Gilcrease Museum, Art and history museum in Tulsa, United States

The Gilcrease Museum is an art and history museum in Tulsa housing over 350,000 objects collected over many decades. The collection includes American paintings and sculptures alongside archaeological items, manuscripts, maps, and works by Indigenous artists spanning both continents.

Thomas Gilcrease, a Muscogee Creek citizen enriched by oil on his 160-acre allotment in the Glenn Pool field, bought his first oil painting, Daniel Ridgway Knight's Rural Courtship, in 1912. He opened a museum at his San Antonio oil company headquarters in 1943, then a public gallery on his Tulsa estate in 1949. In 1954 Tulsa voters approved a bond issue by three to one to clear his debts and keep the collection in the city; he deeded it to Tulsa in 1955, and the foundation transferred the buildings and grounds in 1958.

Thomas Gilcrease was a patron of Native American artists of his time and bought more than 500 paintings by 20th-century Native American artists alone. The museum's anthropology collections hold 300,000 artifacts, from pre-Columbian projectile points to ethnographic materials spanning European exploration to the present day.

The museum is just a few minutes from downtown Tulsa and easy to reach by car. School groups get in free, and members can purchase reduced-price guest passes for visitors.

Within the museum building is the Helmerich Center, holding over 100,000 rare documents, maps, and books available for research purposes. This archive makes the location a destination for serious students of American history and culture.