Weisman Art Museum

The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum is a university art museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The museum was founded in 1934 as University Gallery and was originally housed on the upper floor of the university's Northrop Auditorium. The museum relocated to its current location in 1993, which was designed by Canadian-born American architect Frank Gehry and renamed in honor of art collector and philanthropist Frederick R. Weisman. The 20,000-plus acquisitions include large collections of Marsden Hartley, Alfred Maurer, Charles Biederman, Native American Mimbres  pottery, and traditional Korean furniture.

Weisman, Frederick R.

Frederick R. Weisman (April 27, 1912 – September 11, 1994) was a Minneapolis native who rose to prominence as a Los Angeles art collector. Weisman purchased an estate in Los Angeles' Holmby Hills neighborhood in 1982 to house his personal collection of 20th-century art. He wanted to share the experience of living with art rather than the usual, more formal protocol of seeing art in a gallery or museum when he opened the art collection to the public. To this day, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation is housed on the estate.

The Weisman Foundation estate is a two-story Mediterranean Revival house designed by Los Angeles architect Gordon B. Kaufmann in the late 1920s.

Construction of a museum

The current museum building was designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry and completed in November 1993 with MSR Design as the architect of record. It is one of the University of Minnesota's major landmarks, located on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River at the east end of the Washington Avenue Bridge. The abstract structure is significant because it was built before computer-aided design was widely used in architecture.

Depending on which side of the building you look at, it has two faces. It has a brick facade that blends in with the historic buildings along Northrop Mall to the south and east. To the north and west, it is a curving abstraction of a fish and waterfall.