BIG CHANGE Tacoma Art Museum will double its gallery space to make room for a new collection of 280 American Western artworks, donated by German-born billionaires Erivan and Helga Haub. The Haubs, who also own Sun Mountain Lodge in Winthrop, also made a major contribution toward a new 10,000-square-foot museum wing, slated to open in 2014.

A collection this big could redefine the entire museum. Seattle Art Museum and the Frye each have their own assortment of Albert Bierstadt landscapes in their permanent collections, but TAM will become the regional hub of frontier art: purple mountains majesty as seen by Bierstadt and Thomas Moran; the plight of Native Americans in Frederic Remington’s Conjuring Back the Buffalo; plus many men on horseback by Charles Russell, E. Martin Hennings, and Ernest Blumenschein. Works date back to the 1820s and also include pieces by more contemporary artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, John Clymer, Tom Lovell, Bill Schenck, and Clyde Aspevi.

TAM has gone a great job of late bringing in diverse collections: notably the traveling Hide/Seek exhibit exploring homosexuality across art history, which drew big crowds all spring. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of modern art hangs in the halls adjacent to the new American West wing.

BACK IN BUSINESS After two months of renovations to its galleries and cafe, Frye Art Museum will reopen on July 14 with three new exhibits and a new curator. We’re expecting the announcement of the new curator tomorrow (stay tuned), but in the meantime, we know the Frye will host the US solo debut of Chinese conceptual artist Liu Ding, in addition to two exhibits of artwork from the founding collection. Ties That Bind: American Artists in Europe features paintings by American masters—Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, Albert Bierstadt—who learned new tricks in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.