Imagine that you have been given the responsibility to provide a unique cultural experience for tourists interested in discovering America’s most popular museums that exhibit works pertaining to the theme of our course, “Art of the Americas: A Social History of Art.”
Your task is to provide a guide to 10 locations for an extended cross country trip that begins at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (which holds 12,000 works of art by nearly 2,000 artists) and ends at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. I have provided you with a list of 20 museums from which to choose. Please note, they are neither listed in alphabetical order nor proximity to each other. It will be important for you to carefully plan your itinerary so that you can provide the most direct route from place to place.
What follows are museums with substantial holdings of American art: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Norman Rockwell Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, National Academy of Design, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of the Arts, Amon Carter Museum, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Atkins Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum, Hampton University Museum, Newark Museum, Montclair Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
You will find the above listed museums as well as other sites in your E-text on page 593 under “Websites.” Art museums of the Americas can also be viewed at www.museum.oas.org and you may also add some of your own. For your additional information, links to museums can be found at www.artcyclopedia.com.
In preparing your guide, include address, visitor information such as hours and admission fees, highlights of the museum’s permanent collection and art works of special interest. You might want to indicate if you feel the museum’s website is easy to navigate.