Telfair Academy & Jepson Center

Telfair Museums is the cultural institution Savannah would be poorer without, and the ticket that quietly organizes a whole trip: one admission covers three buildings for seven days — the Telfair Academy, the Jepson Center, and the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters (its own entry in this guide) — so a single purchase on day one turns into three unhurried visits woven between the squares. The Telfair Academy is the heart. Opened to the public in 1886 under Mary Telfair's bequest and long billed as the oldest public art museum in the South, it occupies the Telfair family mansion that the English architect William Jay designed in 1818 on what is now Telfair Square, with a museum wing added behind it and a row of statues of old masters guarding the entrance stairs. Inside: two restored period rooms that show how the city's merchant elite actually lived, galleries of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European painting, and the one object Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil readers come for — the Bird Girl, Sylvia Shaw Judson's 1936 bronze, removed from Bonaventure Cemetery after the book's cover made her famous and on loan to the museum since 1997. The Jepson Center, a block away on York Street, is the counterweight: Moshe Safdie's 2006 building of glass, stone and a bridge over the lane, with contemporary and Southern art, photography, the big traveling exhibitions, and the Telfair Children's Art Museum for families. Fit: first trips that want the city's art and its most famous statue, couples who like a museum hour between squares, and families with a rainy afternoon to fill.

The Bird Girl is the reason many visitors walk in, and the museum tells her story honestly: Judson modeled her in clay in 1936 as a garden or fountain figure, a handful of casts were made, and one ended up on the Trosdal family plot at Bonaventure around 1940, where she stood in near-anonymity for half a century until a photograph of her became the cover of John Berendt's 1994 book. The pilgrims that followed put the statue and the plot at risk, so she came indoors; today she anchors the Telfair Academy exhibition Before Midnight: Bonaventure and the Bird Girl, which places her among the cemetery's own history. Seeing her here, then visiting the empty plot at Bonaventure (this guide's cemetery entry), is one of the most satisfying two-part pilgrimages in the city. The rest of the Academy rewards slow looking: the period rooms show Jay's Regency proportions at domestic scale, and the painting galleries, lit from above, hold the collection that made the Telfair a serious museum long before the city became a tourist town.

The Jepson Center changes with its exhibitions, which is the reason to check the calendar before choosing your day. Through autumn 2026 the program includes Michelangelo's Women alongside Remember the Ladies (both on view from October 9, 2026 into late January 2027) and Divided Loyalties (through February 2027), with the year-long #art912 community exhibition upstairs. Safdie's architecture is a show in itself — the glass atrium stairs, the outdoor sculpture terraces, and the way the building steps politely back from its Victorian neighbors — and the Telfair Children's Art Museum turns the visit into a genuine family stop, with hands-on rooms designed for kids rather than a token activity corner. Allow ninety minutes for the Jepson in an exhibition season, an hour for the Academy, and a separate block for the Owens-Thomas House tour.

Practicals: the museums are closed on Mondays and open the rest of the week during the day, with shortened hours around major holidays; the three-site ticket is valid for seven days, so buy it on arrival and spread the visits. The Academy sits on Telfair Square (Barnard Street), the Jepson a block south on West York Street, and Owens-Thomas a short walk east on Oglethorpe Square — all inside the trolley loop and walkable from any district hotel. Members enter free, children's tickets are inexpensive, and the Museums for All program offers deeply discounted entry for SNAP cardholders. Pair with Bonaventure for the Bird Girl story, Owens-Thomas for the third site on the same ticket, and a long lunch on Broughton Street between them.