Phoenix Art Museum - History

History

Opened in 1959, the Phoenix Art Museum is located on the historic Central Avenue Corridor. It is now the largest visual arts institution in the Southwest with over 285,000 square feet (26,500 m2) of exhibition space.

Shortly after Arizona became the 48th state in 1912, the Phoenix Women’s Club was formed and worked with the Arizona State Fair Committee to develop a fine arts program. In 1915, the club purchased Carl Oscar Borg’s painting Egyptian Evening for US$125 and presented it to the city of Phoenix to begin a community art collection. In 1925, the State Fair Committee expanded its community responsibilities and formed the Phoenix Fine Arts Association. The next major advance in the local art community came during 1936, when the Phoenix Art Center was created under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. Its director was the renowned painter Philip C. Curtis.

As the city of Phoenix grew, it became apparent that better cultural facilities were required if it was to sustain its growth. The heirs of A.C. Bartlett, (most prominently Mrs. Dwight B. Heard, who with her husband founded the Heard Museum), donated land to house such facilities. This area became the core of the city’s civic center.

In the early 1950s, Alden Dow, an architect, was retained by the Board of Trustees to design a complex that would house the Phoenix Public Library, the Phoenix Little Theater (now the Phoenix Theatre) and the new Phoenix Art Museum. To coordinate this endeavor, the Phoenix Fine Arts Association named the Museum’s first Board of Trustees in 1952 and its first director in 1957.

The museum was officially dedicated on November 21, 1959. Two years later, the board announced plans for an expansion, and in 1965 the museum was enlarged from 25,000 square feet (2,300 m2) to 72,000 square feet (6,700 m2). Additional expansions, led by design architects Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects of New York, occurred in 1996. The Museum more than doubled its size with new exhibition galleries, a 300-seat public theater, a research library, studio classroom facilities, the PhxArtKids Gallery, and a café. Most recently, in 2006, the museum saw the opening of the Ellen and Howard C. Katz Wing for Modern Art, the Heather and Michael Greenbaum Museum Lobby, an expanded museum store and the 40,000-square-foot (3,700 m2) Bennett and Jacquie Dorrance Sculpture Garden. The museum’s growth has been funded, in part, by successful City of Phoenix Bond Elections and a voter-approved bond. A Board of Trustees also actively secures funding.

In the last 50 years, the Museum has hosted more than 400 exhibitions from all over the world, grown the collection to more than 18,000 works of art, and been visited by millions, including over one million school children.