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COLUMBUS MUSEUM MAKEOVER

Architect: Derek Jones of Perkins+Will, a large, international practice based in Chicago. The company’s portfolio includes the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Cost: $28.5 million. $3 million from a Special Local Option Sales Tax, or SPLOST, approved by Muscogee County voters. The rest was raised in private donations through a capital campaign.

Size: 89,000 square feet.

Outdoor features include: Restored Frederick Law Olmsted garden, children’s garden, more visibility from the street, new entrance courtyard. History: Opened in 1953. The former estate of industrialist W.C. Bradley, the property was donated to the city of Columbus in 1947 for cultural and educational use.

ON VIEW FOR THE OPENING

The museum’s opening shows are intended to“really make a statement about who we are and what we have to share,” museum marketing director Kristen Hudson said. Here’s a summary:

“Our Own Work, Our Own Way: Ascendant Women Artists in the Johnson Collection”

Forty-two women artists of the 20th Century with connections to the South, including Elaine de Kooning, Zelda Fitzgerald and Alma Thomas, artists whose aesthetic achievements transcended social conventions and invigorated modernism in the South.

“Crossroads: Chattahoochee Valley Blues and Folk Music”

Features Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Darby & Tarlton, plus local folk singers and rock bands. Exhibit highlights recording technologies and instruments through both artifacts and digital content.

“Andy Warhol: Silver Clouds & Cow Wallpaper”

An interactive installation on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Features a room full of floating pillow-shaped balloons, inflated with a mixture of air and helium, and Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper.

“A Decade of Drawings”

Thirty images from a variety of media. Included are works by John Singer Sargent, Burton Silverman, Marsden Hartley, Frederick Hammersley, Benny Andrews and William Beckman.

HISTORY OF THE MUSEUM

This display spotlights the history of the estate of industrialist W.C. Bradley, an early Coca-Cola investor and philanthropist, the transformation of the estate into a museum, plus highlights of the museum’s permanent collection and noteworthy exhibitions over the years.

SPECIAL LOANS

“Light is easy to love,” by Amy Sherald, 2017, from the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

“John Bascombe,” by Edward Troye, 1836. Troye was an American painter of thoroughbred horses. From the Yale University Art Gallery.