The 210,000-square-foot (20,000 m2) museum is distinguished by a neoclassical building designed in the 1920s by American architect John Russell Pope and two landscaped gardens with 20th-century sculpture.

She joined the BMA in 2018 as the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator and previously held curatorial positions at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.

[8] According to a booklet published at the time of incorporation, it was stated that Baltimore lagged behind other cities “in regard to matters of aesthetic interest.” Still without a permanent site, the fledgling museum was founded with but a single painting, William Sergeant Kendall's Mischief, which was donated by Dr. Dohme himself.

As the museum's founders were confident that more art would eventually be acquired, the nearby Peabody Institute agreed to hold the collection for a time until a permanent home was established.

By 1915, the group had decided to permanently house the museum in the Wyman Park area, west of the Peabody Heights neighborhood, later renamed Charles Village.

By 1917, the group had received a promise from Johns Hopkins University for the land further south of the new Georgian Revival architecture-Federal styled campus they were in the process of moving to.

With his years of study in Europe, Pope is considered to be the main examplar of the classical revival style that proved so popular with traditional American architects.

By the 1930s, the public reception was such that director Roland McKinney, in a letter to board chairman Henry Treide, noted, "People seem to feel that the Museum belongs to them and show that they are sincerely proud of it and its activities."

“We, the living, resent being left to work in a vacuum of indifference and neglect while so much of the dead past is exhausted [by the BMA],” the president of the Artists’ Union of Baltimore complained to The Evening Sun in 1937.

Among the donors who have shaped the museum's collection are Blanche Adler, Dr. Claribel Cone and Etta Cone, Jacob Epstein, Edward J. Gallagher, Jr., John W. and Robert Garrett, Mary Frick Jacobs, Ryda H. and Robert H. Levi, Saidie Adler May, Dorothy McIlvain Scott, Elsie C. Woodward, and Alan and Janet Wurtzburger.

In June 2022, it was reported that AFSCME Council 67 would represent BMA workers, along with those at Walters Art Museum and Enoch Pratt Free Library if unionization efforts were successful at those institutions.

[15] This initiative led to the addition of works by Mark Bradford, Isaac Julian, Wangechi Mutu, Amy Sherald, Carrie Mae Weems, Jack Whitten, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and other notable contemporary artists.

[16][17] In fall 2019, the museum transformed the East Lobby with a major new work by artist Mickalene Thomas as part of the Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission.

[25] The next phase encompassed the Dorothy McIlvain Scott American Wing, comprising the first and second floors of the BMA's original 1929 building designed by the acclaimed American architect John Russell Pope; the 1982 East Wing Lobby and Zamoiski East Entrance designed by Bower, Lewis & Thrower; and critically important upgrades to the museum's infrastructure.

Also on display are a Lozi throne from c. 1900, most likely carved in the court of King Lewanika of western Zambia, a 20th-century Hausa Koranic prayer board, and a 2006 video work by Theo Eshetu.

Notable canvases include A Wild Scene (1831–1832) by Thomas Cole, La Vachère (1888) by Theodore Robinson, and Pink Tulip (1926) by Georgia O'Keeffe.

The BMA's holdings of American decorative arts include an extensive furniture collection that represents the major historic cabinetmaking centers of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.

Other notable aspects of the decorative arts collection include a rare set of five clerestory windows and two mosaic-clad architectural columns that represent Tiffany's contribution to 20th-century ornament.

The BMA exhibits a collection of Antioch mosaics, the result of its participation in excavations of this ancient city, known today as Antakya in southeastern Turkey, near the border of Syria.

[30] This collection contains works from 59 distinct artistic traditions from Aztec and Maya of Mesoamerica, Chimú and Muisca of Andean South America, and Nicoya, and the Atlantic Watershed of Costa Rica.

[31] Other notable pieces include a finely worked serpentine figure of Olmec mastery, elegant portrayals of Maya and Aztec noblewomen showcasing the integral roles women played in the social, political, economic, and spiritual realms of society, and miniature gold votives in the Muisca tradition.

Other highlights of the collection include a breast ornament embellished with small birds and stars that figured as insignia of prestige for the Tonga of the Fiji Islands.

Some notable works in the collection include the life-sized early-15th-century bronze Guanyin, known widely as "Goddess of Mercy"; the robust figure of a horse from a Han dynasty tomb; a 39-piece mortuary retinue, a rare example of the quantities of clay figures that were placed in tombs during the early Tang dynasty; and an outstanding foliate-shaped brush washer that represents the mastery of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain.

The collection contains a large selection of 19th-century French art, including more than 140 bronze animal sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye and several paintings by Barbizon artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and impressionist Camille Pissarro.

Highlights of the European art exhibit include Sir Anthony van Dyck's Rinaldo and Armida (1629), which was commissioned by King Charles I of England.

[32] Other items of northern European and French art include Frans Hals' portrait Dorothea Berck (1644), Rembrandt van Rijn's painting of his son Titus (1660), Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's portrayal of a lovely maiden tossing a ball in The Game of Knucklebones (c. 1734), and French court portraitist Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun's exotic Princess Anna Alexandrovna Galitzin (c. 1797).

There are also late-medieval and Renaissance paintings by Giovanni dal Ponte, Biagio D'Antonio, Sandro Botticelli and Workshop, Bernardino Luini, Francesco Ubertini, and Master of View of Saint Gudule.

Their collection of approximately 3,000 objects included 500 works by Matisse, as well as masterworks by Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne, which were displayed in their Baltimore apartments prior to coming to the museum.

The renovated wing houses a two-part architectural intervention that made the BMA the first museum in the United States to commission and acquire a site-specific installation by artist Sarah Oppenheimer.

The Contemporary Wing will be reinstalled again in summer 2019 with a new presentation of 20th- and 21st-century art that focuses on the creativity of black artists such as Roy DeCarava, David Driskell, Joyce J. Scott, Lorna Simpson, and Jack Whitten.