National Museum of Wildlife Art

Overlooking the National Elk Refuge just north of Jackson, the National Museum of Wildlife Art sits into a hillside with a facade of rough Idaho quartzite designed to echo the ruins of Slains Castle in Scotland. The building is easy to miss from the highway, which is intentional: the architects wanted it to read as part of the landscape rather than an intrusion on it.

Founded in nineteen eighty-seven and designated a national museum by Congress in two thousand eight, it holds more than five thousand works spanning four thousand five hundred years of art depicting wild animals. Georgia O'Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and John James Audubon are in the permanent collection alongside Carl Rungius, whose name graces the road that leads to the entrance. Rungius painted the big-game animals of the Rocky Mountains for decades and is represented here by one of the largest collections of his work anywhere. The elk refuge directly below the windows holds one of the largest elk herds in North America.