Five Summertime Art Road Trips

Follow these five art-filled itineraries for summertime road trips to far-flung museums, installations, galleries and private collections

Featured on wsj.com

Art lovers, start your engines.

For a trove of van Gogh paintings, take U.S. Route 7 to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. For a minigolf course designed by artists: Interstate 94 to theWalker Art Center in Minneapolis. A James Turrell light installation: Interstate 10 to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Collectors, dealers, curators and others are hitting the open road this summer, mapping out vacations that include stops at far-flung museums, installations, artists’ studios and private collections.

“When you plan your route, you’re asking yourself, ‘OK, where is the art going to be?’” said Rona Maynard, a 65-year-old former magazine editor from Toronto who visited 49 U.S. museums in five weeks a couple of years ago, logging 6,500 miles with her husband on a route that took them from Detroit to Los Angeles. “You realize that wonderful art turns up in places that are not obvious.”

As art road-trippers plug their coordinates into the GPS, once-remote destinations are newly popular. So many people are trying to visit The Lightning Field, a work by sculptor Walter De Maria featuring 400 polished stainless-steel poles in the New Mexico desert, that its steward said it has convinced Google to scrub the installation’s location from its maps (an office address shows up instead). Jessica Morgan, director of Dia Art Foundation, which owns the land, said the location is kept private to help protect the artwork and its visitors.

Summer offers a chance to make a deeper connection to the paintings, sculptures and other works that drive the art market, art veterans say—an opportunity to contemplate and experience rather than buy and sell.

“It’s much more authentic than banging through an art fair,” said Los Angeles art dealer Bill Griffin, who last year traveled across Texas from museums in Dallas to the Rothko Chapel in Houston (with its 14 monumental paintings by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko) to a swing through the art mecca in the tumbleweed town of Marfa.

Click here to see all five itineraries.