University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art

The Stanley Museum of Art welcomes the University of Iowa community, all Iowans, and the world to discover and enjoy extraordinary works of art, explore new ideas, and cultivate new insights into history, culture, and the act of creation. We build diverse communities around our collections by fostering creative connections across the university, the state, and the world. Through the wise stewardship and dynamic presentation of the collections in our care, the Stanley encourages transformative encounters with works of art and contemplation of the human story.

The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, established in 1969, is one of the leading university art collections in the country. Approximately 15,500 objects constitute diverse collections that include paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, ceramics, textiles, jade, and silver. The Elliott Collection of post-Impressionist European art includes paintings by Braque, de Chirico, Kandinsky, Léger, Marc, Matisse, Picasso, and Vlaminck, among others. The Stanley Collection of African Art is part of one of the most significant collections of African art in the country which today numbers over 2,000 objects. Other significant areas of the collections include nearly 6,000 prints spanning the history of Western printmaking, several hundred ceramics (primarily American studio ceramics), almost 2,000 Pre-Columbian objects, a significant ancient Chinese collection, as well as small but superb groups of ancient Etruscan and Roman art, and Native American ledger drawings. The museum has a large and important collection of twentieth-century American paintings and sculpture, including two of the most well-known works in the field of painting (both given to the museum by the School of Art & Art History [SAAH]): Max Beckmann’s triptych, Karneval, purchased by the faculty in 1946 when he arrived in the US, and Jackson Pollock’s Mural, painted in 1943 for Peggy Guggenheim which she offered to give to the SAAH in 1948 and which finally arrived in the collection in 1951.