Quick Trip

Housed in an Italian Renaissance–inspired villa, Philbrook Museum of Art features world-class art and twenty-five acres of gardens. The museum’s collection features Egyptian, Roman, and Greek antiquities dating back thousands of years, along with contemporary art by Kehinde Wiley and Skip Hill. philbrook.org

Located along the Arkansas River, the Gathering Place offers nature trails, playgrounds, a skate park, and site-specific art installations, including mural-covered cabanas and canoes wrapped in designs by local artists.

Through eyewitness testimony, historical artifacts, immersive projection mapping, and holograms, Greenwood Rising tells the story of Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District, from its aspirational beginnings as the prosperous Black Wall Street, through the horrors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, to the resilience of residents who continue to shape the community in the twenty-first century. greenwoodrising.org

In the northern section of downtown, the Tulsa Arts District is home to galleries, museums, and music venues. The district’s First Friday art crawl attracts more than 3,000 people monthly. See works by emerging and established artists at Living Arts, Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship, the Tulsa Artists’ Coalition, and 108 Contemporary. thetulsaartsdistrict.org

5. Living Arts
6. Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship
7. Tulsa Artists’ Coalition
8. 108 Contemporary

Learn about the history of some of America’s most celebrated singer-songwriters at the Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center. bobdylancenter.com and woodyguthriecenter.org

10. Woody Guthrie Center

Music fans can also travel about two miles from downtown to the Church Studio for a guided tour of the recording studio where Leon Russell helped define the famed Tulsa Sound. thechurchstudio.com

In Locust Grove, the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry seeks to spark or rekindle a love of poetry with displays of handwritten poems and writing prompts. Rotating art exhibitions feed the imagination, and visitors may even have the chance to inspire a custom poem written by Shaun Perkins, ROMP’s director. rompoetry.com

With thousands of artifacts arranged in chronological order, the Museum of Native American History tells the story of Indigenous peoples in the Americas from around 12,000 BCE to the pre-Columbian era, before European colonizers arrived. Examine pottery, jewelry, textiles, and more from a range of regions, time periods, and peoples, and see “Tusker,” the woolly mammoth skeleton, alongside tools used to hunt and process such an imposing beast into food. monah.org

14. Art on the Square

As a shared office space, Ledger might not be the most obvious stop on a tristate art tour, but the six-story building is a unique architectural work. It features zigzagging bikeable outdoor ramps from the ground floor to the roof, which offers cyclists a scenic view of downtown Bentonville. Along the route to the top, look for artist Stefan Sagmeister’s Now is Better mosaics of local insects carrying precious jewels embedded in the concrete ramps, leading up to a large mosaic. ledgerbentonville.com

The Art Studio at Amazeum features Light Scape, where visitors of all ages can learn through interactive exhibits how light creates images and color. The Materials Lab offers tools for creating handmade artworks from featured media. Other areas in this educational, family-friendly museum include re-creations of an old-fashioned log cabin and a crystal-filled cave. amazeum.org

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art chronicles the evolution of American art from pre-colonization to modern movements through paintings, sculptures, and other works, plus there are more than five miles of trails through the gardens and surrounding Ozark woodlands. New in 2026, an expansion adding nearly 100,000 square feet, offering even more aesthetically pleasing opportunities to get your steps in. crystalbridges.org

Constructed in 1875 and filled with nineteenth-century artifacts and furnishings, the Peel Museum and Botanical Garden also features seasonal botanical gardens inspired by the Victorian era. The museum and gardens offer a glimpse into daily life at the former home of lawyer and congressman Samuel West Peel in the decades following the Civil War. peelcompton.org

Pack a swimsuit! At more than 160 feet wide and twelve feet tall, Joplin’s Grand Falls is Missouri’s largest continuously flowing natural waterfall and a popular stop for sightseeing travelers since long before the days of old Route 66.

The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art makes creating and enjoying art more approachable for visitors. The museum opened in 1994 and hosts special exhibitions and selected works from its permanent collection across four galleries. A hub of the community, the Kemper hosts film screenings and a variety of programming for children and adults. kemperart.org

The American Jazz Museum is located in the historic 18th and Vine district. Explore the lasting musical legacy of groundbreaking greats like Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald through historical artifacts, photographs, and art. Spend an evening at the Gem Theater or Blue Room, where you’ll hear musicians of today keeping jazz alive. americanjazzmuseum.org

With a collection of “100,000 objects—and counting,” the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures is a celebration of the playful and small, grown from the combined personal collections of its two founders. See toys from the seventeenth century, marvel at fine-scale handmade miniatures of household objects, and explore works of art created with a nearly microscopic eye for detail. toyandminiaturemuseum.org

On the campus of Johnson County Community College in the suburb of Overland Park, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art features a collection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and more. Designed by architect Kyu Sung Woo and constructed from Kansas limestone, the museum is a minimalist artwork in its own right. nermanmuseum.org

Along with the Kemper and the Nerman, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art also welcomes visitors free of charge. The Noguchi Sculpture Court boasts the largest public display of sculptures by Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi outside of New York and Japan, and the outdoor sculpture park includes large works by Henry Spencer Moore and George Segal, as well as a Rudier Foundry cast of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. nelson-atkins.org