High Museum of Art
Atlanta's art museum, in a white Richard Meier building of 1983 with a later Renzo Piano expansion.
The museum grew out of a gift of the Peachtree Street house of Harriet High in 1926 and is now the largest art museum in the south-eastern United States. Richard Meier's white porcelain-enamel building of 1983, entered up a long ramp and organised around a four-storey skylit atrium, won him the Pritzker Prize the following year. In 2005 Renzo Piano added three buildings around a piazza, roughly doubling the gallery space and linking the museum to the wider Woodruff Arts Center.
The collection of more than 20,000 works is strongest in American art, nineteenth and twentieth-century European painting, decorative arts and design, photography, African art and folk and self-taught art, the last including a large group of works by Howard Finster and Nellie Mae Rowe. The museum has built a substantial holding of contemporary work by African American artists. Its centennial falls in 2026 and is marked by a run of exhibitions and events.
Highlights
- Meier's skylit atrium and curving entrance ramp
- Large collection of folk and self-taught art
- Photography holdings including civil rights documentation
- Piano's 2005 buildings and the piazza between them
