Where: Columbia, South Carolina
When: year-round
If you like: arts and culture
Why you should go: Big-city art museums often hog the spotlight, but the Columbia Museum of Art, which occupies a former Macy’s building on Main Street, showcases the advantages of a midsize institution. This month the CMA will debut a reinstallation of its permanent collection—part of a series of upgrades timed to its seventy-fifth anniversary—and while it contains heavy hitters from Rembrandt to Warhol, the collection’s comparatively modest footprint means the curators get to have a little fun.
In 2018, for example, they toyed with the traditional model of arranging works by time period, clustering them instead by theme (e.g., “Gods, Heroes, and Legends”). “If you’re a museum the size of the Metropolitan Museum, you can’t do that with your full collection, but we’re a midsize museum with twenty galleries. It was something we could play with,” says deputy director Joelle Ryan-Cook. The latest installation will synthesize the two approaches, largely organizing works by history but with periodic “disruptions.” A room full of nineteenth-century landscapes from the Hudson River School, for example, features a 2024 abstract by Mario Joyce in which the artist worked soil from his family’s farm into his paint.
The CMA will also play with its physical spaces, arranging one gallery in the salon style (think many works hanging floor to ceiling) and displaying its newly acquired collection of British New Hall porcelain in a period-appropriate room complete with nineteenth-century wallpaper. But perhaps the biggest changes are ones a visitor won’t notice, including overhauled lighting and reinforced walls, especially in the temporary exhibition spaces, which had begun to suffer under countless layers of paint. “We have really cool fragments of those walls where you could see almost, like, the rings of a tree,” Ryan-Cook says. “It’s the story of our exhibitions through color.”
G&G tip: Don’t miss one of Ryan-Cook’s favorite works, a Nativity fresco by Sandro Botticelli that represents the only Botticelli fresco in the U.S. “It’s an absolute stunner,” she says.
Elizabeth Florio is digital editor at Garden & Gun. She joined the staff in 2022 after nine years at Atlanta magazine, and she still calls the Peach State home. When she’s not working with words, she’s watching her kids play sports or dreaming up what to plant next in the garden.
