The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is one of the principal U.S. art museums, with paintings, sculptures, cultural objects, and ancient masterpieces from all corners of the world. Its three-story building stands in Forest Park in St. Louis, Missouri, where it is visited by up to a half million people every year. Admission is free through a subsidy from the cultural tax district for St. Louis City and County. In addition to the featured exhibitions, the museum offers rotating exhibitions and installations. These include the Currents series, which features contemporary artists, as well as regular exhibitions of new media art and works on paper. History The museum was founded in 1879 as the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, an independent entity within Washington University in St. Louis. It was housed in a building commissioned by Wayman Crow as a memorial to his son, Wayman Crow Jr., and designed by Boston architects Peabody and Stearns for 19th and Lucas Place (now Locust Street). The school, led by director Halsey Ives, educated two generations of St. Louis artists and craftspeople and offered studio and art history classes supported by a museum collection. After the closing of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the museum and school moved from downtown to one of the few permanent remnants of the fair, the Palace of Fine Arts. The building was designed by Cass Gilbert, who took inspiration from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy. Ives introduced a bill into the General Assembly for an art tax to support the maintenance of the museum. The bill was approved by the citizens of Saint Louis by a nearly 4-to-1 margin. However, the city's controller refused to distribute the tax to the museum's board of control, as it was not a municipal entity and so had no right to tax money. The controller's position was upheld in 1908 by the Missouri Supreme Court. This caused the formal separation of the museum from the university in 1909, a split which was the beginning of three civic institutions: a newly created, public City Art Museum, to remain in the Palace of Fine Arts, the organization which evolved into the Saint Louis Art Museum; an organizing board was assigned to take control in 1912. the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum affiliated with the private Washington University, whose collection was lent to the City Art Museum for several years,