Weisman Art Museum. The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum is an art museum located at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The museum was founded in 1934 and is named in honor of art collector Frederick R. Weisman. Originally based in Northrop Auditorium, it moved into its current building in 1993.
Widely known as a modern art museum, the 25,000+ image collection has large collections of Marsden Hartley, Alfred Maurer, Charles Biederman, Native American Mimbres pottery, and traditional Korean furniture. Frederick R. Weisman was a Minneapolis native who became well known as an art collector in Los Angeles.
In 1982 Weisman purchased an estate in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles that would serve as a showcase for his personal collection of 20th-century art. When he opened the art collection to the public, 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.
The estate remains the home of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation to this day. The Weisman Foundation estate is a two-story Mediterranean Revival house designed in the late 1920s by Los Angeles architect Gordon B. Kaufmann. The Weisman home exhibits the fine craftsmanship characteristic of the period, including custom decorative treatments on the walls and ceilings. Today the Foundation estate, annex, and surrounding gardens are made accessi