America's Best Small-Town Museums

When iron industrialist Alfred A. Pope began buying French Impressionist masterpieces, the movement was still stirring outrage across Europe for its radical departure from tradition. But you’d never know it from the intimate, even cozy, atmosphere at the Hill-Stead Museum, which places these works in the same context in which Pope would have enjoyed them—surrounded by antiques and period Federal-, Chippendale-, and Empire-style furnishings in his hilltop estate outside of Hartford. Like the works you’ll find inside, by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, and Édouard Manet, the house itself now seems lovely and genteel. But it also comes with a radical backstory: the Colonial Revival mansion, completed in 1901, was designed by Pope’s own daughter, only the fourth registered female architect in American history. $15; hillstead.org.

Biloxi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum raises many questions. You might wonder what an avant-garde museum is doing in a Gulf Coast beach town known for its casinos and sunshine. Or how starchitect Frank Gehry got involved in a project dedicated to obscure 19th-century ceramicist George Ohr. Or how this place is even still standing. During construction, Hurricane Katrina slammed an unmoored casino barge directly into the unfinished buildings. Any lack of logic seems appropriate in honoring Ohr, a true eccentric who dubbed himself the Mad Potter of Biloxi and was known for his delightfully misshapen, brightly colored pottery. Opened in 2010 in a thicket of live oaks, the museum encompasses brick-and-steel pavilions, twisted egg-shaped pods, and examples of 19th-century vernacular architecture, with galleries on African American art, ceramics, and Gulf Coast history. $10; georgeohr.org.

San Marino is named for the tiny republic on the Italian peninsula. And it’s an appropriate connection for the Huntington, where the vibe is distinctly European, thanks to 120 manicured acres (reserve ahead for the Tea Room, surrounded by a rose garden) and a collection skewed to Old World classics. The Huntington Art Gallery has the largest collection of 18th- and 19th-century British art outside of London—including works by Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable. Other galleries within this Beaux-Arts estate cover Renaissance paintings and 18th-century sculpture as well as the furniture of Frank Lloyd Wright and paintings by Mary Cassatt and Edward Hopper. A Gutenberg Bible from the 1450s and an illuminated manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are among the library’s gems. $20.

College towns offer more than beautiful campuses, tradition-rich bars, and football. Many can also brag about world-class art collections. Case in point: Michigan State University’s new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. It’s the first-ever university building designed by Pritzker Prize–winner Zaha Hadid and only her second project in North America. The corrugated stainless steel and glass facade juts sharply like a ship—or perhaps more accurately a spaceship—run aground. While the collection is primarily contemporary, the curators included some classic works to better contextualize the newer acquisitions. So you can expect Old Master paintings, 19th-century American paintings, and 20th-century sculpture, along with artifacts from ancient Greece, Rome, and the pre-Columbian Americas. Free; broadmuseum.msu.edu.

Low-slung and shedlike, with its corrugated tin roof and parallel 615-foot slabs of poured concrete, Eastern Long Island’s newest art museum features a style that might be called Modern Agricultural. Surrounded by a meadow of tall grasses on the long road to Montauk, the museum is a minimalist stunner that’s perfectly suited to its surroundings: the long horizontal space speaks both to the uninterrupted horizons of the region’s famed beaches and to the unfussy simplicity that first attracted artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. Inside, under an ever-changing glow from skylights above, the collection honors the generations of artists who called this area home, such as American Impressionist William Merritt Chase and mid-century realist Fairfield Porter. In 2014, it won Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron a T+L Design Award for best museum. $10; parrishart.org.

Most art collectors limit purchases to what they can hang on the walls or set on their mantelpieces. But sugar heiress Electra Havemeyer Webb had grander plans. After amassing Hudson River School landscapes, quirky folk art, quilts, decoys, toys, and circus posters, Webb decided she needed somewhere to put it all. So she set out doing what she did best: collecting. From across New England and New York, Webb gathered 18th- and 19th-century structures—houses, barns, a schoolhouse, a jail, a general store, a lighthouse, and a steamboat—and set them up on 45 acres of farmland near Lake Champlain, where she founded the Shelburne Museum in 1947. More than 150,000 pieces are on display and more accessible than ever; the 2013 opening of the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education allowed the formerly seasonal Shelburne to stay open year-round. $22.

The Chinati Foundation is massive by design. Fed up with the cramped galleries of New York City and the need to constantly rotate exhibits, minimalist sculptor Donald Judd decamped to this tiny former railroad stop in the Chihuahuan Desert in 1971. Nearly 200 miles from an airport and surrounded on all sides by scrub grasslands, Marfa is blessed, above all else, with space. Judd teamed with the Dia Foundation to transform a decommissioned army base into the 340-acre arts compound. Here and in a number of buildings downtown, works are given room to breathe. A hundred of Judd’s trademark aluminum boxes fill two old brick artillery sheds, Dan Flavin’s light installations occupy six barracks, Richard Long’s volcanic stone pieces sit on an old tennis court, and John Chamberlain’s painted steel sculptures are in the Marfa Wool and Mohair Building. $25, full collection tour.

Opened in June 2013 in the waterfront town of Bainbridge Island, BIMA is just a five-minute walk from the ferry terminal that brings passengers across Puget Sound from Seattle. But BIMA’s curators aren’t concerned with any big-city competition. They’ve honed in with a laser-like focus on contemporary fine arts and crafts from a very small radius: the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas and the Western Puget Sound region. It’s all on view in a dazzling glass building that reflects the region’s eco-friendly spirit. With its rooftop garden, recycled-denim insulation, solar panels, geothermal wells, and sustainable tigerwood siding, BIMA is on track to become the first LEED Gold–certified museum in the state—and among the first in the nation. Free; biartmuseum.org.

Casting her curatorial net (and considerable wealth) far and wide, Alice Walton gathered centuries of exceptional American art, from the Colonial era up to the present. The works by Gilbert Stuart, John Singer Sargent, Andy Warhol, and Jackson Pollock, to name just a few, would make any big city proud. But Walton set her project in a place critically underserved by cultural institutions, the Ozarks town of Bentonville, where Sam Walton opened his first five and dime. Designed by Israeli-American architect Moshe Safdie with an eye toward connecting with the landscape, the museum is made up of eight interconnected galleries built in and around spring-fed pools, surrounded by forests, ravines, and miles of hiking trails. It helped inspire the opening of 21c, a nearby art-filled boutique hotel with a locavore restaurant. Free; crystalbridges.org.

The repurposed 19th-century brick buildings that make up Mass MoCA’s 13-acre campus are forever linked with northwestern Massachusetts’ industrial heritage. These buildings housed textile manufacturers, then Sprague Electric Company, which produced parts for the atomic bomb and the Gemini spacecraft. When Sprague left in 1985, the site was historically significant but unwieldy—a superfund contamination site also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The director of the Williams College Museum of Art came looking for a raw space for larger-than-life installations. After more than a decade of renovations, Mass MoCA opened in 1999. Now artist residencies mean that works of art—visual, music, dance, film, theater—are being created on the very same floors where forward-thinking advances have been developed for 150 years. $15.

Utah welcomed its first fine arts museum in 1903—seven short years after it achieved statehood—when two local artists donated works to Springville High School, a Spanish colonial revival structure in a small town that’s since been nicknamed Art City. Born to Mormon parents, Cyrus E. Dallin sculpted portraits of Native Americans as well as the famous gold-plated Angel Moroni atop the Salt Lake Temple, while Swiss-born Impressionist painter John Hafen was enamored with the rural Utah landscape. The museum nearly doubled in size with the 2004 addition of 14 galleries and the 2009 dedication of an outdoor sculpture garden. Though Utah-based art still makes up two-thirds of the 3,000-piece collection, you’ll also encounter American Realist and Soviet Socialist Realist works. Free; smofa.org.

Many early 20th-century painters sought refuge from mechanized urban life in the idyllic countryside, in towns like the historic shipbuilding center of Old Lyme, where the Connecticut River meets Long Island Sound. Here, Florence Griswold began renting out rooms in her family’s mansion to Henry Ward Ranger, Childe Hassam, and Willard Metcalf. Soon, “Miss Florence,” as guests knew her, became the sun around which the Lyme Art Colony orbited. The playful artists often painted directly on the boardinghouse’s doors and wall panels, much as their French peers had done in artist colonies like Giverny and Barbizon. You can still view these works in rooms decorated with period furnishings and antiques. $15; florencegriswoldmuseum.org.

Creative types as diverse as Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams have been streaming into these parts since at least the 19th century, attracted by the millennia of Native American history, the rich Spanish Colonial influences, and the shifting light over the starkly beautiful desert. In 2003, the Taos Art Museum moved to its current digs, the former residence of Russian-born portraitist and landscape painter Nicolai Fechin, who embellished his adobe home with triptych windows and carved doors. The space celebrates the works of the Taos Society of Artists, a collective that painted during the first three decades of the 20th century. Their canvases portray horseback riders, aspens and cottonwoods, and simple adobe pueblos. Such features continue to inspire; many locals claim that Taos has the highest number of artists per capita anywhere in the world. $8.

On a cliff overlooking the National Elk Refuge, near the entrance to Grand Teton National Park, this wildlife museum has elk, bison, bald eagles, and wolves at its doorstep. Such creatures of the American West play a starring role in the collection’s many 19th-century paintings. Those were the pre-photography days when explorers painted their latest discoveries to show to the folks back home. The 5,000-plus items from 550 artists date from 2,500 B.C. to the present. That means you’ll find the usual suspects (John James Audubon) as well as Rembrandt van Rijn and Auguste Rodin, Romantics and Realists, Impressionists and Modernists—from the American West, of course, but also from Africa, Europe, and Oceania. $12; wildlifeart.org.

Quaintness defines much of the Hudson Valley, yet Dia:Beacon—which overlooks the river about 50 miles north of New York City—is a hulking, muscular presence. Opened in 2003 in the shell of a 300,000-square-foot Nabisco box factory, the museum does nothing to hide its roots. Brick, steel, and concrete dominate, and massive windows flood the old manufacturing floors with natural light. The works on display, primarily minimalist and conceptual pieces from 1960 through today, are appropriately monumental, with each gallery given over to a different artist’s vision. Look for John Chamberlain’s crushed cars, Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light displays, Michael Heizer’s pitch-black well-like holes carved into the floor, Louise Bourgeois’s menacing spiders, and Richard Serra’s intimidating steel behemoths. $12.

With its turrets, dormers, and bay windows, you might expect this 1891 Queen Anne–style mansion to be full of genteel treasures. But 19th-century furnishings and sculptures tell only half the story: Rahr-West also counts a permanent collection of Modernist and postwar pieces by luminaries like Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. If witnessing these experimental works in such a classically Victorian atmosphere is jarring, brace yourself for a more shocking intrusion of the modern world: outside the museum, in the middle of Eighth Street, you’ll find a brass ring commemorating where a 20-pound chunk of Sputnik IV came crashing down to Earth in 1962. It inspired the museum’s annual Sputnikfest. Free; manitowoc.org.