Museum Facts
“The single most impressive venue in the state for contemporary art is the art museum at Arizona State University, which also boasts a new research center for ceramics.”
- Raphael Rubenstein, Art in America
The ASU Art Museum is a cultural destination for 60,000 visitors and more than 300,000 Web visitors each year. The museum attracts artists, collectors, art enthusiasts, tourists, children, students and international visitors with its broad range of contemporary art exhibitions, programs, and varied and lively strategies for communicating with its audience. Its educational programs engage adults, university students and the children of the Valley.
The ASU Art Museum was founded in 1950 with a major gift of historic American and Latin American modernist works. The museum is housed in two buildings: the Nelson Fine Arts Center (56,000 square feet), designed by Antoine Predock, opened in 1989, and the Ceramics Research Center (7,400 square feet), opened in 2002.
Programs
Global Arizona places Arizona in the international art dialogue and brings international artists and issues to the museum. Ongoing exhibition programs present the work of artists from the region, bring artists from around the world to ASU and create opportunities for dialogue between artists and audiences. Artists often have their first U.S. exhibitions in this museum.
Social Studies turns a gallery into an art-making laboratory in which an artist in residence makes work in collaboration with artists, students, children and other museum visitors curious about how art is made. The program reveals the creative process and, through extensive interaction between the artist and the community, expands the impact of the museum beyond its own walls.
Moving Targets presents major exhibitions of new media and works by renowned as well as emerging artists. The museum offers an annual outdoor Short Film and Video Festival that attracts more than 1,000 people on its plaza. The museum Web site expands the content of the exhibitions and offers a place for audience response. Artist, visitor and staff created videos of exhibitions and events are posted on YouTube.
InterLab scholars and others from the community propose transdisciplinary projects that interpret works of art in the collection from a variety of perspectives. The program brings new vision to art objects and crosses boundaries to make art accessible to audiences from across the university and community.
Education and Community Engagement
As part of one of the largest public universities in the United States, education is central to the museum mission. The museum provides scholarly excellence in accessible and varied formats ranging from in-depth catalogues to children’s guides; video documentation of residencies to digital shorts of museum events posted on YouTube; lectures by artists and professors to Friday Conversations in the galleries. They offer opportunities to engage artists, curators, students, university faculty and others both formally and informally.
Student and volunteer docents offer tours of exhibitions for all ages. School tours include hands-on art activities related to the work on exhibit.
Community engagement through partnerships with community groups reach new audiences and present art in non-traditional, accessible, and surprising ways: the museum partners on campus and in the city, including partnerships with the College of Design, College of Law, the Arts, Media and Engineering Program, Department of Dance, local arts organizations, and political and business leaders.
Collections
The museum collection comprises 12,500 works, including 5,100 prints, 3,000 ceramic works, and 1,100 Latin American works, which includes the largest and most significant collection of contemporary art from Cuba outside the country itself.
The collection, like many museum programs and initiatives, is international in scope. It is unified by the theme of art and society and is presented in context of interpretative materials and with options for audience response. The museum invites campus and community members to curate from the collection, and professors and educators actively utilize the collection in their course curricula. Guided by the curatorial staff, student curatorial interns research and curate exhibitions from collections, such as the annual summer family exhibition.
Areas of collection focus:
Contemporary art in all media with a focus in Latin American works, emerging artists, art incorporating new media and contemporary craft.
Art of the Americas American and Latin American, historic and contemporary art presented together in our permanent collection gallery, grouped by themes such as Faces, Work and Space/Place. Spotlights present in-depth research by curatorial staff and graduate students on a single object, for example the challenge of authenticating a painting by Audubon and the interpretation of the figure in a Diego Rivera easel painting.
Prints Shown in thematic exhibitions, prints are accessible in the Print Study Room for close study. The works document graphic production from the 14th century to the present, with strong emphasis on art and society themes.
Ceramics Presented in the Ceramics Research Center, the ceramics collection is among the best in the United States and presents the range of styles and approaches explored with the medium.
Artists from the region The work of select artists from the region are collected and shown regularly in collection and loan exhibitions.
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