The seed collection came from Robert P. Coggins, a Southern art collector whose 230 paintings Morris purchased in 1989. Coggins' estate later sold hundreds more works, giving the museum a deep foundation of Southern painting. Louise Keith Claussen, appointed museum director in 1990, shaped these acquisitions into a coherent narrative of the region's artistic identity. The collection now exceeds 5,000 works, ranging from the delicate watercolors of early artist-naturalists like John Abbot, who documented Burke County's flora and fauna in the 1700s, through nineteenth-century landscapes by Henry Ossawa Tanner and Joseph Rusling Meeker, to contemporary pieces. One of its signature works is a monumental piece by Robert Rauschenberg featuring images of Augusta itself. The range is deliberate: Southern art is not one style or one century but a continuous conversation between place and vision.

The Morris never wanted to be a silent gallery where visitors whisper past canvases. From its earliest days, the museum built itself around engagement. Changing exhibitions rotate through the galleries, pulling from both the permanent collection and traveling shows. Educational programs bring schoolchildren face to face with original works. Musical events fill the rooms with sound that echoes off the same walls that hold Civil War-era portraits and modernist abstractions. Hands-on art programs invite visitors to create rather than just observe. The result is a museum that functions as a cultural living room for Augusta, a place where art is not preserved behind glass but actively shared.

The museum sits adjacent to Riverwalk Augusta, the city's two-mile promenade along the Savannah River. Step outside and the water is right there, the same river that once powered Augusta's cotton mills, carried steamboats, and flooded downtown more than once. The location is no accident. Augusta's arts district clusters along this stretch of riverfront, and the Morris anchors it with a quiet authority. The Savannah River forms the border between Georgia and South Carolina here, and looking across from the Riverwalk you see a different state. The museum's position reinforces its mission: Southern art belongs not in New York galleries or European collections but here, on Southern ground, beside a Southern river, in a city that has been building and rebuilding its identity since 1736.

What makes art Southern? The Morris wrestles with this question in every exhibition. It is not just magnolias and plantations, though those images exist in the collection. Southern art includes the documentation of enslaved communities, the landscapes of Appalachian hollows, the neon glow of roadside diners, and the abstraction of artists who left the South and carried it with them. The museum's collection includes works born in the South and works that reflect what the curators call a discernible Southern influence, a broad definition that allows for complexity. The South is not one place or one story, and the Morris makes that visible. In a region that has often had its narrative told by outsiders, a museum built by a local publisher to honor his parents feels like the most Southern act of all: claiming the right to tell your own story, on your own terms, in your own house.