Atlanta's culture sits in layers: a Richard Meier museum on Peachtree, a 1929 movie palace with a fake starlit sky, a non-collecting kunsthalle in an old ice house, and West End house museums holding collections most visitors never find.
The Southeast's largest art museum holds 19,000 works split between Richard Meier's white porcelain-panelled 1983 building and Renzo Piano's 2005 expansion. Strengths are American decorative arts, African art and Southern self-taught work by Howard Finster.
The Southeast's only museum devoted solely to design, directly across Peachtree from the High. Three or four changing exhibitions a year on architecture, graphics, typography and product design fill two compact floors — an hour is genuinely enough.
A non-collecting kunsthalle on the Westside in a former ice house, mounting around 15 exhibitions a year and housing studios for a dozen resident artists. Admission has been free since 2016, which is unusual for a space this ambitious.
A 1912 railroad underpass linking Cabbagetown and Inman Park, its walls repainted so constantly that almost nothing survives a month. Layers of spray paint have built up thick enough to flake off the brick in sheets.
Emory's antiquities museum keeps roughly 20,000 objects — Egyptian, Nubian, Near Eastern, Greek, Roman and Asian — in galleries redesigned by Michael Graves. It once held a mummy identified as Ramesses I and returned to Egypt in 2003.
Built in 1929 as a Shriners temple and finished as a 4,665-seat Moorish-Egyptian movie palace, the Fox has a ceiling of 96 twinkling stars and machine-projected drifting clouds. Guided tours ($20) run most weekday mornings and include the Mighty Mo organ.
Thirty-three Buckhead acres built around the Atlanta Cyclorama, an 1886 panoramic painting of the Battle of Atlanta standing 49 feet tall and 371 feet in circumference. The 1928 Swan House and 1860s Smith Family Farm sit in the grounds.
The ASO plays around 150 concerts a season in this 1,762-seat hall, has taken 27 Grammy Awards, and still fields the 200-voice volunteer chorus Robert Shaw founded in 1970. Tickets start near $30 in the upper terrace.
A Victorian house in the West End holding roughly 450 works of African-American and Haitian art assembled by Dr Otis Thrash Hammonds, a physician who died in 1985. Romare Bearden collages and Hale Woodruff paintings hang in former bedrooms.
The 1870s Queen Anne home of Joel Chandler Harris, who published the Uncle Remus tales he took from stories told by enslaved storytellers. The house frames that contested authorship directly rather than glossing it, and keeps original furnishings.
Atlanta's counterculture crossroads since the 1970s, centred on Moreland and Euclid. Criminal Records for vinyl and zines, Junkman's Daughter's 10,000 square feet of oddities, and the Variety Playhouse, a 1940 cinema turned 1,000-capacity music room.
An improv and scripted-theatre company running since 1995, now in a converted church on Ezzard Street. The 200-seat house sells beer, seats you close enough to be pulled into a scene, and runs late-night improv Friday and Saturday.