Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

In nineteen thirty, during the Depression, an artist named John Kelly Fitzpatrick and a group called the Morning View Painters persuaded Montgomery to let them use an abandoned school building at one dollar a year. That was the beginning of the oldest fine arts museum in the state of Alabama. The founders' stated purpose was practical: to give Alabama artists a place to show their work and to bring some measure of cultural life to the people of central Alabama in a moment of economic collapse.

The museum has grown considerably since then, moving to its current location in Montgomery's Wynton Blount Cultural Park. Its permanent collection now spans Old Master prints, Southern regional art, American paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a significant collection of self-taught and visionary art. In nineteen seventy-eight it became the first museum in Alabama to receive accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums.