If your spring break was anything like mine, you spent it in museums.

And apparently I wasn’t the only one. Arturo Adams from the Getty Center’s visitor center estimates that the Getty gets 10 to 20 percent more visitors during school breaks, such as spring and summer, than on a regular weekday. The increases could be due to featured exhibits, however, as the statistics do not distinguish between students and regular visitors.

While we are lucky to live in close proximity to museums such as the Getty and LACMA, which feature works from all over the world, for my break away from Los Angeles, I found that smaller museums can have a charm of their own. By default or design, smaller museums tend to focus on niche works and offer a more intimate look at the relationship between art and its environment.

Museums in smaller towns may have fewer internationally renowned works, because of budget constraints – I’d imagine there are more donors in a larger city, and a piece would have greater visibility in a large city.

So over my break, I spent time at the Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. In town for vacation, I found that in March, in the chilly and windy weather, the indoor museums were attractive entertainment options.

Russell, a western artist famous for painting cowboys, American Indians and buffalo across the plains, spent the majority of his career in the mining town. The museum is adjacent to Russell’s former studio and home, where he lived until his death in 1926.

The artwork in the museum, while not limited to Russell’s own works, focuses on contemporary and historical Western art, by artists who either came from elsewhere to paint the West or were born locally. The images of the old plains were more striking when side-by-side with the view out the window than they would have been in another city. Great Falls is near the waterfalls of the Missouri River, surrounded by flat plains with mountains far in the distance. Seeing that image injected with style and emotion made the actual outdoors more interesting. But where Russell’s pictures featured buffalo and American Indians, the picture outside, while geographically the same, was different: no buffalo, no American Indians – though there were cowboy hats.

“They painted things no one will ever see again,” Sharon McGowan, the museum’s librarian said. As a tourist in a new place, I was able to see the town as it is and as it was.

Another benefit of smaller museums is that they often rely on volunteers to give tours. The volunteers are mostly retired people with an interest in history and a passion for instilling that history in younger museum-goers. The ones I’ve encountered will fight to be the one to take you on the tour and rattle off interesting anecdotes for as much time as you can spare.