The Butler Institute: America's First Museum of American Art
Near Youngstown, Ohio
On Wick Avenue, which was once the address of Youngstown's steel barons, there is a neoclassical building that has been free to the public since the day it opened. The Butler Institute of American Art was the first museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to American art. Not European old masters. Not ancient antiquities. American painting, sculpture, and craft, by American artists, collected in a steel city at the height of its productive life.
Joseph G. Butler, Junior, was a Youngstown businessman whose family had prospered in the iron and steel trade. He commissioned the New York architecture firm of McKim, Mead, and White, one of the most celebrated practices in the country, to design a permanent home for his collection. The building was completed and opened to the public in nineteen nineteen, and it has been free of charge ever since. It is listed today on the National Register of Historic Places.
The museum's collection now numbers in the many thousands of works spanning from the colonial era to the present. Its most celebrated single piece is Winslow Homer's Snap the Whip, painted in eighteen seventy-two. Homer depicted barefoot boys outside a one-room schoolhouse, a chain of them stretched across a summer field in a game of pure physical joy. The painting became one of the defining images of post-Civil War American childhood, and it came to rest here, in Youngstown.
The choice to build a great art museum in this particular city, at this particular moment, says something worth pausing over. Butler could have donated to a museum in New York or Boston. He chose to put it here, on Wick Avenue, in a steel town, open to anyone who could get to Wick Avenue. A hundred years of free admission later, the Butler still is.
