The LSU campus houses eight museums that feature original works by students as well as traveling exhibits by local, national, and international artisans. In addition to the campus museums, LSU currently runs four museums in the greater Baton Rouge area: The LSU Museum of Art, The LSU Museum of Natural History, The LSU Museum of Natural Science, and the LSU Rural Life Museum.
The LSU Museum of Art (LSU MOA), located in the Shaw Center for the Arts in downtown Baton Rouge, opened in March 2005. The museum manifests a decade-long vision to offer LSU and the Baton Rouge community greater access to its diverse art collection, changing exhibitions, education programs, and special events. The LSU MOA shares the Shaw Center for the Arts with many cultural partners including the LSU School of Art Gallery, LSU's Laboratory for Creative Arts and Technology, the Manship Theatre, and the Community School for the Arts of the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge.
LSU MOA first opened in 1962 under the name of The Anglo-American Art Museum in the Memorial Tower on LSU's Baton Rouge campus. The museum and its collection were established through a generous gift to LSU in 1959 from an anonymous donor who wished to support an institution that would illustrate British and continental influences on early American art and culture in the South. The museum's significant collection of American and British portraiture, furniture, and decorative arts grew from this foundation.
The LSU Museum of Natural Science was founded in 1936, when its first director, George H. Lowery, Jr., assembled a few study specimens of birds in a classroom in Audubon Hall. Since its move to Murphy J. Foster Hall in 1950, the museum has continued to expand and is currently one of the nation's largest natural history museums, with holdings of over 2.5 million specimens. As the only comprehensive research museum in the south-central United States, the LSU Museum of Natural Science fulfills a variety of scientific and educational roles at the university, including: the generation of new knowledge in the fields of zoology, archaeology, and paleontology through scholarly research based primarily on natural history collections; collection and preservation of research specimens as a resource for study of the Earth's natural history; education of graduate and undergraduate students in academic areas that are most effectively taught in the museum setting; education of the public by means of exhibits and lecture programs; and assistance to local citizens, wildlife officials, and forensic specialists through identification and consultation services.
The LSU Rural Life Museum has been listed as one of the top outdoor museums in the country. The variety of people who settled in Louisiana made significant and lasting contributions to the state’s unique culture and heritage. It is one of the few museums that celebrates the day-to-day lives of early Americans, including Native Americans, French and Spanish settlers, Anglo-Americans, Germans, Africans, and Acadians. The Rural Life Museum features several displays and exhibits on the pre-industrial residents of Louisiana.
The permanent collection includes tools, utensils, furniture, and farming equipment. The recreated “working plantation” consists of a complex of buildings authentically furnished to reconstruct all the major activities of life on a typical 19th century plantation. The museum also serves as a research facility for LSU students engaged in heritage conservation studies.
In 1999, the sixteen natural history collections at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge were designated by the state legislature as the Louisiana Museum of Natural History. Together, these collections hold a total of more than 2.8 million specimens, objects, and artifacts that document the rich natural history of Louisiana. These collections are dispersed among six independently administered units on campus, and include the Vascular Plant Herbarium, the Mycological Herbarium, the Lichen Herbarium, the Louisiana State Arthropod Museum, the Palynology Collection, the Mineralogy and Petrology Collections, the Textile and Costume Museum, the Louisiana Geological Survey Log Library and Core Repository, and, within the LSU Museum of Natural Science, the Collection of Amphibians and Reptiles, the Collection of Birds, the Collection of Fishes, the Collection of Genetic Resources, the Collection of Mammals, the Vertebrate Paleontology Collection, the Collection of Microfossils and Invertebrates, and the Anthropological and Ethnological Collections.
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