Art gallery

An art gallery or art museum is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art, and usually primarily paintings and sculpture. It is also sometimes used as a location for the sale of art.

Generally, the term art gallery is used to mean a building or location dedicated to displaying and/or selling art, though the large rooms in museums where art is displayed for the public are often referred to as galleries as well, with a room dedicated to Ancient Egyptian art often being called the Egyptian Gallery, for example.

Most large urban areas will have several art galleries, and most towns will be home to at least one. However, they may also be found in smaller villages, and quite remote areas, often places where artists have congregated. Examples incluce the Taos art colony in Taos, New Mexico, and St. Ives, Cornwall.

Although primarily concerned with providing a space to show works of visual art, art galleries are sometimes used to host other artistic activities, such as music concerts or poetry readings. Conversely, some works of visual art are not shown in a gallery and, due to their form, never can be. Altarpieces, for example, are rarely shown in galleries, and murals generally remain where they have been painted. Various forms of 20th century art, such as land art and performance art, also usually exist outside a gallery. Photographic records of these kinds of art are often shown in galleries, however.

Similar to an art gallery is the sculpture garden[?] (or sculpture park), which presents sculpture in an outdoor space.

Famous galleries include:

• The Art Institute of Chicago
• The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York
• The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in Venice
• The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in Bilbao, Spain
• Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin[?], in Berlin
• The Guggenheim Las Vegas[?] and Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum[?], in Las Vegas
• The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
• Louvre in Paris
• Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and in Oxford, England
• The National Gallery in London, England
• National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh
• National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Australia
• National Palace Museum Taipei, Taiwan
• National Portrait Gallery in London
• The Prado in Madrid
• Penlee House, Penzance, Cornwall
• The Tate Gallery in London and other places in England
• The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Whitney in New York

External Links

• Websites for many art museums (http://vlmp.museophile.com/galleries)