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1875–2023
No museum is seated in the CDP — that test stands — but the museum Granger actually uses has a 150-year succession, and it is named here whole. The line stands in the Notre Dame CDP, on the campus this ground's eastern edge faces, and it runs in five houses. It opens in 1875, when the Bishops Gallery — sixty portraits of American bishops painted by the Vatican artist Luigi Gregori, hired by Father Edward Sorin in 1874 — and a Museum of Indian Antiquities opened in Notre Dame's Main Building; the collection grew by the Braschi family's 136 Roman paintings, acquired by President John Cavanaugh in 1917. The second house was the Wightman Memorial Art Gallery, from 1924, on Bond Hall's second floor, founded on Charles A. Wightman's gift of 108 religious paintings in memory of his wife. The third was the O'Shaughnessy Art Gallery, opened 1953 inside the new liberal-arts hall Ignatius O'Shaughnessy funded at President Theodore Hesburgh's request. The fourth was the Snite Museum of Art: funded by Frederick B. Snite Sr.'s $2 million foundation gift of December 1976, in memory of his son, built over four years to Ambrose Richardson's design — bridging the O'Shaughnessy galleries and sculptor Ivan Meštrović's converted studio — and opened in November 1980; it closed in April 2023. The fifth and present house is the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, built from April 2020 on the campus's south edge to Robert A. M. Stern Architects' design, funded by the 2018 lead gifts of Ernestine Raclin and of Carmen and Chris Murphy, and opened to the public on December 1, 2023 — some 70,000 square feet, twenty-three galleries around a skylit atrium, holding the university's collection of more than 30,000 works, Italian Renaissance painting and Mesoamerican art at its head. The campus wall that is itself a landmark work stands on the same campus and is named with it: Millard Sheets' Word of Life — "Touchdown Jesus" — a stone mosaic 134 feet high by 68 wide, 324 panels of some 6,700 granite pieces in 81 stones from sixteen countries, commissioned for the Hesburgh Library's stadium face, given by Mr. and Mrs. Howard V. Phalin at $200,000, and dedicated on May 7, 1964. And at Saint Mary's College, across the same line: Jean Charlot's frescoes — the fourteen Fine Arts panels, saints of the arts, painted August 5–16, 1955, outside O'Laughlin Auditorium in what is now the Moreau Center for the Arts, with The Fire of Creation following on July 21, 1956; restored by the Chicago Conservation Center in 2009. None of this is Granger's, and none is claimed; it is the museum world at this ground's door, told at the size a Granger reader meets it.
From the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art's own history ("How We Started," raclinmurphymuseum.nd.edu) and the museum's published record (opened December 1, 2023; Snite opened November 1980, closed April 2023); the Word of Life record (Sheets, 1964; dedication May 7, 1964; Phalin gift); Saint Mary's College's Charlot record and the Jean Charlot Foundation's mural catalogue (Fine Arts, August 1955; The Fire of Creation, July 1956; restoration 2009).