Lowe Art Museum. The Lowe Art Museum, in Coral Gables, a Miami suburb in Miami-Dade County, is a visual arts museum. It opened in 1950 and is operated by the University of Miami. It was originally established by a gift from philanthropists Joe and Emily Lowe. At the time it opened, it was the first art museum in South Florida. The museum has an extensive collection of art with permanent collections in Greco-Roman antiquities, Renaissance, Baroque, 17th-and 19th-century European art, 19th-century American Art, and modern art. The museum's national and international works come from Latin America, Africa, Asia, Native America, Ancient Americas, and the Pacific Islands. It also has a large collection of glassworks including creations by Robert Arneson, Jun Kaneko and Christine Federighi. There are also glassworks by Pablo Picasso, William Morris, Emily Brock, Harvey Littleton, Erwin Eisch, and Ginny Ruffner in the permanent collection. The permanent collection includes works by: Lippo Vanni, Sano di Pietro, Lorenzo di Bicci, Lorenzo di Credi, Vincenzo Catena, Francesco Bacchiacca, Bernardino Fungai, Adrian Isenbrandt, Jacob Jordaens, Jusepe de Ribera, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Frank Stella, Knox Martin, and Duane Hanson. There are also Modern works of Art by Roy Lichtenstein, Sandy Skoglund, Purvis Young, Louise Nevelson, Julian Stanczak and Enrique Montenegro in the permanent collection. The Lowe Art Museum is served by the Miami Metrorail at the University Station. The Lowe Art Museum is one of the most important art museums in Miami, and one of the most important in the south of Florida. The museum is located within the University of Miami complex, located in Coral Gables, a city southwest of Downtown Miami in Miami-Dade County. The museum's collections include pieces ranging from classical archeology to contemporary art, with important pieces of Renaissance and Baroque art and of Asian and Native American art. 41,000 visitors visited the Lowe Art Museum in 2011, 6,500 of which were students. The history of the museum starts in 1950 with the first big donation by Joe and Emily Lowe. The museum opened to the public in 1952. In 1956 Alfred I. Barton donated the important nucleus of Native American art, and in 1954 the museum was designated the sole heir of Florida of a part of the famous collection of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, which brought to the museum a nucleus of 41 works of works of Baroque and Renaissance art, which have become, the most important nucleus of the museum. In 1984 Robert M. Bischoff donated 531 pieces of his collection of ancient American art. In the span of more than twenty years, the collection of Asian art was created with the contributions of Stephen Junkunc III, resident of Chicago, who usually stayed in Miami in the winter. The most recent donations to mention include the collections of glass and ceramics by collectors Myrna and Sheldon Palley, exhibited in the Palley Pavilion inside the museum starting from 2008, and the collections of South American devotional images by the couple Joseph and Janet Shein exhibited in the museum for the first time in 2012. On loan, extended since 1988, are instead the paintings by the Cintas Foundation, which includes important works of Spanish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by authors such as El Greco, Murillo, Goya and Ribera. The collection is divided into thematic rooms, dedicating a single room for each theme or artistic current in the collection. Currently it includes about 14 rooms, plus the Palley Pavilion, dedicated to the glass collection, and the outdoor garden of contemporary art sculptures. The Antiquities room, one of the smallest, is the first that the visitor encounters on his journey through the museum. Here there are exhibited vases, ceramics, metal objects, sculptures and marble bas-reliefs of the period and both Roman and Greek origins, dated between the first millennium BC and the 4th century A.D. The Renaissance room preserves the paintings that include the European works of the late sixteenth century and the Baroque period between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.There are views, religious works, portraits and engravings that include Italian, French and Flemish authors. Among the artists to remember Francesco Guardi, Tintoretto, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Jacob Jordaens In the Early Renaissance room, there are tables and gold bases, above all of Italian origin, dated between the first half of the 14th century. and the fifteenth century.