Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville NC

September 2024

This was a delightful discovery as I passed through the Greenville area on a barbecue-hunting trip.

The Greenville Museum of Art is housed in a stately old two-story house (plus a modest addition). It is not a massive complex full of dozens of rooms; instead it’s a charming building that you can breeze through in 15 minutes or appreciate for a good hour or more.

The house showcases an eclectic collection of paintings, sculpture, and pottery, most of them bought by local residents and donated to the museum. That, in itself, is one of the museum’s charms; one wall might display 19th-century landscape paintings while the opposite corner might contain grinning folk sculptures. It’s all art, but it’s consistently surprising, which one does not reliably experience in many other museums.

While I’d hesitate to recommend that you go to Greenville just for its Museum of Art, if you’re in the area and you like art, I do think you’ll find something of interest.

Cost: Free

Conditions: 75℉ and partly cloudy