Arts & Culture in Bellevue

Bellevue's arts scene is easy to miss and worth finding. The city doesn't have a Chihuly Garden or a Seattle Art Museum, but it does have a genuinely strong contemporary art museum, a working civic theatre, a historic home operated as a museum, and a cluster of independent Old Bellevue galleries that punch well above their size. This is the guide for visitors who want more than a shopping trip.

The centerpiece is Bellevue Arts Museum — a Steven Holl-designed building on the north edge of Bellevue Square, focused on Northwest craft, sculpture, and contemporary art. Admission is $15, exhibitions rotate quarterly, and the museum's annual BAMFest (late July) turns Bellevue Downtown Park into one of the largest juried craft fairs in the country. If you visit only one arts institution in the city, this is it.

Beyond the museum, Bellevue's arts life is smaller and more social. Meydenbauer Center's 410-seat theatre hosts touring productions, dance, and the Bellevue Civic Theatre's seasonal shows. Old Bellevue Main Street houses Foster/White, Aronica Fine Art, and Gunnar Nordstrom Gallery — three commercial galleries showing Northwest painters, printmakers, and sculptors year-round, all free to visit. Winters House on Mercer Slough is a 1929 Colonial Revival home run as a small local-history museum; it's the least-visited item on this list and one of the most rewarding for a rainy afternoon.

A note on scheduling. Most galleries are Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The museum is Wednesday–Sunday. Theatre and festival programming clusters around fall and spring — check the Bellevue Arts Museum and Meydenbauer Center calendars before you plan a visit around an exhibition or a show.

Spring brings the museum's spring exhibition opening — typically a major contemporary or Northwest craft show that runs through summer. Old Bellevue galleries schedule their most ambitious openings for April and May.

Summer is festival season. Bellevue Arts Fair (BAMFest) — the last full weekend of July — brings 300 juried artists to Downtown Park across three days. The Bellevue Jazz Festival runs the same weekend at Meydenbauer. Both are free.

Fall is theatre season. Bellevue Civic Theatre opens its main season in September and runs through May; Meydenbauer books touring dance and music through the fall. This is also when the museum installs its winter exhibition — historically the strongest of the year.

Winter is the museum's holiday show and Meydenbauer's holiday music programming. Old Bellevue galleries stay open on Snowflake Lane nights and are noticeably quieter than the shopping side of the street — a rare pocket of calm downtown in December.