The University’s art collection began with a founding gift of approximately one hundred paintings that alumnus C. Leonard Pfeiffer donated during World War II. This gift featured Social Realist and Regionalist works by artists such as Isabel Bishop, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Stuart Davis, Leon Polk Smith, and Katherine Schmidt.
The American collection has grown over the years to also include nineteenth-century landscapes by Martin Johnson Heade and George Inness; portraits by Gilbert Stuart, William Sidney Mount, and John Mix Stanley; Surrealist paintings by Gertrude Abercrombie, Dorothea Tanning, and Kay Sage and significant works by N.C. Wyeth, Arthur Dove, Frederic Remington, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Tobey, and Elizabeth Catlett. The UAMA also stewards 300 paintings, prints, and sculptures from the Works Progress Administration-Federal Art Project Collection (WPA-FAP).
