Muscatine Art Center

Once the private home of a lumber heiress, the Laura Musser Museum features many distinctive architectural details of the Edwardian period. The adjoining Stanley Gallery hosts national, traveling art exhibitions. The Muscatine Art Center is one of only 1,070 museums nationwide accredited by the American Association of Museums. This honor signifies that the Art Center has undergone a rigorous and lengthy process involving intensive self-examination, peer review and a thorough examination by the Accreditation Commission. Accreditation by the AAM means the Muscatine Art Center is recognized for demonstrating excellence and operating in accordance with the best practices and highest standards in the field. Funded in part by the Iowa Arts Council, a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Exhibits

What Follows is True: Crescent Hotel by Sean Fitzgibbon is on view September 3 - October 23, 2022: Author/illustrator Sean Fitzgibbon explores the mythologies surrounding the Crescent Hotel’s strange two years as the Baker Hospital, a Depression Era cancer hospital in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Illustrations from Fitzgibbon’s graphic non-fiction book, including images referencing Baker’s earlier years in Muscatine, are on view in the Stanley Gallery at the Muscatine Art Center.

In our Local History Room will be Muscatine's Pearl Button Industry from the Permanent Collection.

The main hallway gallery is Great Leaders of the Indian Nation: McKenney & Hall Portraits. Charles Bird King (commissioned by McKenney) had painted at least 143 portraits over a twenty-year period including the leaders of at least twenty Indian tribes. The original oil paintings led to the establishment of the War Department's Indian Gallery. They were later moved to the Smithsonian Institute. In 1865 a disastrous fire struck the Smithsonian Institute, destroying all but eighteen of these paintings, making the subsequent prints the only remaining historical records.

Prints on view are from the Art Center’s permanent collection. They represent leaders of Native Americans from Ioway, Fox, Sauk, and Mesquaki tribes that inhabited Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Michigan, and Nebraska.

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