Museum of Glass Galleries Are Closed Until Fall

If you've got a Museum of Glass visit on the calendar, read this first: the traditional gallery spaces are closed and will stay closed until early fall.

The museum began a capital renovation in April 2026 aimed at modernizing, improving, and expanding its gallery spaces. Construction runs through the summer.

Here's what a lot of people are missing, though.

The museum itself is still open. Everything outside the galleries is operating without disruption:

• The Hot Shop - where you watch live glassblowing, is running

• The Education Studio is open

• The Museum Store is open

• The Café is open

During select weeks this summer, the museum is also parking its Mobile Hot Shop out on the Grand Plaza in front of the building and offering additional workshops.

So the practical advice: if you were going specifically for the galleries, push your visit to fall. If you were going for the Hot Shop experience, which is arguably the single best thing the Museum of Glass does, go now. You'll have a quieter building and the same show.

What's coming is worth the wait. As part of the renovation, the museum is building the Lino Tagliapietra Legacy Gallery, an immersive new space dedicated to 175 works recently gifted to the museum by the artist himself. It's scheduled to open in fall 2026.

Tagliapietra is one of the most significant living glass artists in the world, and his relationship with the Pacific Northwest glass scene goes back decades. A permanent, dedicated gallery of 175 of his works is a genuinely major addition to Tacoma's Museum District, not a renovation footnote.

Museum of Glass, 1801 Dock St, Tacoma.

Real estate note:
Tacoma's Museum District, Museum of Glass, Tacoma Art Museum, Washington State History Museum, the Chihuly Bridge of Glass, is one of the most underrated cultural clusters in the state. A permanent Tagliapietra gallery gives the district another anchor. If you're watching downtown Tacoma and the Dock Street corridor, institutional investment like this tends to precede the residential kind.