North Carolina Museum of Art

The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) is an art museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. It opened in 1956 as the first major museum collection in the country to be formed by state legislation and funding. Since the initial 1947 appropriation that established its collection, the museum has offered free admission to the permanent collection. Its holdings span more than 5,000 years, from antiquity to the present. The museum features over 40 galleries and more than a dozen outdoor works in its 164-acre (0.66 km2) park, one of the largest museum parks in the United States. In 2010, a 127,000-square-foot (11,800 m2) expansion, the West Building, opened; it received an international design award for its energy-efficient design.