Last Thursday I found myself in Seattle with nothing to do. So I googled “best museums in Seattle”, and discovered a free art museum around the corner from my hotel. I was sold.
The Frye Museum is a museum that mixes contemporary work with a gorgeous family collection comprising 232 late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century oil paintings. Did I mention it’s free?
After browsing its small, but excellent exhibitions, I followed the only hallway I hadn’t yet walked down, and was greeted by an impressive, cavernous room, every inch of its walls covered in art.
This was the Frye Salon.
More than One Hundred Paintings. From Floor to Ceiling.
The Frye Salon is a single dense gallery. Dozens of incredible paintings installed salon-style, stacked from the baseboards to the ceiling with only a breath of wall peeking through. It’s meant to invoke how the founders of the museum, Charles & Emma Frye, lived with the collection in their Seattle home.
Art packed tight, sharing the room only with conversation. It’s both a fixture of the museum, and a living exhibition. The walls are often rearranged to highlight other work in the collection, ever-evolving to continuously surprise visitors.
I was lucky to visit at a unique time. Contemporary work by artist Jonathan Lasker had been installed, bold biomorphic shapes and thick lines displayed alongside portraits and landscapes from the 1800s. A rare interloper in the Frye Salon, Lasker’s work should feel like a collision. Instead it instilled new life into a room that had been spinning through the same collection for 70 years.
One wall in the Frye Salon, highlighting the distinction between the permanent collection & Jonathan Lasker’s more up to date work.
An Art Installer's Perspective
Standing in that room, I asked myself the question I now ask anytime I enter a gallery, “how was this installed?”
A hundred-plus frames, each a different size, every gap between them holding steady, the whole wall reading as one composition instead of chaos. That takes a master’s eye.
It turns out the Frye is generous about showing their work. Shane Montgomery (Director of Architecture and Public Space), has built and rebuilt the Salon many times over the last 17 years, and his method is a craft in its own right.
There is a wooden scale model of the gallery (one inch to one foot), with maquettes of each frame to test placement in three dimensions. He also works digitally in 2D with SketchUp, because the Salon walls are so dense, a flat layout is often quicker to plan and understand.
When a key work goes out on loan or the curators want a change, Montgomery gets to work on his model gallery. He described the process like composing a puzzle. For any installation, you have to consider the framed dimensions of each work, the negative space between frames, how edges line up or stagger against each other, and he leaves enough room between paintings for a person’s hands to actually grip and lift each one during install.
They have done it enough times that the system is second nature.
You can listen to Shane Montgomery, in his own words, in this Frye Museum Guide: Hanging the Frye Salon
The Kinship, and the Difference
At ILevel we spend our days solving the same puzzle of frame dimensions, spacing, and composition. There’s nothing more satisfying than installing a complex gallery wall that finally clicks into one clean composition.
The difference is that the Frye Gallery has the luxury of working with the same beloved room every time. That’s why they can have multiple scale models ready to redesign.
We don’t get to rehearse. Every day and every room is a brand new puzzle. We’ve become experts at seeing the finished gallery before a single nail goes in. We plan out the layout then install the entire thing at once, on site, in real time.
Different discipline, same obsession with balance & precision.
A wide shot of the Frye Gallery. Lots of room to take in the art and composition of the gallery.
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The Rest of the Frye
Beyond the Salon, the Frye rotates through contemporary artists and their different mediums. A genuinely eclectic lineup. I was absorbed by Lotus L. Kang’s I hear the hollow boom of time, an installation of suspended, light-sensitive film sheets and sculptures that respond to the building’s own architecture.
I also loved the Artist’s Choice room, where local artists pull works from the Frye’s collection and tell you, in their own words, why a particular piece matters to them. It makes the whole collection feel personal.
Lotus L. Kang’s “Azaleas” (2024)
Two things stuck with me on the way out. First, that a room can be engineered to the millimeter and still feel warm and human. And second, that the best installation work is invisible. You are meant to see the art, never the labor. Standing in the Frye Salon, I saw both, and I loved it.
If you are in Seattle, go find it. Did I mention it is free?
Did seeing the Frye Salon inspire you to reimagine your own walls? That’s where ILevel comes in.
While the Frye is in Washington state, ILevel HQ is based in beautiful New York City.
We work with individuals, interior designers, art consultants, and more across New York City, the Hamptons, Westchester, and Connecticut.
To start a conversation or request an estimate, fill out our contact form here.
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