Unspecified/General

In the heart of the Museum District just south of downtown Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is one of the largest and most significant encyclopaedic art museums in the southern United States. The museum was founded in April 1924 as the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in a small William Ward Watkin-designed Greek Revival building (since substantially expanded) and has grown over the intervening century into a sprawling 14-acre multi-building campus covering most of the city block on the western side of Main Street. The museum's campus includes several distinct buildings. The original 1924 Caroline Wiess Law Building, with its handsome Greek Revival exterior, houses the museum's collections of European, American and Latin American art. The dramatic 1974 Audrey Jones Beck Building (also by Watkin) houses the museum's twentieth-century, contemporary and Islamic art collections. The 2020 Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, designed by the Studio Mumbai architect Steven Holl, more than doubled the museum's exhibition space with new contemporary and Latin American galleries. The collection comprises some 70,000 individual works spanning more than 7,000 years of art history, with particular strengths in several internationally significant collections. The European collection is one of the largest in the southern United States, with major holdings of Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting, Spanish Golden Age painting, French Impressionism (with significant works by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Manet and Cezanne) and post-Impressionist masters. The Latin American collection is one of the most important in the United States, with major holdings of pre-Columbian art, Spanish colonial paintings, Mexican modernism (including major works by Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo and Jose Clemente Orozco) and contemporary Latin American art. The Photography collection, established in the 1970s by the celebrated curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, is widely considered one of the finest in the United States. The campus also includes the celebrated Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, designed by the late Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and dedicated in 1986, featuring major outdoor sculptures by Rodin, Calder, Bourdelle and other twentieth-century masters.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: 5601 Main Street, Houston, TX, United States

Telephone: 713-639-7300

Website: mfah.org

Opening Date: 12/04/1924