Founded in 1917, the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) is recognized today as one of the five best college and university art museums in the United States. Since its beginning, the museum has always been free for everyone.
Admission to the AMAM is always free and open to the public.
The AMAM has an outstanding collection of nearly 14,000 works of art – including paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings and photographs – that provide a comprehensive overview of the history of art from a variety of cultures. The collection is particularly strong in European and American paintings and sculpture from the 15th century to today, and has important holdings of Asian paintings, scrolls, sculpture and decorative art, including a large group of ukiyo-e prints. The museum also houses the Eva Hesse archives, which includes the artist’s notebooks, diaries, photographs and letters, and is proud to oversee, along with the Art Department, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Weltzheimer/Johnson House.
The collection is housed in an impressive Italian Renaissance-style building designed by Cass Gilbert and named after Dr. Dudley Peter Allen, a distinguished 1875 graduate of Oberlin College.
In 1977, a gallery for Modern and Contemporary art was added to the Cass Gilbert building. Designed by the architectural firm of Robert Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown, the gallery was funded by Ruth Coates Roush (OC 1934) and dedicated to professor of art Ellen Johnson (OC 1933).
