309 Best Sights in USA

At this nonprofit organization, the focus is on drawings—contemporary and historical. The frequently changing exhibits often push the envelope on what's considered drawing so there's usually some thought-provoking material. Many projects are commissioned by the center.

Explore the eccentric artwork and offbeat humor of the late acclaimed artist and illustrator. Regularly changing exhibitions, arranged in the downstairs rooms of Gorey's former home, include drawings of his oddball characters and reveal the mysterious psyche of the sometimes dark but always playful illustrator.

Just outside of Oak Glen, this museum features late 16th to early 19th century European, Indian, and Asian works of art. Founder Dean Stout designed the interior to resemble a home with seven historic rooms including a library with over 2,700 books from the 17th to the 19th centuries. After visiting the museum, stroll the grounds to enjoy the koi pond, garden maze, and the popular Legacy Rose Garden.

El barrio, Spanish for "the neighborhood," is the nickname for East Harlem, a largely Spanish-speaking community; the museum, on the edge of this neighborhood, focuses on Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean art. Founded in 1969, the museum's permanent collection of more than 8,500 objects is highlighted through evolving themes, including women, African and Indigenous artists, Latinx representation and more. Art and crafts from Latin America are prominent. One highlight is the over 300 santos, carved wooden folk-art figures from Puerto Rico. El Teatro, formerly the Heckscher Children's Theater, has stunning 30-foot murals and stained-glass roundels. The museum's events include lectures, films, festivals and parties for Latin and Caribbean holidays, including a Three Kings Day parade.

The realization of founder Samuel S. Fleisher's open invitation "to come and learn art," this school and gallery has offered classes, some tuition-free, since 1898. Fleisher presents regular exhibits of contemporary art as well as works by faculty and students. The Memorial consists of several connected buildings, including the Sanctuary, a Romanesque Revival Episcopal church designed by the architectural firm of Frank Furness and featuring European art from the 13th to the 15th century. A satellite building at 705 Christian Street is dedicated to works on paper.

This museum, now housed in new digs in historic Ybor City, is the epicenter for the photographic arts in the region. With a series of rotating exhibits that runs the gamut, there’s something for everyone, from historic images to contemporary works.

This redbrick Civil War fort never saw a lick of action during the war. Today it serves as a museum, operated by the Key West Art & Historical Society, with exhibits about the 19th and 20th centuries, including relics from the USS Maine, cigar factory and shipwrecking displays, and a collection of Stanley Papio's "junk art" sculptures and Cuban folk artist Mario Sanchez's chiseled and painted wooden carvings of historic Key West street scenes. You can climb to the top of the citadel tower.

The museum's key permanent collections include pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art, Andean pre-Columbian textiles and artifacts, Japanese prints, Berkeley School abstract expressionist paintings, and contemporary sculpture. Temporary exhibits include important traveling shows.

In addition to its beloved permanent collection—predominantly 19th- and 20th-century pastoral paintings—the Frye hosts eclectic and often avant-garde exhibits, putting this elegant museum on par with the Henry in the University District. No matter what's going on in the stark, brightly lit back galleries, it always seems to blend well with the permanent collection, which is rotated regularly. Thanks to the legacy of Charles and Emma Frye, the museum is always free, including parking, and its café MariPili at Cafe Frieda serves Galician-inspired sandwiches, salads, and soups.

The Geffen Contemporary is one of architect Frank Gehry's boldest creations. One of three MOCA branches, the 40,000 square feet of exhibition space was once used as a police car warehouse. The museum's permanent collection includes works from artists like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Cindy Sherman.

Present your TAP metro card to get two-for-one admission.

The museum houses a fascinating private art collection that includes a salon gallery with 19th-century American paintings by Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, as well as a Japanese antiquities room filled with armor, textiles, porcelain, and carved jade. Lovers of architecture will appreciate the Italian palazzo-style building, built in 1896, with fully restored original Tiffany stained glass windows—the windows are rare examples of Tiffany work commissioned for a museum building.

On the campus of the University of Georgia, the museum serves a dual purpose as an academic institution and the official public art museum of the State of Georgia. The permanent collection contains a wealth of 19th- and 20th-century paintings—some from noted American artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Winslow Homer. It also houses the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance art. Special exhibitions display cherished works of art from around the world.

This Southern-focused gallery—reopening in 2024 after a renovation—is home to American paintings dating from the colonial era, along with more modern works by Andy Warhol, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jasper Johns. It hosts the world's most comprehensive public collection of Andrew Wyeth watercolors.

NC State has one of the country's top public-university design programs, and this free museum gives a taste of the creativity and innovation that has fueled the college. Selections from the museum's 54,000-item collection of textiles, decorative arts, ceramics, photography, and folk art rotate in a semipermanent exhibition, while the other galleries display several shows a year on everything from inflatable sculpture to metal jewelry to biotechnology. Behind the museum is a pollinator garden designed by horticulture students.

The handsome Eastlake Victorian house that belonged to Dr. Otis Thrash Hammonds is the focal point of this museum, as well as his fine collection of paintings and Victorian furnishings. The permanent and visiting exhibitions are devoted chiefly to works by African American artists, although art from anywhere in the African-influenced world can be a focus.

This 112,800-square-foot museum has five main collections: Asian, with works dating back to the Neolithic era; African, encompassing costumes, domestic wares, and personal adornments; Modern, featuring the works of Georgia O'Keeffe, William Morris Hunt, Claude Monet, and George Bellows; Contemporary, with original pieces by Yayoi Kusama and El Anatsui; and Photography, including the work of Jerry N. Uelsmann, a retired University of Florida professor.

Historic Brooklyn, as the once-thriving African-American neighborhood here was known, is long gone, but this celebration of Black art, history, and culture serves its memory well. The exhibits change frequently, but you can always see John and Vivian Hewitt's collection of African-American visual art, including those of Harlem Renaissance–famed and Charlotte-born Romare Bearden.

Occupying almost an entire city block between Broadway and Riverside Drive East on 155th Street in upper Manhattan, the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, a repository of an extraordinarily rich collection of more than half a million items relating to the art and cultures of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, opened to the public for the first time in six years in early 2023. Founded in 1904 as a museum for Spanish and Portuguese art, with Goya’s Dutchess of Alba (1797) as a major draw of the collection, the museum reopened with a mission to connect the Society to the art of the 20th and 21st centuries and to its Latino neighborhood of Washington Heights. The Dutchess of Alba is still here, and still a big draw in the arcaded, Spanish Renaissance--style Main Court, which features luscious terra-cotta details. Other highlights include the Sorolla Vision of Spain Gallery housing 14 monumental paintings from the Valencian master painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, and the Upper Terrace, an open-air space that looks out over the bronze equestrian statue of El Cid and other fine sculptures. Renovations to the museum continue and will include a visitor center and an education center.

Housed in a renovated, turn-of-the-20th-century Carnegie library building, the Hockaday Museum of Art presents contemporary art exhibits focusing on Montana artists and the art and culture of Glacier National Park.

Displays at this 17,000-square-foot museum include folk art, crafts, photography, painting, and sculpture, with an emphasis on homegrown Montana artists.

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston's seasonal outpost first opened in 2018 after renovations to a dilapidated former copper-pipe facility in East Boston's working shipyard and marina. Every summer, a single large-scale, immersive art installation makes the 15,000-square-foot space its own. A smaller gallery delves into the shipyard's history.

If you like vintage signs, clocks, and neon art, check out this quirky and cleverly designed museum, a labor of love (and ingenuity) by Tucson sign artist Jude Cook and his wife Monica. The collection, impressive in its breadth, includes rescued, restored signs from mid-century businesses, as well as vintage wall thermometers, soda and beer signs, and items that you would never guess used neon, like old medicinal remedies for sore throats and balding hair. Demonstrations of glass bending and neon sign-making are given on most days.

Explore more than 500 contemporary works of glass art at this gorgeous, world-class museum. The 34,000-square-foot gallery space features stunning translucent pieces that play with color, light, and shape by standout American and international artists, including Harvey Littleton, an early 1960s pioneer in the medium, as well as modern artists who have taken glass-blowing, glass-casting, and sand-casting techniques to the next level.

This museum, part of the University of Pennsylvania, has established a reputation for identifying promising contemporary artists and championing them at critical points in their careers. Among the creators who have had exhibitions at ICA and later gone on to international prominence are Andy Warhol (his first-ever solo museum show, in 1965), Laurie Anderson, Robert Mapplethorpe, and surveys of less famous but important artists such as Jamaican Mavis Pusey's geometric abstractions. ICA is dedicated to the one or two exhibitions they show at a time. Exhibitions are long-running but closing between them is typical, so check what's up before you go.

Founded in 1974 by photojournalist Cornell Capa (photographer Robert Capa's brother), ICP continues to put on exhibitions that explore the timely social and political aspects of photojournalism. The institution, which has moved its collection of more than 150,000 original prints—spanning the history of photography, from daguerreotypes to large-scale pigment prints—several times, finally has a permanent home with both education and exhibition spaces. The new building's spacious, second- and third-floor galleries really allow the exhibits to shine. There's a gift shop and small café on the ground floor. It's pay-what-you-wish ($5 minimum) on Thursday night 5 pm–8 pm.

Intuit showcases work from creators outside the artistic mainstream, many of whom used whatever supplies they had at their disposal to realize their vision. Collectively it’s a testament to the force of the creative impulse, no matter one’s background. Temporary exhibitions change throughout the year, but the heart of the museum is its exhibition about the internationally renowned artist Henry Darger, featuring a selection of artwork and anchored by a recreation of the artist’s cramped one-room apartment with his actual ephemera---think volumes of scrapbooks, balls of twine, pencil stubs, and paint pots—along with digital elements that explore the art, writings, methods and motivations of this mystery-shrouded artist.

Atop Lighthouse Hill sits this replica of a tranquil Tibetan monastery so impressive, it's listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Founded by an American collector of Tibetan art, it's partly a museum comprising a temple and a garden, holding her formidable collection of Tibetan and Himalayan sculpture, paintings, and artifacts. It's also an active community center for visitors to mediate, practice yoga or tai chi, or attend other events posted on their website's calendar. Views from their terrace truly transport you to another place, far from an urban center.

Named for the late best-selling novelist and Doylestown native, this museum, across the street from the Mercer Museum, has a permanent collection and changing exhibitions that focus on 19th- and 20th-century American art, especially those by Bucks County artists. It's known for its collection of early-20th-century Pennsylvania impressionists, representing such artists as Edward Redfield and Daniel Garber. The museum occupies the buildings and grounds of the former Bucks County jail, which dates from 1884. A 23-foot-high fieldstone wall surrounds seven galleries, an outdoor sculpture garden, and a Gothic-style warden's house. There's also a re-creation of Michener's Doylestown study. A relatively new gallery accommodates larger traveling exhibits, included in the price of admission.