865-7672
The Palmer Museum of Art is a dramatic postmodern building--the last completed by the world-renowned architect Charles Moore--and is the most prominent visual arts facility on the Penn State University Park campus.
In 2003, the museum opened its largest gallery and a new print study room--both part of a $1.4-million renovation to the original museum building, constructed in 1972. Now, with eleven galleries, a 150-seat auditorium, Museum Store, and outdoor sculpture garden, the Palmer Museum is one of central Pennsylvania's principal cultural institutions and a unique educational resource for University students, faculty and staff, and the local and regional community.
The Palmer Museum presents an exciting schedule of exhibitions and events each year. Special temporary exhibitions offer works of art by world-renowned artists from all periods and from both public and private collections. In spring 2008, the Palmer Museum will be one of the few national venues for the exhibition Resonance from the Past: African Sculpture from the New Orleans Museum of Art, which features nearly 100 masks and figures, musical instruments, ceramics, and fabric and beadwork costumes considered to be the best objects from the New Orleans Museum of Art collection of African art. In Summer 2008, the museum will feature the exhibition Miniature Worlds: Art from India. Watercolors, drawings, and sculpture spanning 400 years of Indian history will be on view in Miniature Worlds: Art from India. Drawn from the extensive permanent collection of The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts, the exhibition illuminates various forms of Indic media from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries as well as aspects of its religion and history. New York Cool: Paintings and Sculptures from the NYU Art Collection will be the featured exhibition in fall 2008. The 1950s and early 1960s were years of tremendous creative ferment in the New York art world. This exhibition will examine the transitional phase of the New York School–between Abstract Expressionism of the late 1940s and Pop and Minimalism of the mid-1960s. New York Cool is organized by the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. For more exhibitions visit the museum’s Web site.
Admission to the museum is free, as is admission to most of the museum's programs and special events, including films, gallery talks, performances, workshops, and lectures by national and international artists and scholars. A full schedule of events is updated regularly on the museum's Web site.
The Palmer Museum's permanent collection is displayed in seven galleries and is nearly comprehensive in terms of world cultures and time periods. The first-floor galleries feature a collection of ancient coins and gold weights, a fourth-century mosaic from northern Africa, stunning examples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Old Master painting, and hand-carved Japanese jades, among many other European, Asian, South American, and African works of art from antiquity through the twentieth century. The museum's second-floor galleries feature American paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the eighteenth century to the present. Exceptional examples include a large, highly detailed, nineteenth-century still life by the Bucks County painter Severin Roesen; exquisite nineteenth-century landscapes by George Inness, John Kensett, and William Trost Richards; and an impressive range of twentieth-century paintings and sculptures by artists, including Marsden Hartley, Richard Diebenkorn, Red Grooms, and Marisol. The collection continues to grow in these areas, primarily through the generosity of the museum's donors and supporters.
The Palmer Museum of Art is open to all students and the general public free of charge Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 4:00 p.m. Schedules of exhibitions, programs, and events are available in the museum lobby and online at the museum Web site: www.palmermuseum.psu.edu. Call 814-865-7672 for more information.