The Donald W. Reynolds Visual Arts Center houses the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and its Chihuly glass. Inside this museum you'll find traveling special exhibitions alongside original selections from its own collection, a theater that shows foreign, independent, and classic films each week, and a restaurant where you can pause between galleries. The museum is also home to one of the most comprehensive collections of Chihuly glass in the world, centered by the dramatic 55-foot Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower rising in the museum's atrium.
Take a moment to imagine how this place grew: its roots trace to projects of the Oklahoma Art League and the Art Renaissance Club, groups that promoted art education in early Oklahoma City. More formal programs arose when the Works Progress Administration opened an Experimental Gallery to the public. When the museum incorporated on May 18, 1945, that federally funded gallery became a private institution.
Today's Oklahoma City Museum of Art was synthesized from two predecessor institutions — the Oklahoma Art Center, an outgrowth of the WPA Experimental Gallery, and the Oklahoma Museum of Art. Both institutions had been committed to art. Picture the fifty-five-foot Kirkpatrick Tower of glass soaring through the museum's atrium above.