Museums & Galleries in Maple Valley

The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture combines permanent and rotating exhibits such as The Life and Times of Washington State exhibit, which guides the viewer through the state's ancient timeline from the age of mammoths to the mammoth modern age of humans. Through May 31, the museum proudly displays the Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway exhibit, where you can see how professionally excavated fossils compare against the trilobite farm you recently found in the bathtub.

The 90-minute stroll through Seattle’s micro-China starts at the Chinatown-International District. A friendly and engaging guide leads tours through authentic Asian markets, whirling with bustling merchants, brightly colored goods, and savory smells of incense or freshly roasted duck. As you learn the history and significance of historical landmarks, the diverse languages of the city's Asian community co-mingle melodiously in the air, and the spirit of a culture thousands of years old flits through the incomparable Seattle neighborhood like a flutterbug in a bag of cotton balls.

Although admission to the Frye Museum's art-filled halls is always free for everyone, individual museum membership treats you to an exquisitely oil-painted cornucopia of exclusive perks, including:

From the outside, Town Hall Seattle serves as a beacon for fans of the performing arts with its white terra-cotta sides that reflect light in the winter and glow after rain. The building also borrows from numerous Roman Revival–style architectural elements, such as six two-story columns, a central dome with an oculus, and far-reaching glass windows draped with Julius Caesar’s togas. Vaulted ceilings and thick masonry walls form an acoustic dream for Town Hall Seattle’s host of guest performers, which regularly includes orchestras, singers, and other musical talents. Town Hall Seattle still retains many aspects of its original 1922 design, such as the wooden pews and Tiffany-style light fixtures.

The Children's Museum, Seattle inspires curiosity and creativity in children between 10 months and 10 years with 22,000 square feet of hands-on exhibits that explore science, arts, and cultural education. The museum's collection of permanent exhibits boosts brainpower with feats of engineering, miniature global villages, an aquarium, and a theater, where kids can don costumes and reenact famous monologues from Sponge Bob. The museum heightens the joy of discovery with such activities as summer camps, birthday parties, partnership outreach, and after-hours events.

Liberated from adult clutches in a no-parents land, children gaze out across Kids Discovery Museum from their sanctuary atop an authentic tree trunk. Their perch is the Pirate Tree House, a multilevel playspace whose top story—the facility's only grownup-free zone—showcases the museum guiding philosophy: independent exploration.

In this spirit, rather than lecturing youngsters, the museum sparks their imaginations with hands-on exhibits covering science, culture and art. In Science Hall, an interactive physics exhibit illustrates the concepts of velocity and acceleration through experiments first devised by Galileo and Newton to prove the Earth revolves around a fig. Visitors to Our Town’s miniature community can attempt cash withdrawals at a faux ATM or tour a waterfront park, and kids of all ages craft self-guided art projects in the studio known as Sean's Space. Learning continues even when school is out, thanks to week-long summer camps in which youths investigate topics such as photography while defending the museum from a siege of vacationing teachers.