Qualla: North Carolina Museum of Art

North Carolina Museum of Art: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit State549, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1947, the North Carolina legislature did something no other state had done. It earmarked a million dollars to buy art for the people of North Carolina. The state used the money to acquire 139 European and American works. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation matched the appropriation with seventy-one mostly Italian Renaissance gifts. By the time the museum opened in 1956, the state had quietly created the first major museum collection in the United States formed by legislation and public funding. Admission to the permanent collection has been free ever since, by design.

Image: State549 | CC BY-SA 3.0

North Carolina Museum of Art: From the Agriculture Building to a Highway Division Headquarters

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0. The road to opening was slow. In 1924 the North Carolina State Art Society formed to push for a museum. In 1929, seventy-five paintings went on display in temporary exhibition spaces in the state Agriculture Building in Raleigh. The collection moved to the former Supreme Court bu...

Image: DiscoA340 | CC BY-SA 4.0

North Carolina Museum of Art: Edward Durell Stone's Last Big Building

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julianne G. Macie, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1967, the museum had outgrown Morgan Street. The state bought a site on Blue Ridge Road in west Raleigh. Edward Durell Stone, the architect of the Kennedy Center in Washington and the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, was hired with North Carolina firm Holloway-Reeves to design the n...

Image: Julianne G. Macie | CC BY-SA 3.0

North Carolina Museum of Art: Five Thousand Years on One Campus

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Justin Doub, CC BY 2.0. The collection spans antiquity to the present. The European galleries hold a Titian, a Raphael, paintings by Murillo, Monet, Pissarro, Boudin, and Millet, and more than thirty bronzes by Rodin, some of them set into a dedicated Rodin Garden outside. The Italian Renaissance is anc...

Image: Justin Doub | CC BY 2.0

North Carolina Museum of Art: Museum Park

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexisrael, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 127,000-square-foot West Building, opened in 2010, received an international design award for energy efficiency. But the building most people remember at NCMA is not really a building. It is the 164-acre Museum Park around it, one of the largest museum art parks in North Amer...

Image: Alexisrael | CC BY-SA 3.0