The museum's Beaton Hall (administrative offices) includes elements from the entranceway of the Sessions house.

[5] The museum building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 19, 1992, under its original name.

[7] The Margaret M. Walter Wing was designed by Michael Bongiorno of the Columbus-based architecture firm DesignGroup.

[9] The museum and its Pizzuti Collection branch temporarily closed beginning in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[citation needed] The permanent collection includes outstanding late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American and European modern works of art.

The Museum houses the largest collections of works by Columbus born artists Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Elijah Pierce, and George Bellows.

Highlights include early Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, works by François Boucher, Paul Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Edward Hopper, and Norman Rockwell, and installations by Mel Chin, Josiah McElheny, Susan Philipsz, and Allan Sekula.