San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts

The San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts began in 1981 inside the 1868 Quartermaster Building at Fort Concho, twin of the oldest building in San Angelo, and opened in 1985 with exhibitions borrowed from the National Portrait Gallery and the Library of Congress. In 1999 it moved into a new building of its own on the river, paid for with $8 million raised for it, a block north of the fort. It has since mounted more than 350 exhibitions, over 150 of them of Texas artists.

Clay is its specialty. The San Angelo National Ceramic Competition, held every other year, is the show Ceramics Monthly called the premier clay show in America, and the museum runs the Concho Clay Studio, a working ceramics studio with classes and workshops. Its collection holds some 800 works of contemporary ceramics, historical ceramics from Asia, paintings and sculpture by Texas artists, and more than 100 major works of Spanish Colonial and Mexican religious art. It also hosts En Plein Air Texas, among the leading outdoor painting competitions in the country.

The museum has won the national award for museum service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, in 2003, and up to half the children in the San Angelo schools come through in a year. Admission is free for everyone, paid for by members, and the galleries are fully wheelchair accessible.