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Art Museums and Galleries

Many artists and art-lovers make Vermont their home, and season by season they find inspiration in the land, people and ideas that take root in the Green Mountain State. If it is visual art that you are after, you’ve come the right place.

For world-class collections, be sure to visit the Shelburne Museum. With more than 30 exhibit buildings and beautiful grounds and gardens, you can take a day to view collections ranging from American folk art to French Impressionist paintings by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt. But all is not old at Shelburne - the museum’s 21st century focus on art and design makes for a compelling roster of special exhibits with a contemporary flair.

This combination of the old and the new can also be experienced at the University of Vermont and Middlebury College art museums, and museums in Bennington and Montpelier.

Numerous art galleries and art centers exhibit contemporary artworks in ambitious, changing exhibits featuring both representational and abstract works. The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center and the Manchester Center for the Arts (which includes a museum of changing exhibitions and ten galleries for monthly invitational exhibits) are both located in southern Vermont, and the Helen Day Art Center (Stowe), and the Firehouse Gallery in Burlington are in northern Vermont. All feature a wide range of artistic expressions by regional and national artists.

For more information about these museums - and many more - click on any of the following:

20th Century and Contemporary Art

Amy Tarrant Gallery at the Flynn Center for the Arts
Brattleboro Museum and Art Center
Chaffe Center for the Visual Arts
Firehouse Gallery
Helen Day Art Center
M. Bryan Memorial Gallery
Norman Rockwell Museum
Southern Vermont Arts Center
Cornish Colony Museum
Vermont State Craft Centers

Historic and Contemporary Art

Bennington Museum
Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont
Middlebury College Museum of Art
T. W. Wood Art Gallery
St. Johnsbury Atheneum
Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park
Shelburne Museum

Unique/Special

Bread and Puppet Museum
Center for Cartoon Studies
Main Street Museum
Vermont Folklife Center

There are also approximately 100 private galleries selling a huge variety of paintings, prints, sculture and fine craft. Enter GALLERY as a key word search in the Travel Planner shopping option, and begin your art search now.