The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art’s permanent collection encompasses over sixteen thousand artworks. Our inaugural exhibition, Homecoming, reintroduces our extraordinary collection to the public.

Homecoming comprises a series of related installations. “Generations," curated by Diana Tuite, Visiting Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, foregrounds the University of Iowa’s history of innovative arts education and scholarship.  "Fragments of the Canon: African Art from the Saunders and Stanley Collections," curated by Cory Gundlach, Curator of African Art, features African art collected by a Black Iowan, Meredith Saunders. “History Is Always Now,” also curated by Gundlach, displays the Stanley’s celebrated collection of African art in a way that emphasizes movement and cultural exchange through time and across space. Smaller, more focused installations, curated by Gundlach, include "Centering on Cloth: The Art of African Textiles," which highlights the global scope of interactions that surround the creation, use, and circulation of cloth in Africa, and "About Face: African Masks in Iowa," which emphasizes the historical and artistic relationships between West and Central African masks from the world-renowned Stanley Collection of African Art. 

Developed collaboratively by curators, educators, and faculty under the museum director’s guidance, Homecoming illustrates the importance of our world-class collection and allows us to envision new futures in art.

In order to protect sensitive works of art from extended exposure to light, many of the works on display in Homecoming will rotate every six months--meaning that there will always be something new to see during the inaugural exhibition's three-year run.