Review: Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Located on Huntington Avenue, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, one of the largest museums in the United States, was founded in 1870 and has been at its current location for more than a hundred years. Its affiliate, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, stands on a nearby site, enabling students to gain first-hand experience.
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Facilities at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Overview
The Museum houses three arts libraries and nine curatorial libraries associated with particular departments.
The Morse Study Room for prints, drawings, and photographs, for instance, is where students can access to one such facility.
Collections
Boston Museum of Fine Arts has a wide and varied collection.
It contains almost half a million artefacts and displays art and craft works from three thousand years ago to the present, in all kinds of media.
Over three hundred thousand artefacts from the collection are displayed in an online catalog on the museum website.
Recent development
During recent redevelopment, the museum building has expanded by almost 30%.
It has redesigned and expanded its education facilities, for instance, along with renovating its European and Classical galleries and conservation facilities.
New art of the Americas galleries
Art of Americas
The size and scope of this museum is suggested by its Art of the Americas collection, which is exhibited in fifty three galleries displaying art works by Americans from pre-Columbian to recent.
These are housed in a new wing designed by acclaimed architect Norman Foster that opened in November 2010.
Native American, African-American and colonial American ceramics, silverware and portraiture and landscape paintings are displayed here.
Associations
The museum is directly associated with many acclaimed American painters, beginning with locally born Francis Davis Millet, who set up its first Art School.
Special exhibitions at Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Special exhibitions
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston hosts several special exhibitions each year and commissions new work from contemporary artists.
Featured artists include the glass sculpture specialist, Chihuly, and paintings and sculpture by less well known Spanish realist, Antonio López García.
In 2007, the museum mounted a comprehensive exhibition of almost one hundred works by Edward Hopper, a significant American artist of the twentieth century whose use of light is said to have influenced several film directors.
Final word
Online access to a vast range of themed selections from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts collection is available through Mfa.org/explore.com.