Share Huntington Museum of Art

The Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia’s largest art museum, opened November 9, 1952, as the Huntington Galleries. By 1987, when the name was changed to the Huntington Museum of Art, the museum’s art collection had grown to more than 15,000 objects.

The museum is located on more than 50 acres on McCoy Road in the Park Hills section of Huntington, with two nature trails, a sensory trail for people with visual impairments, two outdoor sculpture courts, and a subtropical plant conservatory. With close to 70,000 square feet of space, it hosts traveling exhibitions and has permanent galleries of British silver and portraits; antique firearms; Near East objects; Asian, European, Caribbean, and Inuit art; and an Ohio Valley glass collection of more than 3,000 pieces. The museum’s Daywood Collection features such artists as Childe Hassam and Andrew Wyeth and contains fine examples of late 19th-century and early 20th-century American and European artwork.

The museum’s James D. Francis Art Research Library houses some 27,000 volumes, and its Grace Rardin Doherty Auditorium seats close to 300. Five art studios are housed in two separate buildings on the museum grounds. The museum features visiting artists and occasionally hosts artists-in-residence. Studios 1, 2, and 3 are named for renowned architect Walter Gropius. The studios and Doherty addition of the museum are the only realized museum design by Gropius in the United States, and they were the last project of the aging architect.

To meet its education mission, the museum maintains an outreach program teaching more than 20,000 children about art each year.

Huntington Museum of Art website

This Article was written by John Gillispie

Last Revised on July 18, 2023

Cite This Article

Gillispie, John "Huntington Museum of Art." e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. 18 July 2023. Web. 27 November 2024.