“HIGHLIGHTS OF THE ADKINS COLLECTION” EXHIBITION OPENS AT OU’S FRED JONES JR. MUSEUM OF ART
March 7 Marks First Public Viewing of Adkins Collection

February 11, 2008

NORMAN – Works of art from the Eugene B. Adkins Collection – one of the most important private collections in the nation featuring the Taos artists as well as Native American art –will open to the public on Friday, March 7, at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art on the University of Oklahoma Norman campus. To celebrate the gift of the Adkins Collection, no admission will be charged Friday through Sunday, March 7 through 9, at the OU museum. Other works from the collection will open to the public at Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art on Sunday, March 9.

The Adkins Collection, which is valued at approximately $50 million, is a recent acquisition that features more than 3,300 objects, including more than 400 paintings by such distinguished American artists as Maynard Dixon, Worthington Whittridge, Andrew Dasburg, Alfred Jacob Miller, Victor Higgins, Charles M. Russell, Nicolai Fechin, John Marin, William R. Leigh, Leon Gaspard and Joseph H. Sharp. The collection also includes impressive examples of Native American painting, pottery and jewelry by such famed Native American artists as Jerome Tiger, Maria Martinez and Charles Loloma.

The exhibit, “Highlights of the Adkins Collection,” will include more than 200 of those works. It will remain on display through December 2008.

“The University, working in partnership with Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum, is honored to receive one of the most important art collections in the United States,” said OU President David L. Boren. “The addition of this collection created by the late Eugene Adkins will further strengthen OU’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art as one of the top half dozen university art museums in the entire nation.”

In conjunction with the exhibit opening, OU will hold a President’s Associates Dinner honoring the Adkins Board of Trustees on Thursday, March 6, and the Bi-annual Russell Center Symposium Friday, March 7. The Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West will feature four sets of lectures by important scholars on Native American and Western art from the Adkins Collection. The lectures are free and open to the public; however, there is a fee for the luncheon, and reservations are required. For more information on the symposium, click here or call the Russell Center at 405.325.5939.

The Adkins Foundation Board announced in July 2007 that the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at OU and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa had been jointly selected to receive the Adkins Collection. The joint partnership by OU and the Philbrook was among many proposals submitted by leading museums across the country.
The Philbrook Museum of Art, which received the Adkins Collection in partnership with OU, will open an exhibition to the public in Tulsa on Sunday, March 9. Approximately 45 pieces from the Adkins Collection will be on display at the Philbrook until approximately summer 2009.

As a result of the Adkins Collection acquisition, OU will create a curatorial position specifically for the collection, additional graduate fellowships and an Adkins Presidential Professorship in the history of Western American art. In addition an approximately 6,000-square-foot new exhibition gallery will be built above the original Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art to house the Adkins Collection. Oklahoma City-based Elliott + Associates Architects, recipients of the “Best of Year” 2007 national award by Interior Design, are designing the project, which is scheduled for completion in 2010. The Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa also will embark on a building project to create the Adkins Collection and Study Center, which will focus on the exhibition and study of Native American art and artifacts. The center is expected to open in summer 2009.

Few Oklahoma families have deeper roots in Oklahoma than the family of Eugene Brady Adkins. His father, Eugene Sloan Adkins, born in Chouteau, owned and ran the Adkins Hay & Feed Co., which he established in 1917 in Muskogee. His mother, Bess Brady Adkins, was a member of the pioneer Tulsa Brady family. And his grandfather, W. Tate Brady, who came to Indian Territory at age 17, was one of Oklahoma’s most prominent early-day citizens – a developer, entrepreneur and civic leader in Tulsa. Tate Brady opened a mercantile store on Main Street in 1890, and in 1900, built the famous Brady Hotel, Tulsa’s original first-class hotel.

The Adkins Collection at OU’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art will complement the already outstanding collections held by the museum, including those acquired within the past 12 years: the Weitzenhoffer Collection of French Impressionism; the Richard H. and Adeline J. Fleischaker Collections, the museum’s first major collection of Taos art; the Thams Collection of Southwestern masterpieces; the Tate Collection of masterworks by the Taos Society of Artists and the R.E. Mansfield Collection by some of the world’s most celebrated Native American artists.

For more information contact the museum's communications officer, Kristal Hamm, at 405.325.3178

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