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High Museum of Art

Photo: Josh Hallett / CC BY-SA 2.0 · source

🎡 Attractions

High Museum of Art

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

About

The Southeast's largest art museum holds more than 20,000 works behind a white facade that is itself a landmark: Richard Meier's gleaming 1983 building, later doubled by Renzo Piano's 2005 wing of skylit galleries. Inside you move through American painting, African art, folk and self-taught work, and a deep photography collection, with the light from above shifting as you climb the spiraling ramps. It anchors the Woodruff Arts Center on Midtown's Peachtree Street, an easy pairing with a symphony night or a walk through the surrounding arts district.

Highlights

Getting there

1280 Peachtree St NE, Atlanta, GA 30309

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This 1929 movie palace on Peachtree Street began as a Shrine temple, which is why its auditorium unfolds like an open-air Arabian courtyard beneath a ceiling of 96 crystal stars and clouds that drift across a painted night sky. Mighty Mo, the original Moller pipe organ with more than 3,600 pipes, still rises from the pit before Broadway tours and concerts. Take the backstage tour to see the Egyptian Ballroom and the Moorish detail up close, then catch a show under those flickering stars.

National Center for Civil and Human Rights Attractions

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Georgia Attractions

The Georgia stops worth building a day around. Atlanta's Coca-Cola vault and a whale shark the size of a school bus, the oak-shaded squares of Savannah, a visionary's painted folk-art compound in Buena Vista, FDR's Little White House, and a 56-foot sheet-metal chicken in Marietta. The famous, the historic, and the gloriously strange.