Small Towns, Big Names: Mississippi Art Museums Make Top 17

Two Mississippi art museums just landed on Southern Living's roundup of the 17 best in the South, and neither one sits in Jackson or Biloxi. The picks are the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel — small-town collections in a state that usually gets written up for its blues trail, not its galleries.

That's a bigger haul than it sounds. Twelve states appear on the August 18 list, and only Georgia placed more, with three. Mississippi tied Florida and Virginia at two apiece and finished ahead of Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina, which got one entry each. Arkansas, Maryland, Oklahoma and West Virginia also managed just one.

Here's the part that should change your weekend math: one of the two has never charged admission. The Lauren Rogers Museum has been free since the day it opened in 1923 — 103 straight years of open doors. In a country where a big-city museum ticket now runs $25 or more, that's close to extinct.

What Southern Living Actually Named

The list, written by Carolanne Griffith Roberts, mixes household names with places most people outside their zip code have never heard of. Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas made it. So did the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, the Ringling in Sarasota, Atlanta's High Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.

The framing was explicit about that range. Southern Living opened by pointing readers past the marquee institutions:

From the world-famous Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, to quieter collections like the one at the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, our region is blessed with some of best art museums in the country.

Why These Mississippi Art Museums Made the Cut

Both picks share something the big institutions can't buy: a single, strange, specific story you can't see anywhere else. Neither is trying to be encyclopedic. Each is built around one person, and in both cases that person is the reason the building exists at all.

Ocean Springs: The Room He Painted for Himself

Walter Inglis Anderson lived from 1903 to 1965 and spent much of it drawing the Gulf Coast — its birds, its water, its light. The museum's centerpiece is the Little Room, a small space he covered floor to ceiling with a single day's arc, dawn through night. He kept it locked. The museum's own description calls it his most private work, and it wasn't discovered until after he died.

A galleria connects that room to its opposite: Anderson's murals inside the adjacent Ocean Springs Community Center, built in 1949 and 1950. They cover roughly 3,000 square feet and trace the discovery of the Mississippi coast. Southern Living repeated the local nickname for them — Mississippi's Sistine Chapel. The museum itself was dedicated on May 4, 1991, at a cost of about $1.3 million.

Laurel: A Memorial to a Man Who Died at 23

Lauren Eastman Rogers was 23 when complications from appendicitis killed him in 1921. He and his wife had been building a house. Two years later his family put a museum on that same lot instead, and named it after him. That's the origin story of the oldest art museum in Mississippi, and it explains the free admission — it was conceived as a memorial, not a business.

The Georgian Revival building came from New Orleans architect Rathbone DeBuys and was finished in 1923, with additions in 1924 and 1983. Inside are more than 2,000 objects across 25,000-plus square feet: Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Corot, Japanese prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai, Native American basketry, and British Georgian silver. Southern Living singled out an 1810 portrait by William Owen and an 1827 silver-and-coral baby rattle.

The Big Mississippi Names That Got Left Off

Two obvious candidates didn't appear. Jackson's Mississippi Museum of Art, the state's flagship, was absent. So was the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi — a Smithsonian Affiliate with a campus designed by Frank Gehry, built around the wildly warped ceramics of George E. Ohr, the self-styled Mad Potter of Biloxi who worked from 1857 to 1918.

That's not a knock on either. Lists like this reward a distinct experience over square footage, and a Gehry building in a beach town is arguably the most famous piece of architecture in the state. It just wasn't the kind of quiet, one-artist story the writer was hunting.

What a Visit Actually Costs

If you're planning a Gulf Coast run, the two sit about 130 miles apart — Ocean Springs on the water, Laurel inland toward Hattiesburg. Doing both in a weekend is realistic. Rough current pricing, worth confirming before you drive:

• Walter Anderson Museum of Art: around $10 for adults, $5 for kids 6 to 18 and college students with ID, free for children 5 and under.
• The community center murals next door: free to walk in and see.
• Lauren Rogers Museum of Art: no admission charge, as it has been since 1923.

What to Check Before You Go

Expect the usual list bump. National roundups reliably push weekend traffic to small museums for a month or two, and neither of these has big-museum capacity. Call ahead or check hours online, especially for the community center, which is a working city facility and can be booked for events. If you only have one afternoon, take the free one in Laurel — it's the deeper collection, and the story behind the front door is the best thing on the list.