Crocker Art Museum
The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento combines the old with the new to create a spectacular display of some of California’s best fine art. The original building, built in 1872, belonged to the Crocker family who commissioned a local architect named Seth Babson to construct the Italianate mansion. Since its inception it contained an expansive private art collection. It was donated to the city of Sacramento in 1885 by Margaret E. Crocker and has served as the center of fine art in the city ever since.
The museum is divided into two main sections. The original Crocker mansion houses a large collection of 19th century furniture, exquisite European paintings, and beautifully detailed decor.
The modern wing of the museum contains more contemporary art along with rotating exhibits. We were fortunate to see the Hi-Fructose exhibit which celebrates the first ten years of the artists in the Hi-Fructose magazine.
Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani described her visit to the (then private) Crocker Mansion in her book “Hawaii’s Story”. She describes “a most elegant mansion”, how the art gallery made a lasting impression on her at the time, and how “the least detail of her grand and beautiful residence was nothing less than perfection.” She was pleased to learn that shortly after her visit the entire gallery was donated to the city for future generations to appreciate.
Naturally being a few blocks away form the state capitol building encourages some provocative and politically charged art work to emerge. Some of my favorite pieces in the museum were related to California politics.
The Crocker at museum is a real treasure for the city of Sacramento and is a lasting testimony to love and appreciation that the Crocker family had for fine arts.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- The Futzing Fraction from Deciphering Glyph
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Give a Problem. Grow a Programmer.
In 2009, I kicked off my senior year in college with a class that ultimately changed the way I thought about my degree—and my future.
via flower.codes September 15, 2025Yala stablecoin depegs after theft
The YU bitcoin-backed stablecoin list its intended dollar peg after what they described as "an attempted attack", later writing that there was an "unauthorized transfer of funds". Although they initially wrote that …
via Web3 is Going Just Great September 15, 2025How big a solar battery do I need to store *all* my home's electricity?
I have a modest set of solar panels on an entirely ordinary house in suburban London. On average they generate about 3,800kWh per year. We also use about 3,800kWh of electricity each year. Obviously, we can't use all the power produced over summer an…
via Terence Eden’s Blog September 15, 2025Generated by openring