Nasher Sculpture Center

The phrase “jewel box of a museum” is certainly overused, but it perfectly fits Dallas’s exquisite Nasher, both inside and out. The small, light-filled museum was designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano and opened in 2003. The elegant building with just three galleries and leads into a leafy one-and-a-half-acre garden that was created by landscape architect Peter Walker.

The Nasher contains the private collection of Raymond and Patsy Nasher, both avid collectors of modern and contemporary sculpture, whose holdings feature an array of such big-name artists as Rodin, Brancusi, de Kooning, Giacometti, Matisse and Moore, among many others. In the hands of a lesser architect and landscape artist, the exhibits could have easily become best-of showcases, but the layout of the Nasher and the way the pieces are displayed create a compelling narrative. In one corner of the garden, the massive rust-colored steel slabs of Richard Serra’s My Curves Are Not Mad play off Jonathan Borofsky’s animated Hammering Man, which in turn towers over Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Bronze Crowd. I was familiar with the work of almost all the artists represented at the Nasher and yet left feeling as if I had seen them for the first time. If you have time for only one museum on your Dallas visit, the Nasher should be it. Closed Monday.