Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Douglas County, United States | Art Museum

The Spencer Museum of Art explores the capacity of art to spark curiosity, inspire creativity, and create connections among people. Spencer Museum of Art, located on the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence, Kansas in the United States, houses an internationally-known collection that is deep and diverse, currently numbering nearly 36,000 artworks and artifacts in all media. The collection spans the history of European and American art from ancient to contemporary, and includes broad and significant holdings of East Asian art. Areas of special strength include medieval art, European and American paintings, sculpture and prints; photography, Japanese Edo-period painting and prints; 20th-century Chinese painting; and KU?s ethnographic collection, which includes about 10,000 Native American, African, Latin American and Australian works.
Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas, strengthens, supports, and contributes to the academic research and teaching of The University of Kansas and is committed to serving communities of learners across Kansas and beyond.
In 1917 Sallie Casey Thayer, a Kansas City art collector, offered her collection of nearly 7,500 art objects to the University of Kansas to form a museum "to encourage the study of fine arts in the Middle West." Her eclectic collection included paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, furniture, rugs, textiles, metalwork, ceramics, glass, and other examples of decorative arts, primarily from Europe and Asia. Eventually the University of Kansas Museum of Art was established in 1928, based on this collection. Over the years the collection has grown substantially thanks to the generosity of many benefactors and the expertise of many curators.