Explore Kansas City

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art museum on Oak Street in Kansas City, opened in 1933 in a neoclassical building designed by Wight and Wight. Steven Holl's glass-walled Bloch Building was added on its east side in 2007. The collection covers art from many cultures and periods, with a large Asian section, and the grounds hold a sculpture park.

The Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site preserves the limestone house in Kansas City's Roanoke Park area where the painter Thomas Hart Benton lived from 1939 until his death in 1975. Guided tours show the furnished house and the studio in the former carriage house, left with his brushes, paints and a stretched canvas.

The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures is a museum on Oak Street in Kansas City, on the University of Missouri–Kansas City campus. It opened in 1982 in a 1911 house, combining Mary Harris Francis's antique toys with Barbara Hall Marshall's fine-scale miniatures, and its collection now holds more than 100,000 objects.

The National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City was dedicated in 1926 as the Liberty Memorial, a 217-foot tower by Harold Van Buren Magonigle. The museum below it, reopened and enlarged in 2006, covers the First World War from its causes to the 1919 peace conference; visitors enter across a glass bridge over a field of 9,000 poppies.

The Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City's River Market shows the cargo of the Arabia, a steamboat that hit a snag and sank in the Missouri River in 1856. The wreck was dug out of a Kansas cornfield in 1988–89, and the museum, opened in 1991, displays tools, dishes and clothing, the boat's stern and a lab where finds are cleaned.