Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Missouri, USA

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, holds more than 45,000 works of art spanning over 5,000 years. Its collections range from ancient objects and Chinese painting to European masters, Native American art, photography, modern sculpture and contemporary work. The museum campus combines its original 1933 building with the Bloch Building and the outdoor Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park.

How the Museum Was Created

The museum developed from two separate estates. Newspaper publisher and real-estate developer William Rockhill Nelson, founder of The Kansas City Star, died in 1915. His will directed most of his estate toward a trust that would purchase works of art.

Mary McAfee Atkins, a retired teacher and real-estate investor, had died in 1911. She left roughly one-third of her estate to acquire land for a public art museum in Kansas City. The two sources of funding were eventually combined to establish the institution.

The museum opened to the public on December 11, 1933. At first, the east wing was known as the Atkins Museum of Fine Arts while the rest of the building was called the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art. The institution adopted the name The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 1982, shortly before its 50th anniversary.

Chinese Art

Chinese art is one of the museum’s best-developed collecting areas. The Chinese collection contains more than 7,000 works, including bronzes, jade, ceramics, furniture, textiles, Buddhist sculpture and painting.

The painting holdings are particularly strong in works from the 10th through 13th centuries. Among them is A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks, attributed to Li Cheng, as well as Xu Daoning’s Fishermen’s Evening Song. The Chinese Temple Gallery includes the large wooden Guanyin of the Southern Sea, dating to the 11th or 12th century.

Other holdings document Chinese artistic production through ritual bronzes and jade, Ming and early Qing hardwood furniture, porcelain and stoneware, and more than 500 silk textiles dating from the 2nd century B.C.E. through the 20th century.

European Paintings and Sculpture

The European collection covers painting and sculpture from the medieval period through the late 19th century. Its Italian holdings include Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, alongside works associated with Titian, Bronzino and Canaletto.

Dutch, Flemish and German works include paintings by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Petrus Christus. French art ranges from Poussin, Boucher and Vigée Le Brun to later works by Delacroix, Courbet and Millet.

Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings include Claude Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, Vincent van Gogh’s Olive Trees, Paul Gauguin’s Faaturuma and Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. The museum’s holdings in this area expanded with the 2015 gift of the Henry W. and Marion H. Bloch collection, which brought paintings by artists including Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Gustave Caillebotte and Georges Seurat into the permanent collection.

Photography Collection

The photography department covers the medium from its beginnings in 1839 to the present. The museum acquired an early group of 60 Edward Weston prints in 1957, then greatly expanded its photography holdings in 2005 through the acquisition of the Hallmark Photographic Collection.

The Hallmark collection contained more than 6,500 works by about 900 artists when it entered the museum. Its holdings include works by Dorothea Lange, Harry Callahan, André Kertész, Timothy O’Sullivan, Clarence John Laughlin and other photographers, as well as an extensive group of 19th-century American daguerreotypes.

The Bloch Building

The Bloch Building, designed by architect Steven Holl with Chris McVoy, opened to the public on June 9, 2007. The 165,000-square-foot addition increased the museum’s interior space while placing much of the new gallery area below the surrounding landscape. Five translucent glass structures, commonly described as lenses, bring daylight into spaces below.

The addition also created space for temporary exhibitions and the Spencer Art Reference Library. The library holds more than 270,000 publications devoted to the visual arts and supports research in areas represented by the museum’s curatorial departments.

Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park and the Shuttlecocks

The outdoor collection began taking shape after the Hall Family Foundation acquired 57 sculptures by Henry Moore in 1986. Additional works followed, and the grounds developed into what is now the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park.

Its most recognizable installation is Shuttlecocks by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Completed in 1994, the site-specific work consists of four monumental badminton shuttlecocks arranged around the museum grounds, treating the original museum building visually as though it were a badminton net.

The sculpture park also contains works associated with artists such as Henry Moore, George Segal, Mark di Suvero, Roxy Paine and Robert Morris. The park is free and normally open from sunrise to sundown.

Admission and Museum Access

General admission is free every day. Visitors must check in before entering the galleries, either at the museum or through the museum’s online check-in system. After checking in, general visitors receive a wristband providing access to general-admission galleries.

The regular indoor schedule is Monday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday and Friday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The museum is closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. Holiday schedules can differ from normal weekly hours.

2026 Bloch Building Maintenance

The Bloch Building is undergoing phased interior and exterior maintenance during 2026, with work scheduled to continue through December. The original Nelson-Atkins building remains open during the project, including galleries devoted to American, Ancient, Architecture, Design and Decorative Arts, Chinese, European, Japanese, Modern, Native American, and South and Southeast Asian art.

Contemporary, African and photography spaces in the Bloch Building are affected by rolling closures as work progresses. Because individual galleries can reopen or close as the project moves between phases, visitors planning to see those collections should check the museum’s official Bloch Building maintenance page before visiting.