City: Raleigh, NC

Category: Tours & Attractions

Telephone: (919) 839-6262

Address: 2110 Blue Ridge Rd.

Description: The North Carolina Museum of Art’s new gallery space is a wondrous blend of thoughtful design and ambitious vision. From its anodized aluminum exterior to its glass walls and innovative use of muted sunlight, the 127,000-square-foot building seamlessly melds a grassy, wooded setting and a luminous interior. The stands of birch and magnolia, shimmer pools, and lily pond outside are visible through the glass walls, creating a natural backdrop for the museum’s varied permanent collection. The open floor plan allows visitors to get a sense of the breadth of the collection from many vantage points, as its bright modern murals, European paintings, African textiles, and Egyptian artifacts can be glimpsed together. The new museum building complements the existing, adjacent 164-acre sculpture park. Crisscrossed by several trails, the sculpture park is part open meadow, part woods. Among the highlights are a series of 150-foot arches, a giant whirligig, a cloud chamber, and a pedestrian bridge that spans I-440 at the park’s perimeter. When it began the museum in 1947 with $1 million, North Carolina became the first state in the country to use public money to fund an art collection. Since then, the North Carolina Museum of Art’s permanent collection has grown to span 5,000 years and include 30 Rodin sculptures—the largest collection in the Southeast—one of the few galleries in the country dedicated to Judaica, and pieces from a range of renowned artists—Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Stella, Jacob Lawrence, Thomas Hart Benton, Henry Moore, and Bill Viola among them.Admission to the museum is free, but tickets are required for the frequent touring exhibitions. It’s advisable to get tickets early, as crowds come from a radius of hundreds of miles. Popular exhibitions of previous seasons have included a retrospective of Monet in Normandy, an exploration of ancient Egyptian artifacts, and a collection of impressionist-era landscapes. The museum’s Blue Ridge Cafe serves fancy sandwiches and salads. As part of its mission as the state’s foremost purveyor of art, the museum offers regular programs for children and adults.