3 of 12 Types of Iowa Recreational Facilities--Art Museums
Iowa Art Museums
Davenport: Figge Art Museum
The Figge Art Museum is an art museum in Davenport, Iowa. The Figge, as it is commonly known, has an encyclopedic collection and serves as the major art museum for the eastern Iowa and western Illinois region. The Figge works closely with several regional universities and colleges (see below) as an art resource and collections hub for a number of higher education programs.
The museum opened on August 6, 2005, and is the renamed successor to the Davenport Museum of Art, which was opened on October 10, 1928, as the Davenport Municipal Art Gallery. The museum has its roots in the Davenport Art Association, which was founded before February 23, 1878, and was re-located on November 15, 1889, to the Bianca Wheeler art studio. The Figge Art Museum is one of the oldest art institutions in the country and is considered the first municipal art gallery in the United States. The Figge won an AIA award.
The new building was designed by Stirling Prize-winning Modernist British architect David Chipperfield. It was Chipperfield's first architectural commission in the United States. The Figge Art Museum gets its name from the V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Foundation, which donated $13 million towards its $47 million construction. The Figge family, a local banking family of Swiss origin, has a long tradition of philanthropy and cultural enrichment.
The first pieces of its collections were donated by Davenport community leader Charles Ficke (1850–1931), a successful lawyer and former mayor, who collected art from around the world. Robert E. Harsche, then Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, reported that to his knowledge no American public art gallery had "started out with so large a number of important paintings as a nucleus.”
The museum has over 4,000 works of art, ranging from the 16th century to the present, and is best known for its extensive collection of Haitian, Colonial Mexican and Midwestern art, particularly pieces by Thomas Hart Benton, Marvin Cone and Grant Wood, including the only self-portrait Wood ever painted. In 1990, Grant Wood's estate, which included his personal effects and various works of art, became the property of the Figge Art Museum through his sister Nan Wood Graham, the woman portrayed in American Gothic.
The institution also houses a substantial American collection (including works by Albert Bierstadt, James McNeill Whistler, William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns), European art (including work by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, Francisco Goya, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Henry Raeburn, Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre-Auguste Renoir), and works from East Asia (with pieces by Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kunisada). As owners of Grant Wood's estate, the museum is also home to the Grant Wood Archives, and received substantial support from The Henry Luce Foundation for the conservation of these archives.
The museum exhibits an important collection of pieces by Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect and designer from the Midwest.
Its inaugural exhibition, "The Great American Thing: 1915-1935" opened September 17, 2005, and featured major works from early American Modernists
Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center
The Des Moines Art Center is an art museum with an extensive collection of paintings, sculpture, modern art and mixed media. It was established in 1948 in Des Moines, Iowa.
Artists included in the permanent collection are Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Francis Bacon, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gerhard Richter, Claes Oldenburg, Mary Cassatt, Auguste Rodin, Grant Wood, Deborah Butterfield, Paul Gauguin, Eva Hesse, Ronnie Landfield, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, Mark Rothko, John Singer Sargent, Joseph Cornell and Takashi Murakami.
Some paintings from the collection are well known examples of the artist and/or movement they represent. These include Edward Hopper's "Automat", which was reproduced on a postage stamp as well as used for a cover of Time magazine, Stanton MacDonald Wright's "Synchromy" which has been reproduced in numerous texts about the artist/movement, Francis Bacon's "Portrait of Pope Innocent" which likewise is considered a signature work by the artist and appeared in Robert Hughes "Shock of the New" BBC series in the early 1980s.
Iowa City: The University of Iowa Museum of Art
The University of Iowa Museum of Art is a visual arts institution that is part of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and its director is a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors.
Since its inception, the UIMA has partnered in many teaching programs and research projects with the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, and for several decades has sponsored the annual MFA show as well as the faculty exhibitions. Faculty from the SAAH and elsewhere, and graduate students on campus have curated shows at the Museum that are closely linked with their research, courses, and seminars. The teaching mission of the UIMA embraces the curriculum of the University of Iowa and extends throughout the state.
The University of Iowa Museum of Art, established in 1969, has one of the top university art collections in the country. Approximately 14,000 objects constitute diverse collections that include paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, ceramics, textiles, jade and silver.
A number of major art donors contributed to the collection, including Peggy Guggenheim, Owen and Leone Elliott, and Elizabeth M. and C. Maxwell Stanley. The Guggenheim donation includes masterpieces by Pollock, Matta, Seliger, and Rice Pereira. The Elliott Collection includes paintings by Braque, Chagall, De Chirico, Kandinsky, Léger, Marc, Matisse, Picasso, and Vlaminck, among others. The Stanley Collection of African Art is part of one of the most significant collections of African art in the country which today numbers almost 2,000 objects. Other significant areas of the collections include nearly 5,300 prints spanning the history of Western printmaking, several hundred ceramics (primarily American studio ceramics), Pre-Columbian objects as well as groups of ancient Etruscan and Roman art, and Native American ledger drawings.
Two of the most well-known works in the collections were given to the Museum by the School of Art and Art History: Max Beckmann's triptych, Karneval, purchased by the faculty in 1946, and one of the most famous paintings in the world, Jackson Pollock's Mural, created in 1943 for Peggy Guggenheim, which she gave to the School in 1951. Significant paintings by Robert Motherwell, Lyonel Feininger, Maurice Prendergast, Alexej von Jawlensky, Joan Miró, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Grant Wood, Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Diebenkorn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Arthur Dove, Giorgio Morandi, Mark Rothko, Miriam, and Sam Gilliam, as well as sculptural/3-D works by Louise Nevelson, Sol Lewitt, Mark di Suvero, Beverly Pepper, Henry Moore, Marcel Duchamp, Lil Picard, Alexander Calder, Peter Voulkos, and George Rickey add to the museum's offerings.
After the Iowa flood of 2008, the Museum building was permanently evacuated. The collections were moved out in time and today most are temporarily located in the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, fifty miles from Iowa City.
In August 2009, the UIMA opened a new on-campus art venue, the "UIMA@IMU," a 4,000-square-foot (370 m2) visual classroom in the Iowa Memorial Union that houses more than 500 works of art from the collections. selected specifically to meet classroom needs. The "UIMA@IMU" was funded almost entirely by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, objects from the African art collections are located in the Stanley Gallery of the Levitt Center for University Advancement. Currently, some 3,000 works of art are displayed and/or stored on the university campus. The remaining 11,000 items are mostly stored (some on exhibition) at the Figge Art Museum.
Current Exhibit Locations
· UIMA@IMU at the Iowa Memorial Union, 125 North Madison Street, 3rd floor
· Black Box Theater at the Iowa Memorial Union, 125 North Madison Street
· Legacies for Iowa Gallery at the Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second St., Davenport, IA
· Studio Arts Building - Museum offices only, 1375 Highway 1 West, 1840 SA, Iowa City
Other Sites of Interest
San Marcos Memories—disappearing North County San Diego, Ca
Lake San Marcos—Listing of Vendors and Other Items of Interest to LSM residents
Silly Service—38 years of Federal Civil Service Overview (A book in progress)