Museum of Art and Archaeology

If you're looking for a museum to visit in Columbia this is the place! It holds an interesting variety of permanent and rotating collections and is completely free. It's definitely worth a visit and re-visit as new exhibits rotate through. Perfect over the winter months or bad weather days. You can extend your visit a bit by checking out the plaster sculpture collection in the library next door.

This was a fun museum and it was entirely free! Honestly there was more to it than I expected. We went during the Art in Bloom exhibition which gave us even more to see!

30 min stop. Not obvious place to visit.

A small but well curated collection of art and historic items. Well worth the visit and the gift shop has a great selection. Parking is typical to downtown situations (best bet is a local garage) but not difficult to navigate and not expensive. Definitely make a stop here.

This is a small but well-kept and nicely curated museum. Good place to spend about an hour or so.

Small free University Museum. Some pretty cool items in the collection, well curated, and the right price. Worth checking out if you find yourself in the COMO area.

Lovely displays and great history. It’d be nicer if it was a better venue, it feels like an afterthought considering the pieces. Free to enter and a lovely gift shop - definitely buy a token for the Art-o-matic!

A pleasant little find in Columbia. Relatively small but some great pieces.

A free gallery of local history and Missouri fine art from the past is inside the historical society on campus, and there is also art displayed on the walls in the halls. I learned that Brad Pitt went to Mizzou! It is a small collection, but it works well together, with multiple pieces by the same artists. Stop by if you are on campus. It is in the same building as the library, but with a different entrance.

I have enjoyed having this art gallery/library/archive in my backyard, but I never really used it. I mean, it was only for folks researching their geneology or something, right? Well, when it came time that I needed to do some digging around for local Missouri lore related to square dancing, I did a little checking on their website and as Emeril says, BAM!, they cooked up exactly what I needed. The best part was, it was free. I mean, I guess my taxes are paying for it, but the folks who work there are really helpful, they actually seem like they want to assist me, and they had all this equipment for me to use when I needed to listen to some cassette tapes and even some reel-to-reel audio. Of course, there were some weird things I had to get used to. No pens. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zed. But I could carry around electromagnets, no problem? Anyhow, that being said, I had to get used to other archivist rules (keep everything that was in a folder, actually keep it in the folder). But since they deal with one-of-a-kind stuff, and they don't want to lose anything, this makes sense. I wish I had a reason to delve into their archives earlier, now this place is on my list whenever I have any inkling to learn something about Missouri history.