About

The Harvard Art Museums are comprised of three museums—the Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Arthur M. Sackler Museum—each with a different history, collection, guiding philosophy, and identity.

Fogg Museum

The Fogg Museum opened in 1895 on the northern edge of Harvard Yard in a modest Beaux-Arts building designed by Richard Morris Hunt, twenty-one years after the President and Fellows of Harvard College appointed Charles Eliot Norton the first professor of art history in America. It was made possible when, in 1891, Mrs. Elizabeth Fogg gave a gift in memory of her husband to build “an Art Museum to be called and known as the William Hayes Fogg Museum of Harvard College.” In 1927, the Fogg Museum moved to its home at 32 Quincy Street.

Designed by architects Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott of Boston, the joint art museum and teaching facility was the first purpose-built structure for the specialized training of art scholars, conservators, and museum professionals in North America. With an early collection that consisted largely of plaster casts and photographs, the Fogg Museum is now renowned for its holdings of western paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, photographs, prints, and drawings dating from the Middle Ages to the present. A 2014 renovation and expansion by Renzo Piano Building Workshop brought together the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler museums in one state-of-the-art facility at 32 Quincy Street.

Busch-Reisinger Museum

The Busch-Reisinger Museum was founded in 1903 as the Germanic Museum. Unique among North American museums, the Busch-Reisinger is dedicated to the study of all modes and periods of art from central and northern Europe, with an emphasis on German-speaking countries. In 1921, the Germanic Museum moved to Adolphus Busch Hall, built partly with funds from Adolphus Busch’s son-in-law, Hugo Reisinger, and in 1950 it was renamed the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The museum moved again in 1991, this time to Werner Otto Hall at 32 Quincy Street, designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. Adolphus Busch Hall continues to house the founding collection of plaster casts of medieval art and is the venue for concerts on its world-renowned Flentrop pipe organ. The Busch-Reisinger Museum’s holdings include significant works of Austrian Secession art, German expressionism, 1920s abstraction, and materials related to the Bauhaus. Other strengths include late-medieval sculpture and 18th-century art. The museum also holds noteworthy postwar and contemporary art from German-speaking Europe. A 2014 renovation and expansion by Renzo Piano Building Workshop brought together the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler museums in one state-of-the-art facility at 32 Quincy Street.

Arthur M. Sackler Museum

In 1912, Langdon Warner taught the first courses in Asian art at Harvard—indeed, the first at any U.S. university. By 1977, Harvard’s collections of Asian, ancient, and Islamic and later Indian art had grown sufficiently in size and importance to require a larger space for their display and study. With funding from Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, a psychiatrist, entrepreneur, art collector, and philanthropist, the Harvard Art Museums constructed a new museum facility dedicated to works already in the collections from Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, designed by James Stirling, opened in 1985 at 485 Broadway. This structure remains the home of the History of Art and Architecture Department and the Media Slide Library. A 2014 renovation and expansion by Renzo Piano Building Workshop brought together the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler museums in one state-of-the-art facility at 32 Quincy Street.

Harvard University has established a process for considering de-naming spaces, programs, or other entities. In October 2022, a proposal to de-name the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Building was submitted, and the advisory committee has released its review of the proposal to the University. In July 2024, the Harvard Corporation accepted the committee’s recommendation to keep the Arthur M. Sackler name and contextualize it.