September 18, 1988

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts opened in its current building in Blount Cultural Park. Founded in 1930 as the state’s oldest fine arts museum, its current building features 80,000 square feet devoted to galleries for permanent collections, temporary exhibitions, a graphic arts study center, an auditorium and an interactive education gallery. The opening showcased the first installation of the museum’s new Blount Collection, which contains 41 historically significant paintings by American artists such as Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe. Today, the museum’s collections include more than 4,000 works of art, and more than 165,000 visitors pass through the museum each year.

Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, 2010. (The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

Children learn art from computers at the ArtWorks center in the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, 2010. (The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

Photographer Carol M. Highsmith joins Sharon Tyson and visiting children as they interact with a colorful artistic illusion screen at the ArtWorks exhibit in the Museum of Fine Art, Montgomery, 2010. (The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.