The story
Columbus opened Ohio's first chartered art museum in 1878, first in a donated Victorian mansion and then, from 1931, in the Italian Renaissance-style building it still uses. Its identity is tied to a local boy who left.
George Bellows was born in Columbus in 1882, trained here, and went to New York to become one of the great American realists, painting prizefighters and tenement crowds before he died at 42. The museum kept faith with him and now holds the largest collection of his work anywhere, recently gathered into a dedicated Bellows Center for people who study him.
Around that core the galleries favour early American modernism, the generation that first brought European abstraction home, alongside folk art and a glass-walled wing added in 2015 that opens the collection onto a sculpture garden.
