The story
In 1928 Sarah Joslyn, the widow of an Omaha printing and advertising magnate, gave more than 3 million dollars to build the city an arts centre in memory of her husband George. What opened in 1931 astonished Omaha, a temple of pink Georgia marble and 38 other stones in the Art Deco style, with a concert hall and a fountain court inside.
The collection reaches from antiquity to the present, but its signature holding belongs to the land around it. In the 1830s the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer travelled up the Missouri River with the German naturalist Prince Maximilian, and the watercolours Bodmer made of the Native peoples and landscapes of the Great Plains are among the most exact records of that world before it changed. Joslyn holds the largest group of them.
The museum has stayed free to enter for most of its life, in keeping with Sarah Joslyn's wish that it reach as many people as possible.
