Public Art: The 25 Best, Oddest, Freest, Most Obscure Pieces In Town

There's a wealth of accessible, interesting, and sometimes even important public art far beyond the border of SAM's waterfront compound (or even right next to it). No single collector or institution governs these far-flung sites and installations, which include freely viewable art sitting on private land. So set your Google waypoints en route, as we tour some of the best pieces of public art (plus a few lost, overlooked oddballs) in and around Seattle, some of which are so undersung, they don't even have a placard identifying them. Read Brian Miller's entire story.

Department of Forensic Morphology Annex, UW campus near 15th Ave. N.E. & N.E. 42nd St.: You have to kick aside the fallen leaves to find a small marker identifying this five-year-old installation just south of the UW Law School, a stainless steel blob, which looks like something Buckminster Fuller might’ve designed for Woody Allen’s Sleeper. In fact, credit goes to local artist Cris Bruch, with an assist from the Washington State Arts Commission (est. 1961). With a skin of metal plates held together by steel stitches, DFMA suggests both snail shell and igloo, armadillo and Dr. Seuss. The underlying lattice peeks through in places—a system of rods and bars, like a cage or exoskeleton whose innards have long since rotted away. It’s like an unrusted remnant from a forgotten era when right angles didn’t exist. Dimpled, bulbous, undulating—the architecture could be from a distant galaxy or the sketchbook of M.C. Escher. Bruch, recently featured in a 20-year retrospective at the Lawrimore Project, draws on natural forms—petals, tendrils, acorns, gourds—and executes his sculptures in modern materials like fiberglass and metal. But DFMA also visually echoes the UW’s nearby 1895 Theodor Jacobsen Observatory and its famous cupola. You could almost imagine astronomers staring in one end of the telescope and, light years away, the alien inhabitants of DFMA peering back.