North Carolina Museum of Art
The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) is an art museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a collection spanning more than 5,000 years of artistic work from antiquity to the present. Its more than 40 galleries and 164-acre Museum Park - the nation's largest museum park - showcase more than a dozen major site-specific works where art and nature meet, alongside an amphitheater for outdoor performances. The Museum hosts changing exhibitions, classes, lectures, family activities, films and concerts, plus standards-based virtual field trips led live by a museum educator, where students use inquiry-based discussion to identify, describe and connect with works of art and build cross-curricular visual literacy skills.
The North Carolina Museum of Art is the official art museum of the State of North Carolina, operating under the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. It traces back to 1947, when the North Carolina General Assembly appropriated funds to purchase art for the People's Collection - the first U.S. state legislature to fund an art collection for its citizens - and opened to the public in 1956. Both the permanent collection and Museum Park remain free to the public, a policy the Museum has upheld since its founding, and it has since become one of the leading art museums in the American South, recognized internationally for a major expansion built around energy-efficient design.
