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Beautiful Things is the Conru Art Foundation’s headline event for the summer of 2026, and it fills the second floor of the Occidental Fine Arts Center in Pioneer Square. More than 500 artifacts, gathered to show what life in Seattle actually looked, sounded, and worked like between 1850 and 1950. It runs June 1 to August 15. Admission is free.

The timing is no accident. The FIFA World Cup brings the world to Seattle this summer, Pride brings the city out in late June, and First Thursday keeps drawing its monthly crowd through Pioneer Square, the neighborhood that more or less invented the American art walk. Beautiful Things is built to be the reason people climb the stairs.

Beautiful Things is run by the Conru Art Foundation, a nonprofit built around three words: Beauty, Truth, Love. The goal is simple and ambitious at the same time: to be a public service, to bring people together through art, and to make rooms where strangers can stand next to each other and feel wonder at the same thing.

In practice that means funding artists, running the Seattle Art Prize, hosting the Art Love Salon, and assembling a collection most people have never had the chance to stand in front of. With Beautiful Things, the foundation pays for the art, the curation, and the room. You just show up, for free.

One wall after another holds the things Seattle lived with across a century. A long wall of vintage tube radios, Zenith and Crosley and RCA, the cabinets families once gathered around the way we gather around a screen. Edison and Victor phonographs with their great morning-glory horns. Sewing machines, hand washing machines, and movie projectors. And the showstoppers: coin-operated slot machines by Mills and Caille, chrome jukeboxes, and the orchestrions, those remarkable machines that played a whole band by themselves.

Many of these pieces were owned by people right here in Seattle, though not all. The point is not provenance. The point is that you can stand in the middle of the room and feel an entire century of ordinary daily life at once.

Beautiful Things is not a hands-off exhibition. Many of the artifacts are there to be used. Play video games from the 1970s. Type a sentence on a typewriter from the 1920s. Pick up an old rotary phone and feel the weight of a call before everything became glass. Look through a stereoscope at photographs in 3D taken more than 125 years ago, the way people did in their parlors before movies existed.

It is the kind of show where kids and grandparents end up explaining things to each other, where a sound or a keystroke does more than a wall label ever could. Take a picture of yourself in front of some of the most beautiful things in Seattle, then turn around and actually use a few of them.

The centerpiece is a film, and it is worth timing your visit around. Working from more than a thousand historical black-and-white photographs of Seattle, the foundation has used new technology to restore the images into 4K color and set them gently into motion. Cutting down Denny Hill one wheelbarrow at a time. Streetcars climbing the regraded streets. The Golden Potlatch parades of 1912. The harbor at full crank, tall ships giving way to steam. The Great Fire of 1889 and the brick city that rose out of the ashes.

It is careful work, not a gimmick. Smoke drifts the way smoke drifts. A woman on a 1907 sidewalk shifts her weight, and for a few seconds you are simply standing on Second Avenue with her. The film debuts June 15, in the same room as the antiques it echoes. Watch the old machines on the wall, then watch the old city move on the screen. It is the closest thing to time travel Seattle will offer this summer.

Across from the historical collection hang brand-new paintings by the first Seattle Art Prize Fellows, the first cohort of artists selected through CAF\u2019s new annual prize. The Seattle Prize exists to back serious Seattle artists making humanistic work, work that makes a living case for beauty, truth, and love. This is where you see what the first group made.

And then there is the Wall of Awe, the wall everyone is going to photograph. If you like pets, come see the portraits of nineteenth-century dogs and cats, painted with the deadly seriousness people once reserved for royalty. Some of them are just to die for. Everyone will love them. Consider it fair warning.

Admission is free. Tours run every thirty minutes, noon to four-thirty, closed Mondays.

On the ground floor of the same building, the Occidental Sessions bring about a dozen evenings of live performance into the gallery: chamber music in the round, ballet and contemporary dance, late jazz, opera and song, and spoken word with the city’s writers. The exhibition stays up the whole time, so the music happens inside the art rather than in a black box. The full lineup lands the first week of June.

A short walk away, the Art Love Salon holds a collection worth hearing in person: the orchestrions. Picture a player piano on steroids, with xylophones, flutes, drums, and whole percussion sections built into the cabinet. Drop a nickel and set one going.

The foundation is also exploring more downtown programming for the summer, including a guided history tour and a program inside the historic 1916 Coliseum Theatre at Pike and Fifth. Those are not yet confirmed, so watch for announcements. The sure thing, the one to plan your visit around, is Beautiful Things.

If you love art and you love Seattle, this is the summer to come downtown, climb the stairs at the Occidental, and see a hundred years of the city in one room.

Beautiful Things, the Conru Art Foundation’s headline exhibition for 2026, gathers more than 500 artifacts that show what daily life in Seattle looked, sounded, and worked like across a century. Vintage tube radios, Edison and Victor phonographs, orchestrions, jukeboxes, slot machines, sewing and washing machines, and movie projectors. Many were owned by people here in Seattle, though not all. It runs June 1 to August 15, and admission is free.

Much of the show is hands-on. Play video games from the 1970s, type on a typewriter from the 1920s, try an old rotary phone, and look through a stereoscope at photographs in 3D from more than 125 years ago.

The centerpiece is a film. Built from more than a thousand historical black-and-white photographs and restored with new technology into 4K color and motion, it brings old Seattle back to life: the regrades, the streetcars, the harbor, the crowds. It debuts June 15.

Across the room hang brand-new paintings by the first Seattle Art Prize Fellows. The Prize is CAF\u2019s annual program backing Seattle artists making humanistic work grounded in Beauty, Truth, and Love. And, because everyone asks: the Wall of Awe, a wall of nineteenth-century dog and cat portraits, painted with deadly seriousness. Some of them are just to die for. If you like pets, you will love this wall.

Tours run every thirty minutes, noon to four-thirty, closed Mondays. After dark, the Occidental Sessions bring about a dozen evenings of music, dance, and spoken word into the gallery. If you love art and you love Seattle, come climb the stairs at the Occidental.