The Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKCMOA) is a museum located in the Donald W. Reynolds Visual Arts Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States. The museum features traveling special exhibitions, original selections from its own collection, a theater showing a variety of foreign, independent, and classic films each week, and a restaurant. OKCMOA also houses a collection of Chihuly glass among the most comprehensive in the world, including the 55-foot Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower in the museum's atrium. [1]
The Oklahoma City Museum of Art traces its origins to early projects of the Oklahoma Art League and Art Renaissance Club—groups that promoted art education in early Oklahoma City. Later, more formal programs emerged, with an Experimental Gallery by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), open to the public. When the museum incorporated, May 18, 1945, the federally funded gallery became a private institution. [2] [3] [4]
Today's Oklahoma City Museum of Art was synthesized from two predecessor institutions: the Oklahoma Art Center (an outgrowth of the WPA Experimental Gallery), and the Oklahoma Museum of Art. Both institutions had been committed to art-collecting, exhibitions and public programs — but the 1980s downturn in the oil industry created a depressed local economy, undermining the city's ability to support two art institutions. That led to a 1989 merger of the two museums. [2] [3] [4]
Museum leaders acted to create a new Oklahoma City Museum of Art as a single, financially secure institution. The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation provided a $14.5 million capital grant, and further support was acquired from over 500 corporations, foundations, and individual donors, yielding $40 million, in entirely private funds, to build and endow the new museum. In March, 2002, the Donald W. Reynolds Visual Arts Center, of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, opened. The museum now receives over 125,000 visitors annually, with a permanent collection, a cycle of temporary exhibitions, various education opportunities, an international film program, and a Museum Store. [2] [3] [4]
Dale Chihuly is an American glass artist and entrepreneur. He is well known in the field of blown glass, "moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture".
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's largest and most inclusive collections of art, from the colonial period to the present, made in the United States. More than 7,000 artists are represented in the museum's collection. Most exhibitions are held in the museum's main building, the Old Patent Office Building, while craft-focused exhibitions are shown in the Renwick Gallery.
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is a museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, with more than 28,000 Western and Native American art works and artifacts. The facility also has the world's most extensive collection of American rodeo photographs, barbed wire, saddlery, and early rodeo trophies. Museum collections focus on preserving and interpreting the heritage of the American West. The museum becomes an art gallery during the annual Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition and Sale each June. The Prix de West Artists sell original works of art as a fund raiser for the museum. The expansion and renovation was designed by Curtis W. Fentress, FAIA, RIBA of Fentress Architects.
Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City. He is known for his naturalistic paintings of Black people that reference the work of Old Master paintings. In 2017, Wiley was commissioned to paint former President Barack Obama's portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The Columbus Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007 and describes his paintings as "heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture."
The Toledo Museum of Art is an internationally known art museum located in the Old West End neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio. It houses a collection of more than 30,000 objects. With 45 galleries, it covers 280,000 square feet and is currently in the midst of a massive multiyear expansion plan to its 40-acre campus. The museum was founded by Toledo glassmaker Edward Drummond Libbey in 1901, and moved to its current location, a Greek revival building designed by Edward B. Green and Harry W. Wachter, in 1912. The main building was expanded twice, in the 1920s and 1930s. Other buildings were added in the 1990s and 2006. The museum's main building consists of 4 1/2 acres of floor space on two levels. Features include fifteen classroom studios, a 1,750-seat Peristyle concert hall, a 176-seat lecture hall, a café and gift shop. The museum averages some 380,000 visitors per year and, in 2010, was voted America's favorite museum by the readers of the visual arts website Modern Art Notes.
Philbrook Museum of Art is an art museum with expansive formal gardens located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The museum, which opened in 1939, is located in a former 1920s villa, "Villa Philbrook", the home of Oklahoma oil pioneer Waite Phillips and his wife Genevieve. Showcasing nine collections of art from all over the world, and spanning various artistic media and styles, the cornerstone collection focuses on Native American art featuring basketry, pottery, paintings and jewelry.
The Phoenix Art Museum is the largest museum for visual art in the southwest United States. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, the museum is 285,000 square feet (26,500 m2). It displays international exhibitions alongside its comprehensive collection of more than 18,000 works of American, Asian, European, Latin American, Western American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. A community center since 1959, it hosts festivals, live performances, independent art films and educational programs year-round. It also features The Hub: The James K. Ballinger Interactive Gallery, an interactive space for children; photography exhibitions through the museum's partnership with the Center for Creative Photography; the landscaped Sculpture Garden; dining and shopping.
The Paseo Arts District, originally referred to as the Spanish Village, was built in 1929 as the first commercial shopping district north of Downtown Oklahoma City by Oklahoman G.A. Nichols.
The Washington Gallery of Modern Art was a short-lived gallery promoting contemporary art near Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, United States, during the 1960s. The gallery remained open for seven years, opening in October 1961 and closing in September 1968. Its collection of 153 works was purchased by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in 1968 for $110,000. The collection included 20th-century artists, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Grace Hartigan and Marcel Duchamp.
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is an art museum of post-World War II art in Fort Worth, Texas with a collection of international modern and contemporary art. Founded in 1892, The Modern is located in the city's cultural district in a building designed by architect Tadao Ando which opened to the public in 2002. The museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and holds a permanent collection with more than 3,000 works of art.
The Columbia Museum of Art is an art museum in the American city of Columbia, South Carolina.
Harvey Phillip Pratt is an American forensic artist and Native American artist, who has worked for over forty years in law enforcement, completing thousands of composite drawings and hundreds of soft tissue postmortem reconstructions. To this end, his work has assisted in thousands of arrests and hundreds of identification of unidentified human remains throughout America. His expertise in witness description drawing, skull reconstruction, skull tracing, age progression, soft tissue postmortem drawing and restoration of photographs and videos have aided law enforcement agencies both nationally and internationally. Pratt also assists investigations through training classes, besides lecturing before universities, colleges, schools and civic groups. In the early 2000s Pratt teamed up with David Paulides in researching Bigfoot on the Hoopa Reservation in California, as well as in his home state of Oklahoma.
The Racine Art Museum (RAM) and RAM's Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts are located in Racine, Wisconsin, U.S. The museum holds the largest and most significant contemporary craft collection in North America, with more than 9,500 objects from nationally and internationally recognized artists. The Racine Art Museum's mission is to exhibit, collect, preserve, and educate in the contemporary visual arts. Its goal is to elevate the stature of craft to fine arts by presenting contemporary crafts alongside paintings and sculptures.
Washington Project for the Arts, founded in 1975, is a non-profit organization dedicated to the support and aid of artists in the Washington, D.C. area.
The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art is an art museum on the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman, Oklahoma.
Dan Owen Dailey is an American artist and educator, known for his sculpture. With the support of a team of artists and crafts people, he creates sculptures and functional objects in glass and metal. He has taught at many glass programs and is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he founded the glass program.
Mary Jane Alexander is an American writer and photographer, playwright, poet, and lyricist who documents people and places of the American West, with an emphasis on centenarians and American Indian culture. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame in 2019. During the pandemic, her work expanded into site-specific public art installations focusing on text and soundscapes that “amplify and illuminate facets of our collective shadowed history.”
Les Berryhill is a Native American artist focusing on beadwork. He lives in Edmond, Oklahoma and is a member of the Yuchi and Muscogee tribes.
Oscar Brousse Jacobson was a Swedish-born American painter and museum curator. From 1915 to 1945, he was the director of the University of Oklahoma's School of Art, later known as the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. He curated exhibitions and wrote books about Native American art.