Federal funding has been secured to help the Huntington Museum of Art complete a nature trail on its property that’s accessible to all.
Geoffrey Fleming, executive director of the museum, said from the beginning, the vision for the facility was to make it much more than just a museum.
“Herbert Fitzpatrick, who owned all this land and was our founder, wanted it to be a nature conservancy, a bird sanctuary, a museum, nature trails and much more,” Fleming said.
The museum was incorporated in 1947 and opened to the public in 1952. Today, as the only nationally accredited visual art museum of its size in the Tri-State, the museum encompasses a permanent art collection of more than 16,000 objects, 10 exhibition spaces, an interactive education gallery, an art reference library of nearly 27,000 volumes, a 287-seat auditorium, the only tropical and subtropical plant conservatory in West Virginia, a coral reef aquarium, two outdoor sculpture courts, five studio workshops, two miles of hiking trails and a quarter-mile paved accessible Sensory Trail for the visually impaired.
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