Eskenazi Museum of Art, University art museum at Indiana University Bloomington, US.
The Eskenazi Museum of Art is a university art museum at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, holding around 45,000 works across several gallery spaces. The building is made of concrete with triangular skylights designed by architect I.M. Pei, and its angular shape directly affects how natural light reaches each room.
The museum opened in 1941 under the name Indiana University Museum of Art and took its current name in 2016 after a major gift from Sidney and Lois Eskenazi. That donation allowed the museum to grow its programs and reach well beyond what had been possible before.
The collection brings together works from Africa, Asia, the ancient Mediterranean, and the Americas, all visible in one building. Visitors can stand in front of objects made centuries apart and from very different parts of the world within a single afternoon.
The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday and is fully accessible for wheelchair users, with no barriers between gallery areas. The layout is straightforward, so it is easy to move from one section to another and find seating areas along the way.
I.M. Pei designed this building before he completed the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris, making it an earlier example of his approach to bringing natural light into museum spaces. The triangular skylights cause daylight to shift across the gallery walls at different times of day, giving each visit a slightly different look.
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