Company Profile

Company Overview

Sheldon Museum of Art is a nexus catalyzing the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the Lincoln community, and communities across the state of Nebraska. Its landmark high modernist building, which opened on the University of Nebraska–Lincoln campus in 1963, annually welcomes more than 50,000 visitors.

Sheldon centers a core of institutional empathy and is committed to being visitor-centered, civic-minded, inclusive, responsive, and participatory. Structural equity, inclusion, and belonging drive the museum’s approach to institutional excellence. The museum advances its mission to inspire inquiry and discovery through thoughtful exhibitions, a renowned collection, and dynamic learning initiatives that take place on-site, online, and throughout the community. Sheldon’s exhibitions amplify and complement the museum’s prominent holdings of 19th-century landscape and still life, American impressionism, early modernism, geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism, pop, minimalism, and contemporary art. Additionally, more than thirty sculptures from Sheldon’s collection are displayed year-round across the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s City and East Campuses. The museum is free to the public, and recently expanded its hours to increase accessibility,

Sheldon Museum of Art’s holdings of more than 13,000 objects derive from two collections: the Sheldon Art Association, founded by community members in 1888 with the mission of providing support for the visual arts at the university, and the University of Nebraska, which began collecting art in 1929. Recent purchases include significant works by Richard Avedon, Robert Colescott, Rackstraw Downes, Leonardo Drew, Ron Gorchov, Carmen Herrera, Elizabeth Murray, Odili Donald Odita, Joyce Pensato, Peter Saul, Kiki Smith, Pat Steir, Stanley Whitney, and Sue Williams.