The museum is free and open to the public Tuesdays through Saturdays 10:00 a.m.—5pm, and Sundays noon–5:00pm, and is located on the Indiana University Bloomington campus at 1133 E. Seventh Street.
The Indiana University Art Museum opened in 1941 in a gallery space in Mitchell Hall under the newly appointed head of the Department of Fine Arts, Henry Radford Hope. The first exhibition, Sixteen Brown County Painters, opened on November 21, 1941.
Establishing a permanent collection did not come to fruition until after World War II. In 1955, art collectors James and Marvelle Adams gave Indiana University a terracotta bust by Aristide Maillol, which inspired Hope to revive the goal to create a permanent collection for an IU Art Museum. The William Lowe Bryan Memorial Fund, a fund initiated by James Adams in honor of the university’s tenth president and in support for the blooming museum, financed almost all of the museum’s acquisitions in the early years. Hope also contributed to the museum, giving a number of important works including Pablo Picasso’s The Studio. In the formative years of the museum, the late 1950s, 60s, and 70s, gifts to the museum accumulated rapidly.
The museum moved into the gallery space in the newly built Fine Arts building on campus, right next to the auditorium, in 1962. Encouraged by then-University Chancellor Herman B Wells, the Board of Trustees of the university started budgeting a small amount for the museum each year, with additional special allocations for the Art Museum to grow the collection.
In 1968, Hope hired Thomas T. Solley as the museum’s Assistant Director. Solley became Director in 1971 after Hope retired. Solley, a trained architect, was perfectly suited to start the process of establishing a separate building for the art museum. Wanting an architect with museum-design experience, Solley and the university gave the project to I.M. Pei and Partners in 1974. Completed in 1982, the space has three galleries for permanent collections and one gallery for special exhibitions. Solley grew the collection from 4,000 works to 30,000 in his years at the museum.
Inside the Fine Arts Library. The windows open into the museum's atrium
Thomas T. Solley resigned in 1986 and Adelheid M. Gealt was appointed director the following year. Gealt retired from the museum at the end of June 2015, at which point David A. Brenneman became the museum's Wilma E. Kelley Director.
The three permanent galleries are the Gallery of Art of the Western World, Arts of Asia and the Ancient Western World, and the Raymond and Laura Wieglus Gallery of Arts of Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas. In the museum’s Gallery of the Art of Asia and the Ancient Western World, ancient Chinese porcelains, Japanese paintings, classical Greek, Roman, and Etruscan vases, bronzes, and mosaics are on display. The Burton Y. Berry Collection of Ancient Jewelry consists of 5,000 pieces from across the ancient world. Works by German and Austrian Expressionists August Macke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Alexej von Jawlensky, Max Beckmann, and Emil Nolde, along with early modern European and American masters such as Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Kurt Schwitters, are in the museum’s collection.
American abstract artists such as Stuart Davis, Frank Stella, and Joseph Cornell are also featured in the museum’s collection. The works-on-paper collection includes major works by Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Francisco Goya. The photography collection includes the archives of Henry Holmes Smith and Art Sinsabaugh. There are also European Old Master paintings by Niccolo Di Buonacorso, Apollonio di Giovanni, Taddeo Gaddi Workshop, Vittore Crivelli, Felipe Vigamy, Gereard Terborch(Elder), Emanuel de Witte, Bernardo Strozzi, and Jean Louis Laneuville, among others. There are also 19th Century European paintings by Jean Leon Gerome, Charles Daubigny, Gustave Caillebotte ("Yerres,Rain Effect"), and Claude Monet ("Port of Argentieul") among others in addition.
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