sculpture park, showcasing 14 iconic works by international artists in a unique dialogue between heritage and modernity. Al-Arbaeen Lake in historic Jeddah has been reimagined as an open-air sculpture gallery. The initiative, launched by the Ministry of Culture in partnership with Jeddah Municipality, brings 14 iconic artworks by renowned international artists into a public space, turning the urban waterfront into a living cultural experience. The new installations, set against the backdrop of the lake and the old city skyline, aim to spark what officials describe as a 'dialogue between past and present.' Among the featured pieces are works by Victor Vasarely, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Arnaldo Pomodoro, and Lorenzo Quinn. The pieces range from large-scale abstract structures to thought-provoking figurative compositions, each selected to resonate with both global sensibilities and local context. This transformation of Al-Arbaeen into a sculpture park is part of a broader effort to integrate art into everyday life in Saudi cities. It reflects the Kingdom's growing investment in public art as a means of cultural engagement and community revitalisation.
Identity
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Identity
Exploring Movement & Balance: Calder/Hiquily Exhibition at Opera Gallery
March 2025–Opera Gallery is pleased to present 'Calder/Hiquily: Balancing Act', an exhibition dedicated to the artists Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and Philippe Hiquily (1925-2013) from April 15- May 4, 2025. Featuring 8 works on paper and 21 sculptural works, this exhibition presents a visual dialogue about Calder and Hiquily's shared fascination with movement, material, and form. Alexander Calder, who studied mechanical engineering before pursuing art at the Art Students League in New York, is known for his pioneering mobiles and kinetic sculptures, that revolutionised modern sculpture with the innovative use of wire and metal. With his use of mathematics and principles of engineering, Calder's practice represented a broader conceptual engagement with the relationship between humans and machines, as well as art and technology. By Calder's estimation, kinetic art was striving to 'lift the figures and scenery off the page and prove undeniably that art is not rigid'. Calder's 1953 mobile New Old Universe, with its colourful, spherical forms suspended in perfect harmony, exemplifies the synchronicity between precision and coincidence at the core of his practice.
New York Times
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Danish Art Show Examines Our Awe, and Terror, of the Deep
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, roughly 25 miles north of Copenhagen, occupies a sprawling estate on Denmark's eastern coast. From its sculpture garden, featuring works by Alexander Calder and Henry Moore, the eye travels out over the cliff to the Oresund Sound. On the other side of that shimmering water, roughly eight miles away, lies Sweden. This is a spectacular setting for any exhibition, but is particularly well suited for the one now on view: 'Ocean,' an expansive look at the pull that the deep has exerted on the human imagination (through April 27). That topic is, of course, as vast and fathomless as the sea itself. The roughly 130 artworks and objects that comprise 'Ocean' are spread over an entire wing of the museum and include paintings, sculptures, photos and videos, as well as scientific specimens, archaeological finds and even live fish. Through these objects, the exhibition fuses past with present and art with science to illuminate how our shifting perspectives have always shaped how we understand and interact with the sea. Thematic and multidisciplinary exhibitions like 'Ocean' and earlier ones held at the Louisiana, including 'The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space,' which ran in 2018, might strike some museum-goers as unexpected — not the sort of fare they are used to seeing at a modern art museum. According to Poul Erik Tojner, the museum's director since 2000, these kinds of shows can also serve as a refreshing corrective. 'You sometimes get the impression that everybody thinks that art is only about art, which is a nice point of view, but it is obvious that art also has an extreme potential for talking about the world,' said Tojner, who also is one of the show's three Danish curators. He said that assembling a show of disparate works — which here included marble statues retrieved from the ocean floor, an 18th-century shell cabinet with more than 800 specimens, and precious minerals from the seabed — 'is a way of reactivating a lot of stories and narratives that are inherent in artworks.' 'Both the moon and the ocean are really motors for all kinds of myths and rituals and religious thinking,' added Tine Colstrup, the show's lead curator, who joined Tojner on a recent tour of the exhibition. 'So it's interesting to explore these themes and kind of let knowledge areas join forces,' she continued. Visitors to 'Ocean' are greeted by enlargements of pages from Anna Atkins's 'Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions' (1843-1853), often considered the world's first photography book. Atkins, a Victorian-era botanist, placed seaweed on an emulsion that turned Prussian blue when exposed to light, leaving white, shadow-like impressions where the algae had been — a method familiar to anyone who has ever made sun prints. Her dreamlike and semi-abstract images help to set the tone for the contents of the opening galleries, with their emphasis on how rapidly evolving technology has both demystified the sea and made it the subject of art over the past 150 years. Inside the first room is the Lithuanian artist Emilija Skarnulyte's large-scale video installation 'Aphotic Zone' (2022), in which documentary footage from deep-sea research expeditions is blended with fictional, digital visions of a post-human underwater world. Colstrup felt it was important to introduce the theme of the exhibition in an aesthetic, rather than an intellectual, way. 'When we talk about the ocean, yes it's science and we have climate change, but it's also beauty, and it's something sensual,' she said. In the next gallery, visitors are invited to compare the high-definition video that Skarnulyte used in 'Aphotic Zone' with earlier underwater films by Jean Painlevé, whose cinematic portraits of octopuses and sea horses are every bit as astonishing as they were nearly a century ago, and by the popular deep-sea diver and explorer Jacques Cousteau. The footage from the pioneering aquatic filmmakers that is in the show suggests that contemporary deep-sea video would be unthinkable without their innovations. From there the show dives further back in time, with a stunning display of 19th-century glass models of marine invertebrates, among them sea slugs and cephalopods. They are the painstaking work of the father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, master glass artisans from Dresden, Germany. They made their menagerie largely for research purposes and with meticulous scientific observation, mechanical precision and a dash of creativity. These exquisite, fragile objects, whose wild colors, astounding detail and high degree of verisimilitude make them look like psychedelic pastries, are among the most dazzling works in 'Ocean.' But even the more conventional presentations contain surprises. In a room dedicated to the sublime, a key motif in Romantic art, violent depictions of the sea abound. The first item in that gallery, however, is a poster for the 2000 disaster film 'The Perfect Storm' by the German director Wolfgang Petersen, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. The poster unmistakably revisits the iconography of 19th-century paintings of shipwrecks, with a beleaguered vessel surfing the wave of a digitally rendered squall. With this somewhat cheeky choice, the exhibition makes the point that our imaginations are still as riveted by the overwhelming violence and passion of the sea as they were over two centuries ago, when Caspar David Friedrich painted 'After the Storm' (1817), which also features in the exhibition. 'Ocean' also reckons with painful narratives, including the legacy of colonialism and slavery. The Ghanaian artist El Anatsui's haunting sculpture 'Akua's Surviving Children' (1996) evokes historical crimes and traumas through driftwood sculptures made with wood collected from a beach roughly a dozen miles north of this museum. The artist assembled the work, a group of standing figures that recalls Rodin's 'The Burghers of Calais,' at a nearby former arms factory that produced long-barreled flintlock muskets known as Dane guns, weapons that played a key role in the Danish slave trade in Ghana. Colstrup said she was particularly glad to have Anatsui's work in the show given how Denmark's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade remained something of a historical blind spot for the country. 'It's an extremely political and very local piece,' she said. Nearby, the ocean is depicted not only as a site of oppression but also of resilience and rebirth. The two companion paintings that make up the American artist Ellen Gallagher's 'Fast Fish and Loose Fish' (2023) reference the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya — an alternative Black history of an underwater utopia populated by descendants of enslaved Africans thrown from slave ships. Kara Walker's collage 'Rift of the Medusa' (2017) offers a Black and feminist response to Théodore Géricault's famous painting 'The Raft of the Medusa,' which depicts the deadly aftermath of an 1816 shipwreck off the West African coast. As the show progresses, it leaves behind the myths — old and new — that the ocean has inspired in favor of a more explicit confrontation with environmental crises. 'We didn't want to make a climate show,' said Colstrup. At the same time, she acknowledged that when putting together an exhibition like this, it was impossible to ignore the strain — plastic pollution, rising sea levels and marine biodiversity loss — on the ocean right now. In 'Flooded McDonald's,' a video by the Danish art collective Superflex, a replica of the fast-food restaurant is submerged beneath murky water, with a bobbing statue of Ronald McDonald and trash — the debris of consumer culture — floating eerily through the abandoned interior. In the Danish-born artist Kirsten Justesen's 'Mer Maid / Hav Frue' (1990), 16 small black-and-white images arranged in a four-by-four grid, a modern-day Venus in a bathing suit vacuums pollution from the sea — a comment both on environmental neglect and an assertion of female resilience. One of the concluding pieces -— and one of the exhibition's highlights — is 'Vertigo Sea,' by the Ghanaian-born British artist John Akomfrah. The three-screen video installation that blends historical imagery of whaling, migration and ecological disasters was first screened at the Venice Biennale in 2015. The 48-minute-long film presents the ocean and humans' interactions with it as part beauty, part horror. Placing the video toward the end of 'Ocean' makes sense; it underscores one of the exhibition's preoccupations: that the ocean, endlessly symbolic and physically finite, demands understanding and responsible stewardship. Colstrup recalled something that ocean scientists and marine biologists told her when she was putting the show together. 'If we are to protect something, anything, we need to know it exists and we need to love it.'
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
BMW Marks 50 Years of Iconic Art Car Collection with Global Exhibition Tour
⚡️ Read the full article on Motorious BMW's iconic Art Car collection is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025, launching a global exhibition tour highlighting the unique convergence of automotive engineering and contemporary art. Since its inception in 1975, when American sculptor Alexander Calder turned a BMW 3.0 CSL race car into a vivid, rolling canvas, BMW's Art Car initiative has drawn some of the art world's most influential figures, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, and Jenny Holzer. To date, 20 renowned artists have transformed BMW vehicles into dynamic artworks, making the series one of the automotive world's most ambitious and celebrated cultural endeavors. To mark half a century of collaboration, BMW announced its largest-ever international tour for the Art Car series, featuring special events and exhibitions spanning five continents. The collection represents an extraordinary timeline of art history, encompassing minimalism, pop art, conceptualism, abstraction, and digital expression. 'Our 20 BMW Art Cars have become global icons, narrating stories about society, technology, and performance," said Ilka Horstmeier, BMW Group Board Member for Human Resources and Real Estate. "This anniversary highlights our enduring commitment to fostering innovation and creativity through meaningful artistic partnerships.' Julie Mehretu's recent work, the BMW M Hybrid V8—the 20th Art Car—will make prominent appearances, including exhibitions at Art Basel in Hong Kong and the Shanghai Auto Show. Beyond the car itself, Mehretu's project includes workshops for young filmmakers and media artists in five African countries, culminating in an exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town in 2026. Other milestone events include a European kickoff featuring Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Koons at Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts and SPARK Art Fair, followed by appearances at prestigious events such as the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este in Italy and special museum exhibitions across Europe and Asia. To commemorate the anniversary, BMW will release a third edition of its comprehensive Art Car catalogue, a new limited-edition scale model of Mehretu's car, and a new fashion collection in partnership with Puma. The BMW Art Car project, first envisioned by racing driver Hervé Poulain and BMW Motorsport chief Jochen Neerpasch, has evolved into a globally recognized fusion of automotive and contemporary art, continuously inspiring new dialogues between artists and automotive enthusiasts alike.
