The Fort Wayne Museum of Art

Art classes 1888 — museum from 1921

Lineage: The museum begins as teaching. In 1888 J. Ottis Adams began informal classes in drawing and painting in Fort Wayne, carried on afterward by William Forsyth; by 1897 the classes were formally organized as the Fort Wayne Art School. The museum function arrived in 1921, when Theodore Thieme — the Wayne Knitting Mills hosiery manufacturer whose fortune is in the Wealth record — donated ten paintings and his residence at 1026 West Berry Street to establish a museum alongside the school. (The museum's own blog dates Thieme's gift of home, paintings, and funds to 1922; its history page dates the gift to 1921. The gift itself is not in dispute.) In 1949 the B. Paul Mossman home at 1202 West Wayne Street was donated, and for the first time the museum had an entire facility devoted to exhibitions and collections. That house's later life as the Castle Gallery is in the Architecture record.

The modern museum: In 1977 the museum separated from the art school, which became a department of what is now Purdue University Fort Wayne. In 1984 the museum moved into its own building at Lafayette and Main streets — 40,000 square feet designed by Walter Netsch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the city's first professional museum facility. It was accredited by the American Association of Museums in 1996 and again in 2007, the year it launched a 7.5-million-dollar capital campaign; the expansion, completed in 2010, added 10,000 square feet, a sculpture garden, and expanded education space. Its permanent collection held some 1,400 works of American art — paintings, photographs, drawings, sculpture, and prints — as counted in 2019.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Museum of Art, "Our History" (fwmoa.org) — 1888 classes, the 1897 school, Thieme's 1921 gift, the 1949 Mossman home, the 1977 separation, the 1984 Netsch building, accreditation in 1996 and 2007, the 2007 campaign and 2010 expansion.
2. Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, "About FWMoA" — Thieme's donation dated 1922; the 40,000-square-foot 1984 building.
3. Clio, Fort Wayne Museum of Art (2019) — permanent collection of 1,400 works.