The Addison Gallery of American Art has one of the most important collections of American art in the country. The museum’s founding collection included major works by such prominent American artists as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, John Twachtman, and James McNeill Whistler. Aggressive purchasing and generous gifts have added works by such artists as Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, John Sloan, Frank Stella, Mark Bradford, and Kara Walker.
The Addison’s collection of more than 13,000 photographs spans the history of American photography and includes in-depth holdings of key individual artists, such as Lewis Baltz, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Eadweard Muybridge. In recent years, the Gallery has acquired significant contemporary works by Carroll Dunham, Kerry James Marshall, Joel Shapiro, and Lorna Simpson, to name a few.
Today, the collection is comprised of more than 28,000 works in all media—painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, and decorative arts—from the eighteenth century to the present.