The Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University
Nationally recognized, the Brauer Museum of Art houses an important collection of American art from 1850 to the present and includes significant paintings, prints and drawings, photography, sculpture, as well as decorative arts. The museum was founded in 1953, with an extraordinary bequest of American paintings from the Trust of Percy H. Sloan which comprised over 400 paintings and a generous endowment. The museum is presently housed in a state of the arts Center for the Arts complex built in 1995, along with the departments of Theatre, Music and Art. The museum was renamed in the fall of 1996 to honor the much beloved retired museum Director and professor emeritus, Richard H.W. Brauer who was responsible for nurturing and building the collection for 38 years.
With over 2200 works in the collection, the museum holds outstanding paintings by such distinguished artists as Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, John Kensett, Alfred Thompson Bricher, Karl Anderson, Alexander Harrison, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, John Sloan, William Glackens, Walt Kuhn, Robert Bechtle and Ed Paschke, as well as significant paintings by such distinguished female artists as: Georgia O’Keeffe, Elizabeth Nourse, Elaine DeKooning and Jeanette Pasin Sloan. The collection was featured in the November 1998 issue of The Magazine Antiques in an article written by Franklin Kelly, curator of the National Gallery of Art.
The museum also maintains the collection of record of Junius R. Sloan, a nineteenth-century landscape painter from Illinois who is one of the first artists to paint the prairie. This collection is presently featured as an online interactive exhibition on our web site, and was funded in part by the Indiana Humanities Council. The museum has been building an important collection of contemporary paintings and media, as well as more traditional works of art on paper (prints, drawings and photographs). The international art in the collection focuses on religious works of art.
The museum has had a long tradition of hosting innovative exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. In the fall of 1997, with the generous sponsorship of local corporations, the Brauer Museum was able to sponsor a successful blockbuster exhibition of old master paintings from the National Museum of Art of Romania. To complement these changing exhibitions, the museum sponsors a series of lectures, panel discussions, gallery talks and colloquia. A number of faculty members in various disciplines are involved in these programs. Several faculty members are active in the museum's Faculty Outreach Committee and frequently participate in the planning of exhibitions, catalogs and scholarly writings related to temporary exhibitions.
The museum provides opportunities for students to have hands-on training in the museum field and graphic design, via internships and practica, paid museum work through work study, as well as courses in museum studies. It also provides a social outlet for students in the form of the student docent program. The museum also collaborates with other VU departments as well as other local arts and cultural institutions for cross-disciplinary teaching and programming. As such the museum serves the university as a visual library for teaching, research, educational and co-curricular programming, especially the Freshman Core. The museum has also developed a number of outreach programs including a series off online virtual exhibitions, exhibitions of contemporary artists in two satellite galleries, docent-guided tours (for university classes and the public), a university-wide juried student art competition, a student docent run coffee hour; "Arts-a-Budding" (a showcase for elementary students), and the very popular, "Secondary School Showcase" (an annual juried competition for high school students).
The Brauer Museum is fortunate to have the generous ongoing support of the FRIENDS of Art, a very lively support group, for programming and the purchase of works of art for the collection. The FRIENDS members are sent an excellent Newsletter with up-to-date information on the arts in Northwest Indiana and they are also invited to attend exciting "art treks" to museums collections both here and abroad. The FRIENDS are presently hosting a series on collecting affordable art; please call 219-464-5155. We are grateful to the FRIENDS for our Museum Store with original works of art and unusual gift items. The store is open during museum hours.
Rita E. McCarthy, Director
January, 2000
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