Company Profile
Wichita Art Museum
Company Overview
The Wichita Art Museum is home to over 10,000 works and has one of the finest collections of American art in the country. The core of the Museum's holdings, the Roland P. Murdock Collection, contains important objects spanning three centuries of American painting, sculpture and works on paper. The Museum boasts works by Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, and Winslow Homer among other prominent artists. To accomplish our mission, Museum staff present regularly changing exhibitions, both of the permanent collection and borrowed collections; educational programs designed to enhance our visitors' appreciation of the meaning and beauty of art; and special events are designed to pull new audiences into the Museum.
Company History
The Wichita Art Museum was established in 1915, when Louise Murdock's will created a trust for the acquisition of works by "American painters, potters, sculptors, and textile weavers." Her foresight made the Wichita Art Museum one of the earliest in the country to concentrate on the art of America. Now the largest art museum in Kansas, the Wichita Art Museum is a major cultural center serving the state's largest city, the surrounding rural region, and the Great Plains.
In 1925, energized civic leaders met the requirements of the Murdock will, which stated that the city must provide a building to house a prospective public art collection. They purchased 7.65 acres of land for the museum in Riverside near the bend of the Arkansas River as the site for a public art museum. Despite the burdens of the Depression, city leaders engaged New York architect Clarence Stein to design the museum building, a portion of which was completed and opened in 1935.
The Murdock will charged Elizabeth Stubblefield Navas, a friend and former assistant to Mrs. Murdock, with the task of assembling an American art collection for the people of Wichita. From 1938 to 1962, Mrs. Navas purchased 167 outstanding American paintings and sculpture. Artists represented included Dove, Marin, Ryder, Cassatt, Eakins, Henri, Hopper, Sheeler, Prendergast, Homer, Harnett, De Creeft, Lachaise, and Zorach. This strong collection eventually attracted additional gifts to the museum, particularly the L.S. and Ida L. Naftzger Collection of prints and drawings (1943-1951), the Naftzger Collection of C.M. Russell's Art, and the John W. and Mildred L. Graves Collection of American Impressionism.