University of Arizona Museum of Art, Art museum at University of Arizona, Tucson, United States
The University of Arizona Museum of Art is a gallery with over 6,000 works showing European and American artists from different periods and styles. The collection includes paintings, sculptures, and other art forms spanning from the Renaissance to the present day.
A university gallery existed in the 1930s, when the Works Projects Administration donated 200 lithographs and prints that formed the core of the collection. In 1944 alumnus C. Leonard Pfeiffer gave nearly 100 American paintings, and in the early 1950s the Samuel H. Kress Foundation added 50 European paintings, first shown publicly at President Richard A. Harvill's inauguration in 1951. Director Peter Bermingham led the museum from 1978 to 1998, more than doubling its holdings.
The Robert Priseman Collection holds 71 damaged religious icons bought on eBay in 2011–2012 and over-painted with celebrities who died young, among them Frida Kahlo, Amy Winehouse and Marilyn Monroe. Priseman's series, shown in Colchester in 2013, sets sainthood against modern fame.
The museum offers guided tours, educational programs, and workshops open to both students and general visitors. An on-site shop sells art-related materials and makes it easy to take home a souvenir from your visit.
On the day after Thanksgiving in 1985, a woman distracted a guard on the staircase while a man cut Willem de Kooning's Woman-Ochre from its frame and carried it out under his coat. The theft was noticed at once, but the painting stayed missing until 2017, when antique dealers in Silver City, New Mexico, found it in the house of a woman who had died. It returned to Tucson shortly afterwards, and the museum is raising funds for its restoration.
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