It is commonly held that the American South is our nation’s most culturally distinct region. Because it can so vividly record reality, photography has been the medium chosen by many artists to convey their unique impressions and experiences of the South. Works in the collection by Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and others document the conditions endured by rural southerners as the nation struggled through the Great Depression. Our nation’s Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s played out most notoriously in the Southeast. A number of photographs in the Museum’s collection by photographers including Chris McNair, Ernest C. Withers, James “Spider” Martin, and Charles Moore have forever fixed images of the era’s braveries and brutalities in the national consciousness. Beyond its travails, the Southeast can also evoke a sensual slowness and pride of place. Birney Imes’s color print, Freedom Village Juke, conjures this mood and flavor, as do a number of William Christenberry’s images of his beloved Hale County and environs.

The American and Modern and Contemporary art departments share a solid and diverse collection of works by African American artists, whose works span multiple styles and movements. Several of these artists are represented by multiple pieces (Willie Cole, Glenn Ligon, Lonnie Holley, Kerry James Marshall). The collection includes excellent examples of work by master painters Robert S. Duncanson and Henry Ossawa Tanner; the photographer Gordon Parks; Modern artists Bob Thompson, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, and Romare Bearden; and contemporary artists such as Emma Amos, Lorna Simpson, Chakaia Booker, Radcliffe Bailey, Carrie Mae Weems, Jeff Donaldson, Jack Whitten, Odili Donald Odita, Nick Cave and Hank Willis Thomas. The Museum has sterling examples of “self-taught” art. Many of the genre’s key figures are black Alabamians, among them, Bill Traylor, Mose Tolliver, Lonnie Holley, Charlie Lucas and Thornton Dial.

The Bohorfoush Gallery, located off of the main lobby, is also dedicated to African-American art, and features rotating exhibitions from the Museum’s permanent collection, loans from private and public collections, and traveling exhibitions. 

The Museum’s collection of modern art encompasses styles and approaches that were developed over a roughly seventy-five-year span during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, when artists were beginning to reject art’s conventional role as a noble or instructive pursuit whose ideal form was the realistic representation of historical subjects. Highlights include outstanding early and mid-century works by Alexander Archipenko, Alfred Leslie, Salvador Dalí, Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson and Mark Tobey. The mid-20th century is represented by a selection of European and American black and white photographs; notable among them are pictures by Irving Penn, Imogen Cunningham, George Platt Lynes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Berenice Abbott, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The Museum’s contemporary art collection has been assembled to reflect the myriad ways in which artists of the past 100 years have approached art-making, as traditional genres have expanded, splintered, and hybridized. There is a strong and diverse collection of sculpture including works by, Robert Arneson, Nancy Graves, Mel Edwards, Sue Williamson, Kenneth Snelson, Lynda Benglis, Mel Chin, Chakaia Booker, Roni Horn, Nick Cave, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Luis Jiminez, Scott Burton. Sited on the Museum grounds are sculptures by Fernando Botero, Luis Jiménez, Anthony Caro, and George Rickey. Several of these large-scale works were created for specific sites at the Museum by artists including Valerie Jaudon, Sol LeWitt, Elyn Zimmerman, Dale Chihuly and Tara Donovan. There are fine examples of abstract painting by Juan Usle, Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, Kennth Noland, Beatriz Milhazes, Odili Donald Odita and Callum Innes. The collection includes excellent contemporary photographs by Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, Lorna Simpson, James Casebere, Vic Muniz, William Christenberry and David Levinthal, and videos by Ann Hamilton, Tabaimo, Joseph Grigely, Bill Viola and Emily Jacir.

In 1956, Childe Hassam’s Building the Schooner, Provincetown (1900) became the first American painting of major significance to enter the Museum’s permanent collection. This early commitment to landscape painting established a tone for the Museum’s collecting habits, and landscape has emerged as the collection’s single greatest strength. The Museum has significant works by Thomas Doughty, Robert Scott Duncanson, Jasper F. Cropsey, Martin Johnson Heade, William Louis Sonntag, Sr., and George Inness, to name just a few. However, no painting has made a greater impact on the permanent collection than Albert Bierstadt’s massive and commanding canvas, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California (1875). The painting first came to the Museum as a loan from the Birmingham Public Library in 1974, and was permanently given to the Museum in 1991. It has provided a clear focal point, prompting the Museum to acquire two additional Yosemite views by Bierstadt, as well as a sketch album from his first trip to the scenic valley.

The Museum possesses a fine collection of American genre painting, including works by Francis William Edmonds, John George Brown, Enoch Wood Perry, Charles Courtney Curran and Francis D. Millet, among many others. In 2007, the museum acquired a significant history painting, Asher B. Durand’s The Capture of Major André (1845), which complements an already excellent group of historical and literary subjects, including works by Benjamin West, Thomas Sully, Francis William Edmonds, and George Bellows. The Museum is also fortunate to have Gilbert Gaul’s twelve-painting Civil War series, With Confederate Colors (1882–1911). The paintings, which formerly hung in Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel, are Gaul’s best-known works, and are perennial favorites with the Museum’s visitors.

Among the Museum’s most significant American portraits are examples by Gilbert Stuart, members of the Peale family, John Neagle, and Mary Cassatt.  Among the most admired portraits in the collection is John Singer Sargent’s Lady Helen Vincent (1904), one of three works by Sargent in the permanent collection. The work was acquired in 1984, with funds donated through the Museum’s annual dinner and ball. The previous year, those funds were used to acquire a major work by Georgia O’Keeffe, The Green Apple (1922). Not only does this painting serve as the most important example of early modernism in the American collection, but it also adds to an excellent collection of still lifes, including works by John Peto, William Mason Brown, and Joseph Decker. Of particular note is William Merritt Chase’s Still Life with Watermelon (1869), believed to be his earliest extant work.

The Birmingham Museum of Art has a strong and growing collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American decorative arts, including silver by Tiffany & Co. and Gorham, glass by Tiffany Studios and Steuben, and ceramics by the Union Porcelain Works, George Ohr, and the Newcomb College Pottery. Most important, perhaps, are the works by Frank Lloyd Wright: a window from the Joseph Jacob Walser House in Chicago, and a chair from Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. In 2009, the Museum made two major acquisitions of eighteenth-century Boston silver: a porringer by John Coney and an armorial teapot by Jacob Hurd.