We are the Allentown Art Museum:
Our mission is to enrich the lives of the widest possible audience of visitors to the museum by engaging, informing, and inspiring them through the activities of collecting, preserving, studying, exhibiting, and interpreting important works of visual art.
Mission statement adopted September 2004
The Allentown Art Museum was established through a grass roots effort led by the teacher, painter and
critic, Walter Emerson Baum (1886-1956). Founded and incorporated during the Depression (1934 and 1939
respectively), the museum served the local community for 20 years in a city-owned Federal-style house,
primarily exhibiting the works of area artists.
In 1960 and 1961, a gift of 63 Renaissance and Baroque paintings and sculptures from Samuel H. Kress (a native of nearby Cherryville, Pa.) brought the museum to a new level. The Kress gift stimulated community visionaries and museum friends to purchase and refurbish a building, the museum's current location, suitable to house the new collection. In 1975, an expansion to the building was completed to enhance the museum's programs and collecting plans. At the time, the museum installed a room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as part of its permanent collection; the library from the second Francis W. Little House. Another room from that house can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The collection, still largely defined by European paintings in 1975, expanded with a large collection of textiles and another gift of works on paper. The 1978 acquisition of Gilbert Stuart's beguiling portrait of Ann Penn Allen, granddaughter of the founder of Allentown, set the benchmark for the qualitative standards of the collection. The museum's goal, to develop the American collection to parallel the extraordinary quality of the collection of European paintings, is one that the museum is well on its way toward achieving.
Today the Allentown Art Museum embraces the broadest possible audience in the Lehigh Valley, offering tremendous variety and quality in its collection and exhibitions, educational and popular programs, and its busy calendar of public events. We serve over 100,000 participants annually, of whom more than 14,000 are children in school programs.
The museum's collection of about 14,000 works of art offers our community the opportunity to experience nearly 2,000 years of cultural heritage, in an accessible and visitor-friendly environment.