Located on the campus of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, the Sheldon Museum of Art kind of flies under the radar.

You may not expect an art museum of this caliber to be set in this inauspicious location. Yet here we are, with a collection that includes works by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alexander Calder, Marsden Hartley, Richard Serra, Tom Wesselmann, and Mary Cassatt, among others.

This museum didn’t start out as a museum; as with some other institutions, it started in a much more informal manner, in this case, as the Haydon Art Club, named after British painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon. The Art Club then became the Nebraska Art Association, which in turn was later renamed the Sheldon Art Association (SAA), which is the organization that supports the museum itself. As for the collections of art, they are the combined result of the SAA and the University of Nebraska collections; the museum was first the University of Nebraska Art Galleries, then the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, and finally, in 2008, the Sheldon Museum of Art.

The museum has had a couple of thefts in its history. In 1965, the painting The Golden Age by Benjamin West was stolen, but was recovered by the FBI. A student at the university was later charged. In 1998, a large sculpture, Man in the Open Air, was discovered to be missing after the U of N Cornhuskers victory in the Orange Bowl football game, perhaps as part of the “celebrations.” At the time, the director of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, George Neubert, said that the Gallery “would be pleased if the sculpture simply showed up at its door.” Lucky for the rest of us, it was found a few days later on the East campus of the university, about three miles away. Man in the Open Air then found a new home inside of the building, after some repair and restoration.

The sculpture mentioned above is only one of 33 outdoor works of art on the campus; these range from smaller pieces mounted on a wall, to monumental-sized works made from steel. Moving indoors, there are many more examples of sculpture, as well as collections of drawings, photographs, prints, and of course, the paintings.

The name of the museum and the Art Association goes back to the Sheldon family, who were involved with the Nebraska Art Association for a number of years, but it became real when Frances Sheldon died in 1950, leaving much of her estate to fund not only the construction of a gallery, but also the equipment needed for it to function. Her brother Bromley and his wife also left a very sizable sum to go toward the gallery when he died in 1958. The building where most of the art lives was designed by architect Philip Johnson in the late 1950s and was completed in 1963; it now occupies a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.