The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the largest art museum in America south of Chicago, west of Washington, D.C., and east of Los Angeles.There are two major museum buildings, the Caroline Wiess Law Building and the Audrey Jones Beck Building; two facilities for the Glassell School ofArt, the Studio School for Adults and the Glassell Junior School; two house museums that exhibit decorative arts, Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens and Rienzi; the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden; and 18 acres of public gardens.A total of 300,000 square feet of space is dedicated to the display of art.The Hirsch Library is one of the largest art libraries in the Southwest.More than 2.5 million people visit the MFAH each year. Community outreach programs touch the lives of more than 670,000 people each year.
The collection contains more than 53,000 artworks, which date from antiquity to the present. The major civilizations of Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa are represented. Italian Renaissance paintings, French Impressionist works, photographs, American and European decorative arts, African and Pre-Columbian gold, American art, and European and American paintings and sculpture from post-1945 are particularly strong holdings.The museum and the Glassell School of Art present more than thirty changing exhibitions each year. The MFAH has published more than forty scholarly books in the last decade.
