Fundamental to the Frye Art Museum is its mission, which informs and guides its curatorial vision:

The Frye Art Museum is dedicated to artistic inquiry, a rich visitor experience, and civic responsibility. A primary catalyst for our engagement with contemporary art and artists is the Founding Collection of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art by Munich-based artists. Admission to the Museum will always be free.

Honoring and extending the legacy of Charles and Emma Frye, the Frye Art Museum showcases its Founding Collection of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European art. It also presents visually compelling and conceptually rich contemporary art. The Museum’s commitment to the art and ideas of living artists is the bridge between these two charges.

The core of the Founding Collection comprises two generations of Munich-based art, the Munich Academy and the Munich Secession. Selections from this Collection are always on view in exhibitions that provide fresh perspectives, contribute to art-historical scholarship, and revitalize the Founding Collection for contemporary audiences. Recent examples include Spectatorship and Desire: Lust, Loss, and Love; Dreaming the Emerald City: The Collections of Charles and Emma Frye and Horace C. Henry; and Oyster Skies: Meditations on Northern Landscapes.

The Frye also regularly loans paintings from its Founding Collection to international exhibitions organized by esteemed institutions such as the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, Spain; and Musée de Lodève, France.

The Frye’s engagement with the art and ideas of living artists takes its cue from the collecting practice of the Fryes, who, in building their collection, regularly sought the counsel of artist-advisers and often bought art directly from artists in their studios. Therefore, the Founding Collection is a primary catalyst for our engagement with contemporary art and artists. Invited artists regularly curate from the Collection and create new work in response to its paintings and history. Recent examples include Sin, Heaven is Being a Memory to Others, and Over Julia’s Dead Body.

The Permanent Collection comprises twentieth-century European and American paintings and works on paper, including fine examples of American Early Modernism. Artists included in this Collection are Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, Charles Burchfield, Albert Bierstadt, Rockwell Kent, and Andrew Wyeth, as well as contemporary painters such as Odd Nerdrum, Steven Assael, and Timothy Lowly. These works are featured in Frye-generated exhibitions such as The Walser Greathouse Legacy and Gaze: Vision, Desire and Difference in the Frye Collections, and in national exhibitions including those organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Fla.; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Me.; and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, Calif.

The Frye regularly generates innovative exhibitions of contemporary art by regional, national, and international artists that contribute to art-historical scholarship, challenge our perceptions, thrill our senses, and introduce the region to new art in all mediums. Recent exhibitions organized by the Frye include Joseph Park: Moon Beam Caress, The RetroFuturistic Universe of NSK, Tracy and the Plastics 101, Oliver Herring: Taking and Making, Swallow Harder: Selections from the Ben and Aileen Krohn Collection, Ginnungagap: Recent Work by Sigrid Sandström, Hug: Recent Work by Patricia Piccinini (co-organized with the Des Moines Art Center), and Empire.

The Frye also welcomes high-caliber traveling exhibitions of contemporary and historical art. Recent examples include Acting Out: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley); Candida Höfer: The Architecture of Absence (Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fla. and University Art Museum, California State University at Long Beach); Henry Darger: Highlights from the American Folk Art Collection (American Folk Art Museum, N.Y.); Anxious Objects: Willie Cole’s Favorite Brands (Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, N.J.); I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My Time: Recent Work by Erwin Wurm (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco); Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection (Rubell Family Collection, Miami); R. Crumb’s Underground (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco); Dario Robleto: Alloy of Love (The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.); and The Puppet Show (Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia).

A short list of contemporary artists whose work has been exhibited recently at the Frye: