Founded in 1938 as a Depression-era Works Progress Administration project, the Art Center has grown to include a number of arts, civic, and educational functions, offering—among others—more than 100 courses in painting, drawing, printmaking. The Center’s collection has grown to include the works of famed Midwestern artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Four of the latter’s Iowa-focused murals were conserved and put on permanent display in an exhibition room designed specifically for Wood’s “Corn Murals.”
Just as regional art predominates the Art Center collection, SOM’s design incorporated local building materials, including Siouxland brick similar to the horizontal brick favored by Prairie School architects. The brick was used to clad the museum’s L-shaped building, which contains offices, exhibition spaces, classrooms, and a children’s gallery. A central, three-story glass rotunda anchors the building, and contains a grand stairway leading up to the second and third levels, which include an auditorium, café, and gift shop.
The Art Center rotunda has become an important Sioux City landmark and a key gathering place for local civic events. The rotunda’s landmark three-story atrium is central to a circulation system that begins in the Center’s garden and landscaped court and continues via the serpentine grand stairway leading up to studios and galleries. The rotunda’s crown contains the building’s HVAC plant.
The Sioux City Art Center is a regional landmark by day and a glowing urban beacon by night. The Art Center has been named Cultural Attraction of the year by the Iowa Division of Tourism, and was selected by the Omaha World Herald in 2000 as one of the ten most significant Arts Events of the Decade in the Midwest.
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