Telfair Museums, in Savannah’s historic district, is widely recognized as the first public art museum in the Southern United States. Created through Mary Telfair’s bequest, it opened in 1886 in the family’s renovated Regency-style mansion, now the Telfair Academy, and later expanded into a three-site campus. Its collection holds more than 4,500 American and European paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. The Telfair Academy, Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters, and Jepson Center for the Arts together span Savannah’s artistic, architectural, and social history, pairing fine and decorative arts with the preserved realities of slavery and spaces for contemporary art.