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The Art Museum of WVU
Admission is always free.

The 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:


Regional Highlights

The Art Museum is proud to collect the work of West Virginia artists who have achieved international renown, notably James Edward Davis and Blanche Lazzell, from Maidsville and Clarksburg respectively; the museum has the largest public collection of Lazzell’s work in the world. The visions of these artists resonate in the museum with those of self-taught Appalachian artists who consistently and quietly expressed the rhythms of life in the region.

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International Highlights

Works of art from nearly every continent can be found in the museum’s collection, with the arts of Africa particularly well represented by ritual objects, textiles, and jewelry as well as a landmark collection of Shona sculptures gifted to the Art Museum in 2009 by John and Ruth McGee, examples of a tradition which originated in Zimbabwe in the 1960s.

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Painting Highlights

The paintings in the Art Museum’s collection encompass every genre of the medium — landscapes, portraits, history, still lives, abstraction — and represent major artistic movements in the United States and abroad from the nineteenth century to today. The painting collection can take you to the American landscapes of Albert Bierstadt, the sophisticated abstractions of Romare Bearden. It can also take you to the dynamic experiments of Jean Metzinger and the intricate compositions of Maude Kerns wh

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While the Art Museum’s collection includes works in all media, it is particularly strong in prints and other works on paper. The print collection is the museum’s largest with more than 1,400 works spanning from Rembrandt in the seventeenth century to Mary Cassatt in the nineteenth century and from Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Bourgeois, and William Kentridge in the twentieth century to Shepard Fairey, Mickalene Thomas, and Martin Puryear in the twenty-first century.

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Sculpture and Ceramic Highlights

Three-dimensional arts are also well represented in the museum’s collection. Works by artists including Leonard Baskin, Buckminster Fuller, Henry Moore and, more recently, Jacob Hashimoto and Buzz Spector demonstrate how three-dimensional forms have evolved over time. The sculpture collection is complemented by the Harry Shaw Collection, which features more than 160 examples of contemporary ceramics.

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Recent Acquisition Highlights

The Art Museum is always adding to its collection through an active purchasing program and donations of art and funds for acquisitions. The museum is committed to diversifying its collection, and many recent acquisitions reflect this commitment.

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