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Established | 1925; in present location since 2005 |
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Location | 225 W. 2nd Street, Davenport, Iowa, US |
Visitors | 76,688 (2006) |
Director | Melissa Mohr |
Architect | David Chipperfield |
Public transit access | ![]() |
Website | www |
The Figge Art Museum is located on the north bank of the Mississippi River 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's new building was designed by British architect David Chipperfield [1] and opened to the public August 6, 2005. The Figge was among Chipperfield's first architectural commissions in the United States. The cost of construction was $47 million, $13 million of which was donated by the V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Foundation. [2] Chipperfield also designed the Saint Louis Art Museum's east building which opened in 2013. [3] In 2023, Chipperfield was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, often regarded as architecture’s highest honor. [4]
Today's Figge Art Museum is the successor to the city-owned Davenport Art Museum, which itself began as the Davenport Municipal Art Gallery in 1925. The museum's original collection was donated by Charles Ficke (1850–1931), a successful lawyer and former mayor, who collected art from around the world. [2] 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." [5]
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, Moncho1929 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 American architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). The Wright collection includes drawings, furniture, fabrics, and decorative objects from a wide range of projects spanning the architect's career. Projects represented include: Arthur Heurtley House (1902), Avery Coonley House, 1907), Edward P. Irving House (1909), Frederick C. Bogk House (1916), Johnson Wax Headquarters (1936), and the Price Tower (1952).
In 1943, the prominent Mexican art historian Manuel Toussaint traveled to Davenport, Iowa to assess the Figge's (then called the Davenport Museum of Art) collection of colonial Mexican art. He called it one of the most important in an American institution at that time and published his thoughts on the collection. [6]
The Figge Art Museum temporarily housed much of the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art collection, after the University of Iowa's gallery was flooded in 2008. [7] With the construction of a new building for the Stanley Museum, the collection was returned to Iowa City starting in 2020. [8]
The Figge Art Museum is home to Western Illinois University's graduate program in Museum Studies, which offers a Master of Arts degree in the various aspects of museum management, such as curatorial design, museum administration and finance, art education, collections management, and marketing/PR. [9]
The museum is 115,000 square feet (10,683 m2) and has been accredited by the American Alliance of Museums since 1973. [10]
Davenport is a city in and the county seat of Scott County, Iowa, United States. Located along the Mississippi River on the eastern border of the state, it is the largest of the Quad Cities, a metropolitan area with a population of 384,324 and a combined statistical area population of 474,019, ranking as the 147th-largest MSA and 91st-largest CSA in the nation. According to the 2020 census, the city had a population of 101,724, making it Iowa's third-most populous city after Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. Davenport was founded on May 14, 1836, by Antoine Le Claire and named for his friend George Davenport.
The Quad Cities is a region of cities in the U.S. states of Iowa and Illinois: Davenport and Bettendorf in southeastern Iowa, and Rock Island, Moline and East Moline in northwestern Illinois. These cities are the center of the Quad Cities metropolitan area, a region within the Mississippi River Valley, which as of 2023 had a population estimate of 467,817 and a Combined Statistical Area (CSA) population of 474,019, making it the 90th-largest CSA in the nation.
Grant DeVolson Wood was an American artist and representative of Regionalism, best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. He is particularly well known for American Gothic (1930), which has become an iconic example of early 20th-century American art.
American Gothic is a 1930 painting by Grant Wood in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. A character study of a man and a woman portrayed in front of a home, American Gothic is one of the most famous American paintings of the 20th century, and has been widely parodied in American popular culture.
Sir David Alan Chipperfield,, is a British architect. He established David Chipperfield Architects in 1985, which grew into a global architectural practice with offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai.
Clement Meadmore was an Australian-American furniture designer and sculptor known for massive outdoor steel sculptures.
Bruce Walters, is an artist who has exhibited digital artworks, graphite drawings and paintings primarily in the American Midwest. Walters received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and BA from the University of Iowa. He retired from Western Illinois University in 2021 and was conferred with the title Professor Emeritus.
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is an art museum located on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, within the university's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Founded in 1881 as the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, it was initially located in downtown St. Louis. It is the oldest art museum west of the Mississippi River. The Museum holds 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century European and American paintings, sculptures, prints, installations, and photographs. The collection also includes some Egyptian and Greek antiquities and Old Master prints.
Albert Henry Krehbiel, was the most decorated American painter ever at the French Academy, winning the Prix De Rome, four gold medals and five cash prizes. He was born in Denmark, Iowa and taught, lived and worked for many years in Chicago. His masterpiece is the programme of eleven decorative wall and two ceiling paintings / murals for the Supreme and Appellate Court Rooms in Springfield, Illinois (1907–1911). Although educated as a realist in Paris, which is reflected in his neoclassical mural works, he is most famously known as an American Impressionist. Later in his career, Krehbiel experimented in a more modernist manner.
The University of Iowa Stanley 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.
The National Center for Midwest Art and Design is based at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. Founded in 2007, it is an academic institute that promotes the study of art, architecture and design in the Midwestern United States. NCMAD sponsors research, publications, and academic conferences on various related topics. The recent museum exhibition entitled "Global Currents: The John Deere Art Collection" is an example of an NCMAD project. NCMAD is currently responsible for the Grant Wood archive at the museum. The founding director was Dr. Gregory Gilbert, head of the Art History department at Knox College (Illinois), which displays part of its Midwestern art collection at the Figge Art Museum.
The J. Monroe Parker–Ficke House is a historic building located in the College Square Historic District in Davenport, Iowa, United States. The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The house was individually listed on the Davenport Register of Historic Properties in 2003. It has been owned and occupied by the Alpha chapter of Delta Sigma Chi since 1978.
The Harwood Museum of Art is located in Taos, New Mexico. Founded in 1923 by the Harwood Foundation, it is the second oldest art museum in New Mexico. Its collections include a wide range of Hispanic works and visual arts from the Taos Society of Artists, Taos Moderns, and contemporary artists. In 1935 the museum was purchased by the University of New Mexico. Since then the property has been expanded to include an auditorium, library and additional exhibition space.
Museum architecture has been of increasing importance over the centuries, especially more recently.
Douglas Abdell is an American sculptor, living and working in Málaga, Spain.
Paul Claude Gardère was a Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based visual artist whose work explored "post-colonial history, cultural hybridization, race, and identity, in and beyond the Haitian diaspora." Gardère's work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States, including at institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Figge Art Museum, Lehigh University, Pomona College Museum of Art, and the Jersey City Museum, and is included in a number of prominent institutional collections, including that of Thea Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Milwaukee Art Museum, the Figge Art Museum, the Columbus Museum, the Beinecke Library at Yale University and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.
Deborah Dancy, also known as Deborah Muirhead, is an American painter of large-scale abstractions in oil; she is also a printmaker and mixed media artist. Her work is also known to encompass digital photography. In 1981, she began to teach at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she taught painting for thirty-five years until her retirement in 2017. She has received awards such as a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Women’s Studio Workshop Studio Residency Grant, and a YADDO fellowship.
John Dilg is an American painter based in the Midwest. He is known for idiosyncratic landscapes that use a pared-down visual vocabulary drawing on imagination, vernacular artifacts, folk art and art historical sources. Critics describe them as dreamlike ruminations on place, the fragility of nature, the collective unconscious and mystical storytelling. Precedents for his work that have been cited include 19th-century Romantic landscape painters, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe and Horace Pippin, and the imaginary vistas of Henri Rousseau.
Charles A. Ficke (1850-1931) was a Kingdom of Prussia-born American lawyer, politician, author, and art collector. He served two terms as the mayor of Davenport, Iowa. Ficke made significant contributions to a number of cultural institutions in Iowa during his life and after his death. He was the father of poet and artist Arthur Davison Ficke.