Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, that ranks among the 10 largest in the United States.

(Read Sister Wendy’s Britannica essay on art appreciation.)

Opened in 1933, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has more than 40,000 works of art. The museum’s outstanding feature is its collection of Asian art. The collection of Chinese landscape paintings is one of the finest in the West, and the museum’s holdings of Chinese ceramics and decorative arts are also noteworthy. Besides European paintings from the Renaissance on, the museum has notable collections of ancient Egyptian sculpture, Japanese porcelains and lacquer, English pottery, and American photography; in 2006 the museum acquired the Hallmark Photographic Collection, which includes more than 6,500 works and spans the history of the medium. The E.F. Pierson Sculpture Garden was dedicated in 1972, and the Henry Moore Sculpture Garden opened in 1989. The latter was expanded in 1996 and renamed the Kansas City Sculpture Park. When it was renovated in 2006, the park merged with the Pierson Sculpture Garden, and the entire campus was renamed the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park in 2013. The sculpture park features a number of signature pieces, including Claes Oldenburg’s and Coosje van Bruggen’s site-specific Shuttlecocks (1994). In June 2007 the museum underwent a major expansion with the opening of the Bloch Building (165,000 square feet [15,329 square metres]). Largely underground, the innovative building is topped by glass cubes that channel light into the subterranean galleries.

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The museum is situated on 20 acres (8 hectares) in south Kansas City. The gallery and museum were named respectively for cofounder and editor of the Kansas City Evening Star William Rockhill Nelson and for local teacher Mary McAfee Atkins. Both left bequests used to finance construction of the museum.