Georgia Museum of Art

Founded in 1945, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, in Athens, is both an academic museum and, since 1982, the official art museum of the state of Georgia. It offers free admission to all visitors, six days a week. From the time it was opened to the public in 1948 in the basement of the old library on the university’s historic North Campus, the museum has grown consistently both in the size of its collection and in the size of its facilities. Today the museum occupies a contemporary building in the Performing and Visual Arts Complex on the university’s burgeoning east campus. There, 79,000 square feet house more than 10,000 objects in the museum’s permanent collection—a dramatic leap from the core of 100 paintings donated by the museum’s founder, Alfred Heber Holbrook.