Your Collection: Celebrating 50 Years Exhibition

About the event

Your Collection: Celebrating 50 Years commemorates the museum’s first five decades as seen through the permanent collection. Simple in premise, the museum’s repository of artworks and materials of visual culture are cared for and made accessible for our community’s benefit. This is your collection to enjoy, to study, and to learn from. Without exception, every donation, transfer, and purchase over the museum’s first fifty years was made with the public in mind. The exhibition traces how this significant cultural resource was formed, how it has developed over the decades, and points to nascent but important collecting directions.

From its founding collections of nineteenth and twentieth century American and European paintings, the museum’s holdings have grown to 4,000+ art objects. The collection now spans a wide variety of approaches to form and content, created by a diverse group of regional, national, and international artists who have helped propel visual culture from the eighteenth century to the present, with a particular focus on artworks created since 1890 the year the college that would ultimately become Washington State University was established.

The museum is grateful to the generosity of our many friends for enhancing the depth of our permanent collection. Our donors come to us from diverse backgrounds and varied relationships, but always motivated by the desire to share their treasures within an educational framework. As the American artist Jim Dine said on the announcement of his unprecedented gift of 201 original prints, “It’s about education, it’s about enriching the culture of the state and it’s about exposing young people to what’s called art.”