Blanton Museum of Art
Introduction
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Images
Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.
Exhibition room.
Exhibition room. Image by Zereshk. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Backstory and Context
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The Blanton was established in 1963 as the museum of the University of Texas at Austin. Portion of the cost for the construction of the museum in 1963 was raised from the sale of the 4 acre land, which Archer Milton Huntington, the son of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, donated as a support for the museum’s founding. The early museum collection was created by donations of eminent persons including the novelist James Michener and his wife, Mari (the Blanton's new gallery building is named after them), then John and Barbara Duncan, C. R. Smith, Charles Clark of McAllen and many others.
The museum's collections were originally displayed in the Art Building. In 1972 the museum permanent collection moved to gallery spaces in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (then called the Humanities Research Center). In 1980, the museum was renamed the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, and in 1997 the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, in honor of Houston Endowment Inc. former chairman Jack S. Blanton (the company donated $12 million for expansion of the museum).
The Blanton collection today comprises more than 17,000 individual pieces, including the museum’s Latin American collection of modern and contemporary art which contains more than 1,800 modern and contemporary works, and represents more than 600 artists from Mexico, South and Central America, and the Caribbean. Widely recognized for its breadth and depth, the collection is considered one of the finest in the nation.