The story
The University of Michigan's art museum lives in Alumni Memorial Hall, a Beaux-Arts building of 1910 in Ann Arbor raised to honour the university's Civil War dead, with a light-filled glass wing added a century later by the architect Brad Cloepfil. Everything inside is free to enter.
For a campus museum the range is wide, close to 20,000 works crossing continents and centuries, from a strong Asian collection of Chinese and Japanese art to European painting by Whistler, Monet and the Guardi family, and 20th-century pieces by Kandinsky and Rothko. Being a teaching museum, it changes its displays often and hands over galleries to students, who can end up studying an original in a room they walk past between lectures.
