Phoenix Art Museum

The Phoenix Art Museum opened on November 18, 1959, and is the largest museum for visual art in the southwestern United States. Architect Alden Dow designed the original 25,000-square-foot building, and the permanent collection has since grown to more than 18,000 works spanning American, Asian, European, Latin American, Western American, and contemporary art, along with a distinctive fashion design collection.

The collection's best-known painting is Jean-Leon Gerome's Pollice Verso, an 1872 gladiator scene so vivid it later helped inspire the film Gladiator. The museum also holds Claude Monet's Flowering Arches, Giverny from 1913, a late garden scene painted from the artist's own property, and contemporary pieces by Yayoi Kusama, Kehinde Wiley, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Major expansions in 1996 and 2006, led by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, grew the building to 285,000 square feet. The 2006 project added the Ellen and Howard C. Katz Wing for Modern Art and the Bennett and Jacquie Dorrance Sculpture Garden, a 40,000-square-foot outdoor space for large-scale contemporary sculpture. The building sits on Central Avenue in the Phoenix Art Museum campus alongside the Phoenix Center for the Arts, anchoring the city's cultural corridor. Community donations fund roughly 80 percent of the museum's budget, keeping it independent of heavy government reliance.