Skip to content

Top Navigation

Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure
  • Trip Inspiration
  • Plan Your Trip
  • Travel Guides
  • World's Best
  • Destination of the Year
  • A-List Travel Advisors
  • Cruises
  • Travel Tips
  • News
  • Food + Drink
  • Travel Accessories
  • Check-In

Profile Menu

Your Profile

Your Profile

  • Join Now
  • Newsletters
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Give a Gift Subscription
  • Help
  • Logout
Login
Subscribe
Pin FB

Explore Travel + Leisure

Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure
  • Explore

    Explore

    • World's Best

      The greatest islands, cities, hotels, cruise lines, airports, and more — as voted by you. Read More Next
    • The 50 Best Places to Travel in 2021

      Whether you're traveling solo or planning a family vacation, here are the 50 best places to visit in 2021. Read More Next
    • Let's Go Together Podcast

      Start listening to T+L's brand new podcast, Let's Go Together! Hosted by Kellee Edwards. Read More Next
  • Trip Inspiration

    Trip Inspiration

    • Trip Ideas
    • Weekend Getaways
    • Spring Travel
    • Summer Travel
    • Fall Travel
    • Winter Travel
    • Solo Travel
    • Romantic Getaways
    • Luxury Travel
    • Beach Vacations
    • Adventure Travel
    • Road Trips
    • Family Travel
    • National Parks
    • Holiday Travel
    • Travel Photography
    • Photo of the Day
    • Culture and Design
  • Plan Your Trip

    Plan Your Trip

    • Travel Deals
    • Attractions
    • Amusement Parks
    • Festivals and Events
    • Bus and Trains
    • Flight Deals
    • Budget Travel
    • Hotels and Resorts
    • Disney Vacations
    • Airlines and Airports
    • Ground Transportation
  • Travel Guides
  • World's Best

    World's Best

    • Top Hotels
    • Top Cities
    • Top Islands
    • Domestic Airlines
    • International Airlines
    • Tours
    • Safaris
    • All World's Best
  • Destination of the Year
  • A-List Travel Advisors
  • Cruises

    Cruises

    • Find A Cruise
    • Caribbean Cruises
    • River Cruises
    • European Cruises
    • All-Inclusive Cruises
    • Family Cruises
    • Alaskan Cruises
    • Disney Cruises
    • See All Cruise Vacations
  • Travel Tips

    Travel Tips

    • Travel Trends
    • Packing Tips
    • Points + Miles
    • Budgeting + Currency
    • Customs + Immigration
    • Responsible Travel
    • Travel Etiquette
    • Travel Warnings
    • Weather
    • Mobile Apps
    • See All Travel Tips
  • News

    News

    • Wellness
    • Celebrity Travel
    • Animals
    • Jobs
    • Offbeat
    • See All News
  • Food + Drink

    Food + Drink

    • Restaurants
    • Wine
    • Beer
    • Cocktails + Spirits
    • Bars + Clubs
    • Celebrity Chefs
    • Cooking + Entertaining
    • Food Fairs + Festivals
    • World's Best Restaurants
    • See All Food + Drink
  • Travel Accessories

    Travel Accessories

    • Travel Bags
    • Shoes
    • Travel Tech
    • Shopping
    • Style
    • Gift Guides
    • See All Travel Accessories
  • Check-In

Profile Menu

Subscribe this link opens in a new tab
Your Profile

Your Profile

  • Join Now
  • Newsletters
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Give a Gift Subscription
  • Help
  • Logout
Login
Sweepstakes

Follow Us

  1. Home
  2. Attractions
  3. Museums + Galleries
  4. America's Best Small-Town Museums

America's Best Small-Town Museums

By Nicholas DeRenzo
June 06, 2014
Skip gallery slides
Save Pin
Credit: Jerome Wilson / Alamy
The first significant new museum of American art in nearly half a century debuted in 2011. But to view Crystal Bridges’ collection—from a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington to Jackson Pollock canvases—you don’t travel to New York, L.A., or Chicago. You head down a forested ravine in a town in northwestern Arkansas.

As museum founder and Walmart heiress Alice Walton scooped up tens of millions of dollars’ worth of art from across the country, thinly veiled snobbish rhetoric began to trickle out from the coasts. Most notably, when she purchased Asher B. Durand’s 1849 Kindred Spirits from the New York Public Library for $35 million, some culturati bristled at the thought that this famed Hudson River School landscape would be leaving for Bentonville. The controversy raised the question: who deserves access to great art?

Yet a small town is precisely the kind of place where a stellar art collection fits in. After all, coastal hamlets, mountaintop villages, and desert whistle-stops have inspired American artists for generations, among them, the Impressionists of Connecticut’s Old Lyme Colony and the minimalist installation artists who more recently gentrified Marfa. Where else can you find the mix of affordable rents, access to inspiring natural vistas, and enough peace and quiet to actually get work done?

Many small towns also offer detour-worthy museums, some housed in spectacular historic spaces—old factories, former army bases, Beaux-Arts estates, Victorian mansions—and others built from scratch by internationally renowned architects like Zaha Hadid and Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron. And with works inside just as varied, from landscape paintings at the Taos Art Museum to minimalist installations at Dia:Beacon to American folk art at the Shelburne, you’re sure to find a small-town art museum to suit any artistic taste.
Start Slideshow

1 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT

Credit: Courtesy of HIll-Stead Museum

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.

1 of 16

Advertisement
Advertisement

2 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, Biloxi, MS

Credit: Courtesy of Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art

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.

2 of 16

3 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

The Huntington, San Marino, CA

Credit: Alexander Vertikoff

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.

3 of 16

Advertisement

4 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI

Credit: Photo by Paul Warchol

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.

4 of 16

5 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY

Credit: Hufton + Crow

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.

5 of 16

6 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, VT

Credit: © Shelburne Museum

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.

6 of 16

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

7 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX

Credit: Photo by Florian Holzherr, courtesy of the Chinati Foundation. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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.

7 of 16

8 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island, WA

Credit: Art Grice

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.

8 of 16

9 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR

Credit: Photograph by Timothy Hursley, courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

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.

9 of 16

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

10 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA

Credit: Zoran Orlić

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.

10 of 16

11 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Springville Museum of Art, Springville, UT

Credit: Courtesy of Springville Museums of Art

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.

11 of 16

12 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT

Credit: Florence Griswold Museum

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.

12 of 16

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

13 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, NM

Credit: Courtesy of Taos Art Museum at Fechin House

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.

13 of 16

14 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, WY

Credit: © National Museum of Wildlife Art

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.

14 of 16

15 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY

Credit: Randy Duchaine / Alamy

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.

15 of 16

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

16 of 16

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Rahr-West Art Museum, Manitowoc, WI

Credit: Jerome Wilson / Alamy

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.

16 of 16

Replay gallery

Share the Gallery

Pinterest Facebook

Up Next

By Nicholas DeRenzo

Share the Gallery

Pinterest Facebook
Trending Videos
Advertisement
Skip slide summaries

Everything in This Slideshow

Advertisement

View All

1 of 16 Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT
2 of 16 Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, Biloxi, MS
3 of 16 The Huntington, San Marino, CA
4 of 16 Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI
5 of 16 Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY
6 of 16 Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, VT
7 of 16 Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX
8 of 16 Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island, WA
9 of 16 Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR
10 of 16 Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA
11 of 16 Springville Museum of Art, Springville, UT
12 of 16 Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT
13 of 16 Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, NM
14 of 16 National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, WY
15 of 16 Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY
16 of 16 Rahr-West Art Museum, Manitowoc, WI

Share options

Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message
Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure

Magazines & More

Learn More

  • Subscribe this link opens in a new tab
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Content Licensing this link opens in a new tab
  • Sitemap
  • Travel Guide Sitemap

Connect

Follow Us
Subscribe to Our Newsletters
Other Travel + Leisure Sites
Other Meredith Sites

Other Meredith Sites

  • 4 Your Health this link opens in a new tab
  • Allrecipes this link opens in a new tab
  • All People Quilt this link opens in a new tab
  • Better Homes & Gardens this link opens in a new tab
  • Bizrate Insights this link opens in a new tab
  • Bizrate Surveys this link opens in a new tab
  • Cooking Light this link opens in a new tab
  • Daily Paws this link opens in a new tab
  • EatingWell this link opens in a new tab
  • Eat This, Not That this link opens in a new tab
  • Entertainment Weekly this link opens in a new tab
  • Food & Wine this link opens in a new tab
  • Health this link opens in a new tab
  • Hello Giggles this link opens in a new tab
  • Instyle this link opens in a new tab
  • Martha Stewart this link opens in a new tab
  • Midwest Living this link opens in a new tab
  • More this link opens in a new tab
  • MyRecipes this link opens in a new tab
  • MyWedding this link opens in a new tab
  • My Food and Family this link opens in a new tab
  • MyLife this link opens in a new tab
  • Parenting this link opens in a new tab
  • Parents this link opens in a new tab
  • People this link opens in a new tab
  • People en EspaƱol this link opens in a new tab
  • Rachael Ray Magazine this link opens in a new tab
  • Real Simple this link opens in a new tab
  • Ser Padres this link opens in a new tab
  • Shape this link opens in a new tab
  • Siempre Mujer this link opens in a new tab
  • Southern Living this link opens in a new tab
  • SwearBy this link opens in a new tab
Travel + Leisure is part of the Travel + Leisure Group. Copyright 2021 Meredith Corporation. Travel + Leisure is a registered trademark of Meredith Corporation Travel + Leisure Group All Rights Reserved, registered in the United States and other countries. Travel + Leisure may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Privacy Policythis link opens in a new tab Terms of Servicethis link opens in a new tab Ad Choicesthis link opens in a new tab California Do Not Sellthis link opens a modal window Web Accessibilitythis link opens in a new tab
© Copyright . All rights reserved. Printed from https://www.travelandleisure.com

View image

America's Best Small-Town Museums
this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines.