Birmingham Museum of Art: Guide to the Collection

Founded in 1951, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, has one of the finest collections in the Southeastern United States, with more than 24,000 objects representing a rich panorama of cultures. This new guide to the collection showcases examples of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, as well as textiles, photographs, drawings, and architecture, with pieces chosen for their importance in the development of the collection over the last sixty years.

Of particular note are the Museum’s collections of Asian art with works from Japan, China, Korea, and India, and the finest holding of Vietnamese ceramics in the United States. Highlights include a rare example of a Ming dynasty temple wall. A chapter on the arts of Africa and the Americas features stunning objects from Meso-America, Central America, and the Northern Andes, as well as ancient Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama. This collection features gold jewelry, volcanic stone figure sculpture, ceremonial gold vessels and ceramics from the Moche, Chimu, Chancay, and Vicus cultures, Incan masks, and Peruvian textiles. The remarkable collection of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century European decorative arts includes superior examples of English ceramics and French furniture and the Museum’s world-renowned collection of Wedgwood, which is the largest outside England.