Collection

The heart of any museum is its collection—the works of art it holds in trust for the public. Here at the Art Museum of West Virginia University, our collection beats with more than 4,000 paintings, prints, drawings, photography, sculpture, and ceramics.

With a focus on art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the museum’s collection also has the depth to contextualize the art of the recent past and the present, allowing you to “see” the conversations in art that have taken place across continents and centuries. Ritual objects from Africa and Asia are put into dialogue with twentieth-century sculpture. Works of art on paper—prints, watercolors, drawings, and photographs—tell stories from Rembrandt’s time to Rauschenberg’s. Contemporary art is illuminated by nineteenth-century American landscape painting. And though the history of art is a global history, it has also been written here in West Virginia, as you can see in the museum’s collection of artists from the region, such as James Edward Davis and Blanche Lazzell.

Serving the entire state from WVU’s flagship campus in Morgantown, the Art Museum is committed not only to bringing the world’s great artistic traditions to you but also showcasing the talents and practices of artists who have called West Virginia home.

The Art Museum is a lending institution and collection study center that also licenses reproductions of works in its collection. For more information on loans and image rights and reproductions, please contact registrar Karen Louvar at Karen.Louvar@mail.wvu.edu. You may find more information about research and classroom visits on our Visit page. 

The Art Museum is prohibited by codes of professional conduct and the Tax Reform Act of 1984 from appraising or authenticating works of art. If you would like to have a work appraised, we suggest you contact one of the following organizations:

• American Society of Appraisers
• Appraisers Association of America
• International Society of Appraisers