Riverside Art Museum, Art museum in Riverside, California

The Riverside Art Museum occupies a 1929 building at Mission Inn Avenue and Lime Street, designed by Julia Morgan for the Riverside YWCA. Morgan used reinforced concrete, wooden frames, glass doors and a terra-cotta tiled roof in a tri-block layout combining Mediterranean and Classical Revival elements. The first floor held a swimming pool, an open-air atrium and a gymnasium; bedrooms, offices and a meeting room with a small stage were upstairs, and a badminton court sat on the roof.

The building was designed by Julia Morgan, a pioneering California architect, and was later added to the National Register of Historic Places. This structure documents the development of architecture and museum culture in Southern California.

The museum mounts about 20 exhibitions a year, often of art addressing social issues, and its permanent collection holds roughly 1,500 pieces, among them works by Karl Benjamin, Rex Brandt, Millard Sheets and Marc Chagall. Student and community work is shown alongside touring and member exhibitions, and classes, workshops, tours and birthday parties run for all ages.

The museum stands at the corner of Mission Inn Avenue and Lime Street, next to the Mission Inn in the historic Mission Inn District. The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture is a separate building at 3581 Mission Inn Avenue. A climate-control system and a glass roof over the garden atrium were added in the 1992 renovation.

The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture opened in June 2022 at 3581 Mission Inn Avenue, a public-private partnership between the museum, the City of Riverside and comedian Cheech Marin. It houses Marin's private collection of Chicano art.