Gibbes Museum of Art

The first floor costs nothing. Walk in off Meeting Street and you can use the museum store, the art sales gallery, the two visiting artist studios along the Angela D. Mack Promenade, and the Lenhardt Garden out back without buying a ticket. What you pay for are the galleries on the second and third floors, where the permanent collection and the rotating exhibitions live.

The building, and the man who paid for it

James Shoolbred Gibbes Sr. left the City of Charleston $100,000 in his will "for the erection or purchase of a suitable building to be used as a Hall or Halls for the exhibition of paintings." He died in 1888. The city did not get the money until a will contest was settled in 1901.

The Gibbes Memorial Art Gallery opened on April 11, 1905, designed in Beaux Arts style by architect Frank P. Milburn, with a stained-glass dome over the rotunda. It became home to the Carolina Art Association, chartered in 1858 by a group of Charleston businessmen and politicians who had staged their first exhibition that April, 176 works borrowed from private houses around the city. The association still owns the collection.

Two moments from the century in between: in 1932 the museum hired its first professional director, Robert N. S. Whitelaw, who wrote the collecting policy that still shapes the place, American art of the South. And in 1936 the Gibbes hosted the first public showing anywhere of Solomon R. Guggenheim's non-objective collection, 128 works including Kandinsky, Chagall, and Picasso, three years before the Guggenheim opened in New York.

What the 2016 renovation changed

In 2011 the Gibbes started a five-year, $13.5 million capital campaign, then closed for roughly eighteen months of construction and reopened to the public on May 28, 2016. Milburn's original 1905 blueprints turned up in the City of Charleston archives in 2008, and the restoration used them to pull the interior back toward its Beaux Arts plan. Gallery space grew by about 30 percent.

Much of the money went into work you notice only indirectly: rebuilt climate control, new security, better art storage on the third floor. The visible additions are the free first floor and the Lenhardt Garden behind the building, a small formal garden with gravel paths and a fountain that most people on Meeting Street never learn is there. The artist studios and classrooms reopened then too, which is why you can often watch someone painting a few feet from the ticket desk.

What is actually in the galleries

The permanent collection runs to more than 10,000 works and covers about 350 years, almost all of it American and much of it made in or about Charleston. It is laid out on the second floor.

Gallery 5 holds the miniature portraits, and this is the collection the Gibbes is known for nationally: more than 600 works, which the museum describes as one of the most prestigious American portrait miniature collections in the country. The first American miniatures were painted in Charleston. They are watercolor on thin disks of ivory, most of them small enough to sit in your palm, painted to mark a birth, an engagement, a marriage, or a death in the decades before photography made that unnecessary. Edward Greene Malbone's 1801 pair of Eliza Izard and Thomas Pinckney Jr. is the set to look for.

Gallery 6 is labeled "20th Century American Regionalism and the Charleston Renaissance," and for most visitors it is the reason to come. The Charleston Renaissance is the museum's name for roughly 1915 to 1945, when the city became a place artists moved to. Alfred Hutty's Magnolia Gardens from 1920 hangs here, along with Anna Heyward Taylor's 1929 woodblock print Sea Turtle. Hutty was the first director of the art school the museum opened in 1920. Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and Elizabeth O'Neill Verner were the other names in that circle, and Smith's work belongs to the Carolina Art Association. The subjects are streets and gardens and marsh you can walk to in twenty minutes, which is a different thing from seeing them eight hundred miles away.

The rest of the second floor is the Kim and Jim Pallotta Main Gallery with 18th and 19th century American painting, sculpture under the rotunda dome, the Rivers Collection of decorative arts, and the Mary Jackson Modern and Contemporary Gallery. Patrick Dougherty's woven-stick installation Betwixt and Between fills the second-floor atrium, and Fred Wilson's Omniscience sits outside on Meeting Street where anyone can see it.

The third floor is two special exhibition galleries. The Gibbes runs six to eight exhibitions a year there, which is the argument for coming back, and it has awarded the $10,000 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art annually since 2008. Check what is currently on view before you go.

Visiting today

Buy tickets online or at the Visitor Services desk on the first floor. Museum tickets are not timed, they are good for any open day, and they do not expire for twelve months, so an unused ticket from an earlier trip still works. The museum asks visitors to buy ahead for Saturday and Sunday.

Free public tours with a museum interpreter run Wednesdays and Fridays at 1pm, and they are the best upgrade to a Gibbes visit if your schedule bends that way. Wednesday is also the only late night, with galleries open until 8pm. If crowds bother you, the museum's accessibility guide names its quiet windows: weekdays 10 to 11am and 2 to 5pm, Saturday 12:30 to 2:30pm, and Sunday after 3:30pm. There is a free Gibbes guide on the Bloomberg Connects app with audio on the permanent collection.

The museum store is on the free first floor, sells work by regional artists, and charges no sales tax; there is an online store as well. There is no café. Café Gibbes operated for a few years after the 2016 reopening, but the museum no longer lists one on its floor plan or visitor page, so eat before or after.

Accessibility is documented here better than at most Charleston attractions. The accessible entrance with an automatic door is on the right side of the front facade near the bike rack, and an elevator under the staircase reaches all three floors. Two wheelchairs, portable gallery stools, noise-limiting headphones, and fidget items are at the front desk on a first-come basis. Accessible restrooms are on every floor, with family restrooms on the first and third. Service dogs are welcome; emotional support animals are not. The Lenhardt Garden is gravel, the one surface worth knowing about in advance. Tours for visitors with vision impairments can be arranged with about two weeks' notice.

Is it worth it?

Yes, for an hour, and it is honest to say an hour is what it is. The Gibbes is a small, well-curated museum, not a place you plan a day around, and $20 buys you two floors rather than ten. Anyone treating it as a major-city art museum will leave feeling short-changed.

The people who get the most out of it came to Charleston for the city itself. Gallery 6 is art about this place, painted by people who lived here, and it lands differently when you have spent the morning walking the same streets. The miniatures are a specialty collection with no real equivalent in the region. Rain is the other good reason: the whole visit is indoors and it is a short walk from the shopping streets, which puts it near the top of our rainy day things to do in Charleston.

Skip it if you have one day in Charleston and no particular interest in painting; there are better uses of that hour in our things to do roundup. Skip it also if what you want is local history rather than art, in which case the Charleston Museum covers that ground properly. Families should know the ticketed floors are quiet gallery space, though the free first floor usually holds a child's attention longer than the art upstairs.

Getting there and what's nearby

The Gibbes is at 135 Meeting Street, between Cumberland and Queen, two blocks south of the City Market. There is no museum parking. The nearest Charleston County garages are on Queen Street, one block away, and at 90 Cumberland Street, a two to three minute walk the museum recommends for anyone using a mobility device. One accessible space sits on Meeting Street in front of the building, city-owned and impossible to reserve, and a placard or accessible plate lets you park free in any city garage or meter.

You are on the edge of the gallery district here. Church Street and the blocks around it are dense with commercial galleries, the Dock Street Theatre is at 135 Church, and the Circular Congregational Church and its burying ground are across Meeting Street. Our French Quarter guide strings those into a walk. The Charleston Museum is about fifteen minutes north up Meeting Street. For everything else in range, see the full list of Charleston attractions.