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I wasn’t expecting to find one of the country’s most impressive collections of Western art in Cartersville, Georgia. When someone says, “Let’s go see the American West,” my brain immediately heads toward Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, or Colorado. Georgia isn’t exactly the obvious choice.
But there I was, walking into the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville and realizing very quickly that this wasn’t going to be a little regional museum I could knock out in an hour. The place is huge, the collection is impressive, and the stories told through the artwork reach far beyond the cowboys and horses I expected to find.
There are enormous landscapes and bronze sculptures, Native American stories, Civil War works, contemporary interpretations of the West, and enough cowboy art to satisfy anyone who came specifically looking for it. Then, just when you think you understand what kind of museum you’re visiting, you find yourself surrounded by American presidents.
Cartersville had surprised me again.
The American West Is Bigger Than Cowboys
I’ll admit that when I hear “Western art,” my brain goes to a fairly predictable place. I picture cowboys on horseback, cattle moving across an open range, maybe a dramatic sunset behind a mountain, and almost certainly someone wearing an excellent hat.
You’ll find those things at Booth, and some of the artwork is spectacular. What surprised me was how quickly the museum demonstrated that telling the story of the American West is far more complicated than painting a cowboy on horseback and calling it a day.
The West has always been a mixture of people, cultures, conflict, migration, survival, opportunity, displacement, mythology, and reinvention. The artwork reflects those layers, particularly when you slow down enough to consider not only what you’re seeing but who created it and when.
For generations, popular culture gave many of us a fairly narrow version of the American West. Movies and television turned it into gunfights and saloons, heroes and villains, cowboys and Native Americans, with plenty of dramatic music playing in the background. The real history was considerably messier, and good museums give visitors room to consider the difference between the West that existed and the West Americans later created in our collective imagination.
Booth does that exceptionally well.
Some Paintings Practically Pull You Into Them
One of the things I love about Western art is its sense of scale. Mountains tower over tiny human figures, storm clouds roll across vast plains, horses kick up dust, and snow-covered landscapes seem to continue forever beyond the edge of the canvas.
Standing in front of these paintings is completely different from seeing them reproduced on a computer screen or in a book. In person, you can see the brushstrokes and texture. You notice tiny figures you initially missed and the way an artist used light to make a landscape feel warm, threatening, peaceful, or impossibly vast.
You also begin to understand why the West became such a powerful part of the American imagination. Even if you’ve never lived there, the landscapes often feel familiar because we’ve been seeing versions of them our entire lives. Hollywood certainly helped, but so did advertising, photography, books, television, and generations of artists.
That makes looking at Western art particularly interesting because sometimes you’re looking at the actual landscape of the West, and sometimes you’re looking at the idea of the West that America created for itself. The two aren’t always the same.
Don’t Walk Past the Sculptures
It would be easy to become so focused on Booth’s paintings that you move too quickly past the sculpture, but some of these pieces deserve just as much attention.
Western sculpture can have an incredible sense of movement. Somehow an artist can take something as solid and heavy as bronze and convince your brain that a horse is about to leap forward, a cowboy is shifting in the saddle, or a piece of clothing is moving in the wind.
Whenever the display allows it, walk around the sculpture instead of looking at it from only one angle. The view from behind may reveal something you completely missed from the front. Look at the expressions, clothing, saddles, ropes, equipment, and the muscles of the animals. Tiny details begin telling their own stories.
These pieces also reinforce how physical life in the West could be. Horses, saddles, wagons, ropes, boots, weapons, and tools weren’t decorative accessories designed to make a scene look appropriately Western. People depended on them for work, transportation, food, protection, and survival.
Then There Are the Presidents
One of my favorite twists at Booth was discovering the museum’s Presidential Gallery. You can be completely immersed in Western landscapes, cowboys, horses, and frontier history and then suddenly find yourself face-to-face with American presidents.
The gallery adds another dimension to a museum already much broader than its name might suggest. Presidential portraits and related materials shift the conversation from the landscapes and people of the West to the leaders whose decisions helped shape the country during many of those same periods.
I also find presidential portraits fascinating because they aren’t simply pictures of people. They are carefully constructed images of leadership. Look at the posture, expression, clothing, setting, and objects surrounding the subject. Artists are communicating something about how that president should be seen—strong, thoughtful, approachable, dignified, powerful, or perhaps some combination of all five.
Presidential portraiture may be one of America’s oldest forms of image management. Once you start looking at it that way, the gallery becomes even more interesting.
The Civil War Belongs in the Conversation
The Booth also explores Civil War history through art, which makes sense within the larger story the museum is telling. The Civil War and westward expansion aren’t isolated chapters that happened neatly one after the other. Their stories overlap through military service, migration, federal policy, settlement, railroads, Reconstruction, and the country’s changing definition of itself.
Seeing Civil War-related works in Georgia adds another layer. Here, the war isn’t a distant event tied to a faraway battlefield. Its history is deeply connected to the region and remains visible in historic sites, monuments, buildings, family stories, and communities throughout the South.
Art provides a different way to approach that history. Rather than memorizing battles and dates, you’re looking at how people experienced, remembered, interpreted, and sometimes mythologized those events. Who created the work, when it was made, and what the artist chose to include—or leave out—can completely change the story being told.
History is rarely simple, and the most interesting museums don’t pretend that it is.
Pay Attention to How Native Americans Are Represented
You cannot tell the story of the American West accurately without Native American history, and Western art gives visitors an opportunity to think carefully about how Indigenous people have been portrayed over time.
As you move through the galleries, it is worth asking a few questions. Who created this piece? When was it made? Is the person depicted as an individual or primarily as a symbol of “the West”? What assumptions did the artist bring to the work, and how might those assumptions differ from the perspective of the person being portrayed?
Those questions don’t require an art history degree. They simply require you to look a little longer.
This part of the Booth experience also connects particularly well with another important Cartersville attraction, the Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site. Visiting both during the same trip gives you two very different opportunities to think about Indigenous history. Booth explores portions of the Western story through art, while Etowah puts you on land where a thriving Mississippian community existed centuries before European colonization.
Together, they reinforce something that is easy to forget when we travel through historic American destinations: the story didn’t begin when Europeans arrived.
Don’t Try to Race Through Booth
Booth is not a “we have 45 minutes before lunch” museum. You could certainly walk through it quickly, but that would be a little like reading the first paragraph of every chapter in a book and claiming you finished it.
The museum rewards curiosity. Give yourself time to stand in front of the pieces that grab you. Read the labels when something raises a question. Back away from a massive painting so you can take in the entire scene, then move closer and look at the details you couldn’t see from across the gallery.
You also don’t need to feel obligated to love everything. That’s one of my favorite things about visiting an art museum. Sometimes a piece stops me cold and I could stand there looking at it for ten minutes. Sometimes I think, “That’s nice,” and keep moving. Occasionally I stare at something and wonder what everyone else sees that I apparently don’t.
All three reactions are perfectly acceptable.
You Don’t Need to Be an Art Expert
People sometimes put strange pressure on themselves when visiting art museums. They think they’re supposed to understand something that everyone else already knows, or that there is a correct reaction they’re failing to have.
There isn’t.
You don’t need an art history degree to enjoy Booth. You don’t need to memorize the names of famous Western artists before walking through the door, and nobody is going to quiz you on artistic techniques on your way out.
Start with the simplest possible question: What catches your attention?
Then figure out why. Maybe it’s the light in a landscape or the expression on someone’s face. Perhaps it’s a horse that looks ready to gallop right off the canvas, a storm gathering over the mountains, or a painting of a place you’ve visited yourself. You may find a sculpture you want to examine from every angle or a piece you absolutely wouldn’t hang in your living room but can’t stop looking at anyway.
Congratulations. You’re looking at art.
Cartersville’s Museums Keep Punching Above Their Weight
By the time I visited Booth, I was beginning to understand something about Cartersville: this city has absolutely no business having this many good museums.
I mean that affectionately.
Within one getaway, you can visit Booth, the Savoy Automobile Museum, and the Tellus Science Museum. One gives you Western art, presidential history, and sculpture. Another turns classic automobiles into works of art and design. The third gives you dinosaurs, minerals, transportation, and space.
That’s a wildly good museum weekend, especially because each museum feels substantial enough to be a destination rather than something created simply to give tourists another attraction to visit.
Booth, in particular, is a museum I would travel specifically to see. That’s about the best compliment I can give it.
The West, Found in Georgia
Travel is at its best when a destination messes with your assumptions, and Cartersville did that repeatedly. I didn’t expect to walk into a Georgia museum and spend hours thinking about the landscapes, people, mythology, conflict, and identity of the American West. I certainly didn’t expect presidential history to become part of the afternoon.
That’s exactly what makes the Booth Western Art Museum so interesting. It isn’t simply asking you to admire paintings of cowboys and beautiful landscapes. It’s giving you an opportunity to think about how artists have pictured the West, how those images influenced the way the rest of America understood it, and how complicated the real history behind those images can be.
In the process, the museum starts telling a much bigger story about how America has pictured itself.
And somehow, wonderfully, you can find that story in Cartersville, Georgia.
