At the boundary — the university museums

Notre Dame's collection from 1875 — the Raclin Murphy opened 1 December 2023

The boundary stated: The region's largest art museum does not stand in South Bend. It stands on the University of Notre Dame's campus, in the unincorporated Notre Dame district east of the city line, and it is printed here at the boundary — fully enough that the map is honest, briefly enough that the Notre Dame record remains its owner's. The university's art collection dates to 1875, making it, in the university's own description, one of the oldest and most highly regarded university art collections in America, and its objects number more than 30,000 — nearly 31,000 in the university's count — spanning the principal cultures and periods of world art.

The Snite and its successor: From 1980 the collection was housed in the Snite Museum of Art, beside O'Shaughnessy Hall near the campus's center. The Snite closed its doors to the public on 29 April 2023 — one wire account dates the closing to the end of 2023; the university's own magazine fixes the day — and the building continues as the Snite Research Center in the Visual Arts, open to scholars and students by appointment. Its replacement opened on the campus's south edge, at Eddy Street and Angela Boulevard, on 1 December 2023: the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, a 70,000-square-foot first phase designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects, named for its lead donors, Ernestine Raclin and her daughter and son-in-law Carmi and Christopher Murphy — a South Bend family, the Raclin name being the city's own, carried across the line. Some 1,000 works hang in its twenty-three galleries at a time. The museum's art, its Meštrović and Rickey holdings and its campus world belong to the Artists and Notre Dame records; its weight in the region's museum life is registered here.

Saint Mary's: Across the river, Saint Mary's College keeps exhibition galleries rather than a collecting museum: the Moreau Art Galleries — the Hammes Gallery, the Little Theatre Gallery and the Sister Rosaire Gallery — in the college's Moreau Center for the Arts, showing rotating exhibitions of professional, faculty, alumnae and student work, as the college's Department of Art announces them each season. They are the college's teaching galleries, printed here at their size. One caution for the record: the accredited "Saint Mary's College Museum of Art" that reference works describe is the California college's museum at Moraga, not this one; the Indiana Saint Mary's museum presence is its galleries, and they are enough.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame (news.nd.edu and Notre Dame Magazine, 2023) — the collection's origins in 1875, its more than 30,000 works, the Snite Museum's closing to the public on 29 April 2023, the Snite Research Center in the Visual Arts, and the Raclin Murphy's naming for the Raclin and Murphy families of South Bend.
2. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and its opening coverage (Antiques and the Arts Weekly, December 2023) — the opening on 1 December 2023, the 70,000-square-foot building by Robert A. M. Stern Architects, the twenty-three galleries and some 1,000 works on view.
3. Saint Mary's College, Department of Art and Moreau Art Galleries announcements (saintmarys.edu) — the Hammes, Little Theatre and Sister Rosaire galleries in the Moreau Center for the Arts and their exhibition seasons.
4. Saint Mary's College Museum of Art (stmarys-ca.edu) — the California college's museum of the same name, distinguished here so the two are never merged.