For many years the university has received gifts of artistic and scientific value from alumni, collectors and friends of the university. As a result, the three museums on the University of Oklahoma campus, the Charles M. Russell Center for Study of Art of the American West, the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, possess many valuable collections.
555 Elm Ave., Norman, OK 73019
Phone: (405) 325-3272
Internet: http://www.ou.edu/fjjma/
The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art is one of the finest university-based art museums in the nation. In January 2005 the museum reopened following a major expansion project designed by acclaimed architect Hugh Newell Jacobson that has been critically hailed in publications such as Architectural Digest and The Washington Post. The expanded museum is 64,000 square-feet and houses the museum's collection of more than 9,000 works of art.
The museum’s showpieces include the renowned Weitzenhoffer Collection, which is the largest gift of French Impressionist art ever given to an American public university and features paintings by such artists as Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Renoir and others. The museum also has extensive holdings of American, American Indian, and Asian art, photography, Eastern Orthodox icons, and Persian miniatures, as well as strong collections of modern and contemporary art. The museum’s collection of southwestern art, including works by the Taos Society of Artists, is among the most important in any public museum. In addition to showcasing the permanent collection, the museum hosts special exhibitions throughout the year.
The museum serves the educational needs of the university and the extended community through programs coordinated with the university faculty and the state’s school districts. Museum information and art curriculum guides are provided to teachers and university faculty, and the museum sponsors the pARTner project, an arts education program that reaches 1,200 Norman Public School students annually. Tours are offered to all ages. Internships are available for students with an interest in museum careers.
Lectures, videos, and films complement the permanent collection and special exhibitions. Programs like Family Days, Art Adventures, Tuesday Noon Concerts, FredFilms and Art After Hours utilize the museum’s galleries, classroom and auditorium and make the arts accessible to thousands of visitors throughout the year.
The newly expanded Museum Store offers a wide variety of exceptional goods including art books, colorful mobiles, puzzles, American Indian jewelry, scarves, cards, posters, and much more. The recently published catalogue, The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art: Selected Works, co-written by Eric M. Lee, the Bill and Wylodean Saxon Director of the museum, and Rima Canaan, offers a comprehensive look at the museum's permanent collection and is available in the Museum Store. The Museum Store is always free and is open during regular museum hours.
The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art is located at Elm Avenue south of Boyd Street in Norman, Oklahoma. The museum is open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m. Closed Mondays and university holidays. Admission is $5 for adults, $4 for senior citizens (65+), $3 for children ages 6 to 17, and $2 for OU faculty/staff. Museum Association members, students with a valid OU ID and children under six are admitted free. The museum is free to the public on Tuesdays.
|
|
|
|
2401 Chautauqua Ave., Norman, OK 73072-7029
Phone: (405) 325-4712
Internet: http://www.snomnh.ou.edu
Ellen Censky, Ph.D., Director
The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, located just south of the intersection of Timberdell Road and Chautauqua Avenue, has extensive collections in earth, life and social sciences, including more than six million specimens and artifacts. These collections represent a vast and irreplaceable resource of the natural and cultural heritage of Oklahoma and many other parts of the world. The SNOMNH is the official museum of natural history for the state of Oklahoma as well as an independent research unit of the University of Oklahoma. The museum curators conduct original research and teach in their collection areas, while overseeing the research of graduate students and visiting scientists. The curators also maintain an active lending program that makes specimens available to scholars throughout the world. The collections provide the basis for a variety of exhibitions, public service programs and educational activities. Major collection areas include vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology, archaeology, classical art, entomology, ethnology, herpetology, ichthyology, invertebrate zoology, mammalogy, ornithology, paleobotany and Native American languages.
The 198,000-square-foot facility contains space for extensive permanent and traveling exhibits as well as a café, gift shop, education classrooms and a hands-on Discovery Room.
With collections that document 500 million years of Oklahoma’s natural history, the SNOMNH is one of the finest university-based natural history museums in the world. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m on Sunday. It is closed on Mondays, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Memorial Day, Labor Day and Martin Luther King Day. Admission is $5 for adults, $4 for seniors and faculty and staff, $3 for children ages 6 and older and free for children ages 5 and younger and for OU students with ID.
The museum also is available for after-hours rental for banquets, receptions and other events. For more information, visit the museum’s Web site at http://www.snomnh.ou.edu or call (405) 325-4712.
 |
|
 |
 |
520 Parrington Oval, Room 202, Norman, OK 73019-3011
Phone: (405) 325-5939
Internet: http://www.ou.edu/special/russellcenter/
Founded in 1998, the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West is the first such university-based program in the nation. The center, which opened to the public in the fall of 1999, is dedicated to the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge in the field of American art history as it relates to the western United States. Through its resource center, national symposia, course offerings and related outreach programs, the Russell Center actively engages students and the public in developing a better understanding of, and appreciation for, 19th- and 20th-century Euro-American and Native American artistic traditions. Special emphasis is given to art of Charles M. Russell and his contemporaries. The Russell Center was established concurrently with the Charles Marion Russell Chair, an endowed professorship in art history at the University of Oklahoma. Both the center and the endowed chair were made possible through a generous gift from the Nancy Russell Trust and matching funds from the state of Oklahoma. Administered through the School of Art and the College of Fine Arts, the Russell Center operates in concert with several of the University of Oklahoma's other distinguished branches including the Western History Collection, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, and the departments of History, Literature, Native American Studies and Film and Video Studies. The Russell Center also actively interfaces with institutions across the country, including museums of Western art and universities that support related programs or collections of Western material culture or art.
The Russell Center is both a facility and a program designed to inspire and excite interest in the study of American Western art, an aesthetic history that enjoys both a regional and a national dimension. While a branch of American art, Western art also incorporates European artistic traditions that have, over time, been adapted to themes, experiences and environments unique to the western United States. Art of the American West also encompasses Native American cultures as both subjects of art and as creative forces.
During much of America's history, the West has been a defining national symbol. Although considered a region by Euro-Americans, the West was also a myth, a dream and inspiration, a collection of individual experiences, a process of westering and a destination. For Native Americans, however, process and destination played little part in their thinking. For them, the West was something spiritual as well as physical, a sacred domain as well as a common home. The center's course of study in the art of the American West seeks to discover what the West symbolized and to whom and why.
630 Parrington Oval, Suite 110 Norman, OK 73019-4033
Phone: (405) 325-7495
Internet: http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/
World Literature Today, founded in 1927 as Books Abroad, is a quarterly journal published by the University of Oklahoma and devoted to the review of contemporary belles lettres throughout the world. Each issue contains articles and commentaries on leading writers and significant literary trends, plus approximately 300 reviews of the newest fiction, poetry, drama, essays, biography, and criticism published in more than 50 languages on six continents. WLT is the only publication anywhere, in any language, that provides such thorough, systematic, and broad-ranging coverage of current literary activity.
The Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sponsored by the University and World Literature Today, is a biennial $50,000 award that honors outstanding achievement in fiction, poetry, or drama and is open to writers in any language. Often referred to as the “American Nobel” for the high quality of its laureates, candidates, and jurors (23 have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature subsequent to their involvement with the Neustadt, and one has received the Nobel Peace Prize), the Neustadt Prize is the first international literary award of such scope to originate in the United States and is one of the very few international prizes for which poets, fiction writers and dramatists are equally eligible. Founded in 1969 and conferred 21 times since 1970, the prize bears the name of the Neustadt family of Ardmore, Okla., whose 1972 endowment has ensured funding of the award in perpetuity. Recipients include such noted authors as Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Elizabeth Bishop, Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, Max Frisch, Raja Rao, and Kamau Brathwaite.
The Puterbaugh Conferences on World Literature are a biennial series sponsored by the University of Oklahoma’s international literary quarterly, World Literature Today, in collaboration with the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and the Department of English.
Originally named the Oklahoma Conferences on Writers of the Hispanic World, the series was endowed in perpetuity by the Puterbaugh Foundation of McAlester, Okla., in 1978. The scope of the conferences was expanded at that time to include writers from the French-speaking world as well as from Spain and Spanish America. Since 1992, its scope has been unrestricted.
Each conference brings a prominent author to the university for two weeks of lectures and seminars. At the end of the author’s stay, a two-day symposium on his or her work is held, featuring specialists and scholars. The conference papers are published in a subsequent special issue of World Literature Today. A reading by the author concludes the conference activities.
September 2006