Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art - Overview

Overview

The University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art is one of the finest university art museums in the United States. Strengths of the nearly 16,000-object permanent collection (including the approx. 3,300-object Adkins Collection and the more than 4,000-object James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection) are French Impressionism, 20th century American painting and sculpture, traditional and contemporary Native American art, art of the Southwest, ceramics, photography, contemporary art, Asian art and graphics from the 16th century to the present.

The museum has become well known in art circles for its fine art collections, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photographs.

The main collections are:

• The Weitzenhoffer Collection, a collection of paintings by various Impressionists, including Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Vincent van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Valued at over $50 million, it is considered the most important collection of Impressionist art ever donated to a university.
• The Fleischaker Collection, a large collection of more than 350 pieces of Native American and southwestern paintings, sculpture and ceramics, including some of the most famous works by Russian Taos painters Leon Gaspard and Nicolai Fechin.
• The McGhee Collection, which features dozens of Eastern Orthodox icons dating back to the 15th century.
• The Thams Collection, containing 32 paintings by members of the Taos Society of Artists. Together with the Taos paintings in the Fleischaker Collection, this gift give OU one of the world's leading collections of Taos art.
• The State Department Collection was purchased by the museum in 1948 from the controversial Advancing American Art collection. Hailed as a "cultural Marshall Plan," this traveling exhibit was created by the Department's Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs to demonstrate to the world America's cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism in the mid 20th century. Critics accused the exhibition of portraying an unflattering image of American life and found leftist sentiment in many of the paintings. The exhibition was dismantled by congress in 1947, after only two years, and sold to various institutions. Highlights of the collection include works by Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper.
• The Eugene B. Adkins Collection - The Adkins Foundation Board announced in 2007 that the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa had been jointly selected to receive the Eugene B. Adkins Collection. The joint partnership by OU and the Philbrook was among many proposals submitted by leading museums across the country. The Adkins Collection, which is valued at approximately $50 million, features approximately 3,300 objects, including more that 400 paintings by American artists. The collection also includes impressive examples of Native American paintings, pottery and jewelry.
• The James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection, a multimillion-dollar collection of more than 4,000 works representing indigenous cultures across North America, especially the Pueblos of the Southwest, the Navajo, the Hopi, many of the tribes of the Northern and Southern Plains and the Southeastern tribes. Bialac gave his private collection to the University of Oklahoma in 2010. Included in the collection are approximately 2,600 paintings and works on paper, over 1,000 kachinas and approximately 400 works of varying media, including ceramics and jewelry, representing many major Native artist such as Fred Kabotie, Awa Tsireh, Fritz Scholder, Joe Herrera, Allan Houser, Jerome Tiger, Tonita Pena, Helen Hardin, Pablita Velarde, George Morrison, Richard “Dick” West, Patrick DesJarlait and Pop Chalee.

Special exhibitions are held every few months to showcase works in the museum's permanent collection, traveling exhibitions and more.