If you’re generally afraid of clowns or puppets, the Frye Art Museum’s gallery, The Puppet Show, is probably not for you. The gallery contains puppets from around the world in a variety of traditional and innovative displays. If you can get past the mild creepiness of so many strange faces looking at you, though, you might enjoy the one-of-a-kind experience.

“It’s a little unsettling,” said Erin Court of Bellevue. “All these little faces look like they’re staring at you, but some of the pieces are so interesting.”

The exhibit features recognizable puppets like hand puppets, rod puppets and marionettes, as well as less-familiar incarnations, including clay-animation characters. Also featured are art works depicting or evoking topics associated with puppetry, such as manipulation, miniaturization and control.

At the entrance to the exhibit is an installation within the installation called “Puppet Storage.” The area was conceived to mimic the backstage area of a puppet production, with puppets, props, pictures and parts on display.

“I never though about puppets as art before,” said Jan Tingle of Seattle. “And I’ve never seen ‘puppet’ so broadly interpreted.”

The puppets in “Storage” run the gamut from traditional Javanese and Balinese wayang kulit shadow puppets to Czech marionettes to Andy Warhol’s hand-puppet caricatures of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

There were also a trio of marionettes: Gepetto, Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket, from a puppet-show version of Pinocchio called The Blue Fairy.

“Those remind me of my childhood,” said Louise Palmer of Redmond, who was a child when Disney’s Pinocchio was released. “I’ve always loved that story; it’s just so magical. These puppets seem to really catch that feeling.”

The storage area also contains several examples of puppets made by Bil Baird, who created the puppet show in the movie The Sound of Music.

Beyond “Puppet Storage” is the first of several rooms containing the rest of The Puppet Show. In this first room, we come to the source of a strange racket, echoing though the rooms: “Theme for a Major Hit” by Dennis Oppenheim. The piece is composed of six identical puppets — representations of Oppenheim himself — distinguished only by the color of their suits. The puppets are marionettes attached to motors on the ceiling. A song, also written by Oppenheim, plays over a speaker apparatus also on the ceiling. The lyrics are: “It ain’t what you make, it’s what makes you do it.”

At regular intervals, the motors start, causing the puppets to dance.

“They look like little tap dancers,” said Court. “You can almost imagine the artist’s competing ideas dancing around in his head.”

At the end of the next room are two large televisions dominated by literal hand puppets. To get an idea of what they look like, make a fist with your hand, with your thumb toward you; your thumb now serves as a mouth for this puppet. The hands on the television also have rhinestones for eyes.

The piece, called “Colloquy,” represents a couple in a “relationship gone south,” according to the exhibition catalogue. One hand speaks, while the other remains mute, reacting merely through “facial” expression.

“It’s actually very sad,” said Jeremy Long of Seattle. “There seems to be all this talk about sharing and intimate knowledge of the other, but some sort of distance. And the puppets being so clearly unreal makes it worse; if we feel bad for the hand, we must realize how we act the same ways. It’s a moving piece.”

Another work, “What Will Come,” is a scene projected onto a round table, which is completely incomprehensible. But the light from the projector reflects onto a cylinder in the middle of the table, upon which the scene plays out clearly.

Other exhibitions include Bringing Munich Home which features a number of examples from the Frye Founding Collection. Munich, long known as the Kunststadt, or art city, was home to many artists at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, briefly rivaling even Paris as the European capital of visual art.

This exhibit, and the third, Over Julia’s Dead Body: Gabriel von Max’s Mystics and Martyrs feature more traditional art, namely more realistic paintings.

The most stunning of these is “View of Königssee” by Dániel Somogyi. An almost photograph-quality painting of the German lake “Königssee” is a tranquil work.

“I really enjoy coming here,” said Tingle. “It’s free, the exhibits are always changing, and I always see something new and interesting. It reminds me that, as with life, there’s no one, right way to do art.”

Reach features editor Randy Ferreiro at features@dailyuw.com.