<p>UT-Austin has the largest art museum of any North American university. When the second building is completed this year, the Blanton Museum of Art will total 180,000 sq ft. Put in perspective with another recent museum campaign - at ~$85M, UT's art museum is over 3X the cost and size of Duke's new Nasher art museum. In addition to the Blanton Museum, the Ransom Humanities Research Center has a very large art collection. In total, UT's art collections in these two museums total almost 120,000 works, from antiquity to the present.</p>
<p>Notable collections: Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and Baroque Art, James Michener contemporary American collection, one of the largest and most significant print and drawing collections on any US campus (including noted historian Leo Steinberg's collection), and one of the largest contemporary Latin American collections in the world</p>
<p>Primarily a literary archive, the $1B Ransom Center collection is also a repository of over 5 million photographs (including the world's first) and over 100,000 works of art - from one of only 11 copies of 'Songs of Innocence' hand colored by William Blake to works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.</p>
<p>Rice doesn't have any museum to speak of, but it is located in Houston, near the city's museum district. Houston is home to a number of excellent museums, most notably the Menil Collection, considered by many to be one of the finest private collections in the world. The Menil Collection (as well as Houston's other world class museums) is literally an example of what huge amounts of oil money can buy.</p>
<p>By the same token, SMU and the other colleges in North Texas benefit from their close promixity to Dallas/Ft. Worth, cities which are home to spectacular collections like the Kimball, Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, the DMA, and the Nasher Sculpture Center</p>
<p>If it's not on campus it does not count for this thread. I'm sure Dallas has good restaurants too but that does not make the food in the dorms any better.</p>
<p>Au contraire, per the thread's original post (emphasis added):</p>
<p>
[quote]
One of the areas that students might want to consider as part of their college search process is a school's own museum or proximity to/relationship with local art institutions. </p>
<p>If you have a good art museum at or near your school and it has had some impact on your undergraduate experience or college search process, then please share that with others. Thanks.
<p>The only significant art museum per se on Penn's campus is the Institute of Contemporary Art, which does not have a permanent collection, but which has been prominent in the modern art world for over 40 years for the shows it has sponsored and mounted. For example, it exhibited the first-ever museum shows of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana, as well as the famous/notorious Robert Mapplethorpe show that generated a ferocious conservative backlash against the National Endowment for the Arts in the '90s.</p>
<p>Though not strictly an art museum, Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is one of the finest museums of its type in the world, and has an internationally renowned collection of ancient art and artifacts:</p>
<p>Within a mile or so of Penn's campus is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is the 3rd largest art museum in the U.S. and is currently undergoing a $500 million expansion.</p>
<p>A few blocks beyond that is the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which is the oldest Art School and Museum in the U.S., and contains a marvelous collection of American art.</p>
<p>About 5 miles from Penn's campus is the legendary Barnes Foundation, which is "one of the world's largest collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings, with extensive holdings by Picasso, Matisse, C</p>
<p>Right on Harvard's campus you can find the Fogg, Sackler, and Busch-Reisinger art museums for world-class paintings from Rembrandt to Matisse in an intimate setting:</p>
<p>
[quote]
University of MN--Twin Cities has the best one, no contest:
[/quote]
</p>
<p>While I certainly agree the Gehry design is striking (and gets mega-points for originality considering it pre-dated his masterpiece in Bilbao), the collection of the museum itself is rather lacking and has been criticized as such.</p>
<p>Contrast that with a museum like the Blanton, which admittedly is quite boring on the exterior, but doesn't compete with the collection inside.</p>
<p>Ideally a great museum would have both a striking design and spectacular collection, but if not both, I would think a better collection is more important since it is a museum, after all...</p>
<p>Beloit College in Wisconsin has two excellent museums on campus - the Wright Museum of Art and the Logan Museum of Anthropology. Both museums have extensive collections. The Wright Museum's collection includes an extensive collection of asian art, as well as sculpture from Greece and Egypt, while the Logan has a larg collections of pre-columbian artifacts. Beloit also has a student run art gallery that schedules exhibits and shows as well, and offers a minor in museum studies that is well-respected in the museum world.</p>
<p>Here's a link to an article in the NYT when UT's new Blanton opened:</p>
<p>Once the second, auxiliary building is completed, university officials say, the University of Texas will surpass Ohio State and Harvard to have the largest university art museum complex in the United States, with 180,000 square feet. </p>
<p>Since some posts are listing non-art museums, UT-Austin also has the LBJ Presidential Library & Museum (first on a US campus and most visited of all presidential museums - being free helps! lol) and the Texas Natural Science Center (a natural history museum complex).</p>
<p>Here are takes from different angles - museums by size and attendance figures</p>
<p>Five largest university art museums in the U.S. </p>
<p>Blanton Museum of Art, UT — 180,000
The Wexner Art Center, Ohio State University — 162,200
Harvard University Museums— 150,697
Brigham Young University Museum of Art — 143,980
Berkeley Art Museum — 141,990</p>
<p>Sources: Association of Art Museum Directors, 2005 Survey; staff research </p>
<p>TOP FIVE UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS BY ANNUAL ATTENDANCE </p>
<ol>
<li>Brigham Young University Museum of Art — 334,774 </li>
<li>Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State Univ. — 225,950 </li>
<li>Blanton Museum of Art — 172,225 </li>
<li>UCLA Hammer Museum of Art — 129,337 </li>
<li>Harvard University Art Museums — 123,465 </li>
</ol>
<p>Source: American Association of Museum Directors 2005 annual survey; staff research </p>
<p>Good opportunity to brag on something that doesn't get much attention.</p>
<p>WashU has the Kemper Art Museum, one of the oldest university teaching museums (est. 1881), which has recently been ensconced as the centerpiece in a $57-million five-building complex containing studios and classrooms for art students. The new building links WashU's College of Art, College of Architecture, and Graduate School of Art and Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design. </p>
<p>In greater St. Louis, there are many other museums on hand, including the centerpiece for Forest Park, a fine arts museum set in a grand building designed for the 1904 World's Fair. </p>
<p>Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum is a work of art itself: it was designed by world renowned architect Michael Graves. Emory's museum is the best museum for ancient art in the entire South. Eight years ago it was discovered that the museum had in its posession the mummy of Ramses 1, which the University returned to Egypt in exchange for the right to borrow pieces from Egypt's museums. This has obviously been extremely beneficial. </p>
<p>The best university art museum overall is probably Yale. Based upon my knowledge of art and my recollection of visits to many university galleries/museums, Yale's was the best.</p>
<p>The University of Rochester has a small, but impressive art museum with a smattering of paintings from many of the masters as well as some great sculpture and traveling exhibitions. It is located in downtown Rochester, close to the Eastman School of Music, but there is shuttle service from the undergrad river campus.</p>
