Weisman Art Museum

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November 28, 2023 Closed today

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Weisman Art Museum

About the Collection

Detail of the architectural nooks and crannies of the Weisman's Frank Gehry-designed building

WAM’s collection contains approximately 30,000 works of art in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, ceramics, and video. Key collection areas are listed below.

American Art

WAM’s permanent collection features a prominent holding (approximately 20,000 works) of art of the United States, including an internationally significant collection from the first half of the twentieth century, featuring the world’s largest holdings of works by Marsden Hartley, Alfred H. Maurer, and B.J.O. Nordfeldt.  

Ceramics

WAM holds a particularly rich collection of ceramics featuring approximately 2,000 objects from a range of eras, geographic locations, cultures, and styles, including a significant collection of Upper Midwest studio pottery.

Korean Furniture and Decorative Objects

The variety and breadth of the museum’s collection of traditional Korean furniture is unmatched in the United States, and is perhaps unrivaled outside Asia. The collection includes about 200 examples of Choson dynasty (1392–1910) furniture, 80 Silla dynasty (668–935 B.C.) stoneware pieces, some 150 folk paintings, wooden bowls and utensils, and other folk arts and crafts. The majority of the collection came to Weisman Art Museum as a bequest from Dr. Edward Reynolds Wright Jr. in 1988.  From that time, the Weisman has built on the collection, including work by modern and contemporary Korean artists.

Art on Paper

Works on paper, including drawings, watercolors, prints, and photographs, constitute approximately two-thirds of WAM’s collection. The Edith Carlson Gallery was designed specifically to better and more safely display these light-sensitive works.

Explore the WAM eMuseum →

WAM’s permanent collection is now available through eMuseum. Search the collection’s database, and take a deep dive into the vast holdings of artworks housed at WAM—most of which aren’t on view in the galleries at any given time. We also encourage you to take advantage of the Digital Content Library (DCL) Elevator, which contains a great deal of information about works in WAM’s collection as well.