The Akron Art Museum in Ohio features American art and international collections through visiting exhibitions. It began as an art college and now hosts community outreach programs and a research library. The museum’s focus is on American artists from the 1850s onward, with a permanent gallery dedicated to Ohio-based painters. The museum digitized its permanent collection and made it available online. The museum expanded in 2007 with a new wing and a glass lobby.
The Akron Art Museum is an art gallery located in downtown Akron, Ohio. It predominantly features work by American painters and sculptors, but is also home to more robust international collections through its program of visiting exhibitions. The museum began in the early 1900s as an art college where students were taught to paint and educated in the history of art. Although the art institute has long since closed, the Akron Art Museum remains true to these roots by hosting numerous community arts outreach programs and maintaining an art research library on the premises.
Art, especially painting, impressionism and sculpture, is the main focus of the modern Akron Art Museum. Most of the collections focus on American artists from the 1850s onward. A permanent gallery is also dedicated to celebrating the work of Ohio-based or born painters. This sort of regional separation is common in American museums.
Beginning in 1999, museum curators began the monumental task of digitizing all the pieces of the museum’s permanent collection. The digitized paintings have been posted on the museum’s website, making them freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The digital collection is separated by genre, not by gallery room. It’s not so much a virtual tour, then, as an online collection. Seeing collections online is never as good as visiting museums in person, but it can be a good way to start your research or to get a feel for certain elements of an artwork.
Research is an important part of the Akron Art Museum’s mission. The museum initially opened in 1922 as the Akron Art Institute, a volunteer-run space for city residents to learn about and engage in art. Classes were held in the borrowed lower floors of what was then the Akron Public Library.
When the library moved to new space in 1950, the institution expanded to take up the entire building. It expanded its services and started branding itself as a professional academy of design arts and art training. Over time the school began to showcase student work and began to amass a private collection of outside art as well.
The art institute officially closed in 1980, but the collections and much of the staff didn’t go far. They moved down the road to a renovated post office which soon became known as the Akron Art Museum. The museum has kept track of all of the art institute’s teaching materials and maintains them all cataloged in its on-site research library. Unlike the libraries of many types of museums, which are closed to anyone but accredited researchers, the Akron Museum Art Library is open to the public, but depending on staff, an appointment may be required to view certain works.
The growing collections led the museum’s curators to plan an expansion, which was completed in 2007. All aspects of the original building have been preserved, with new wings flanking and surrounding the more historic structure. The museum chose the plans for the renovation through an open design competition. Members of the public were invited to vote on which design they preferred, with the final decision falling to the board of directors. The result is a striking glass lobby with distinctive steel features that has become something of an architectural landmark in the Akron area.
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