Essay on Museums: Louvre and Atlanta Art Association

I’ve always been into going to places like museums and art galleries for the fun of it. I guess I should thank my family for that, because growing up as a child, the adults always made sure that we (kids) were brought up to admire other things besides television and video games. I enjoyed going to museums as a child, but the older I get the more I appreciate the beauty of what’s inside the museums. The Michael Carlos museum was wonderful, but once I stepped into the High Museum, it was really a jaw dropping experience. The first thing I was happy about was that the tickets were $5 instead of the usual $15 because of March being college month, so students get a discount on tickets. The High Museum is located in Midtown Atlanta. It was originally founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, but the name later changed to the High Museum of Art when it received its first permanent home in 1926 when Mrs. Joseph M. High donated her family’s residence on Peachtree Street. In 1955, the Museum was outgrowing their location so it moved to a new brick structure adjacent to the original High house. In 1979, Robert W. Woodruff offered a $7.5 million challenge grant for a new facility that would triple the museums space to 135,000 square feet. In 1983, they raised $20 million and moved to a new location designed by Richard Meier. This design won many awards and the American Institute of Architects deemed the Meier design one of the “ten best works of American architecture in the 1980s.” The museum itself has four levels, with the 18th and 19th century collections near the bottom and the contemporary pieces near the top levels. Because of the growth of the museum, it was expanded by adding on three more buildings in 2005. This expansion doubled the size of the building to 312,000 square feet. The expansion was completed by Italian architect Revizo Piano. “The High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of 19th and 20th century American art;

significant holdings of European paintings and decorative art; a growing collection of African American Art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and African art and is the only major general museum in North America to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the field of folk and self-taught art.” To celebrate it’s 20th anniversary, the galleries were enhanced and their permanent collection was put into chronological order. I initially wanted to visit on a friday night so that I could enjoy the jazz concerts that they offer, but after reading about the crowd, I decided to enjoy the museum first and then go back

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Essay on Museums: Louvre and Atlanta Art Association

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