Chrysler Museum of Art

The Chrysler Museum of Art is a major art museum located on the border between downtown Norfolk, Virginia, and the Ghent district. Founded in 1933 as the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, it was renamed in 1971 after receiving a transformative donation from Walter P. Chrysler Jr., the automotive heir whose wife, Jean Outland Chrysler, was a native of Norfolk. With a collection exceeding 35,000 objects spanning over 5,000 years of world history, the museum ranks among the most significant art institutions in the Southeastern United States. It is particularly celebrated for its glass collection, which is among the largest in America.

The museum opened in 1933 under its original name, the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences. For nearly four decades it operated as a regional institution before the pivotal 1971 gift from Walter P. Chrysler Jr., who had previously displayed his collection at the Chrysler Art Museum of Provincetown from 1958. This donation instantly elevated the museum's national standing and prompted its renaming. The main building underwent a major expansion and renovation, reopening on May 10, 2014; during this period, the Glass Studio and Moses Myers House remained open while art was displayed at community venues throughout Norfolk. The grand reopening featured the Rubber Duck floating sculpture from May 17 to 26, 2014. An earlier 1980s renovation had enclosed the original courtyard to create Huber Court, now used for concerts and events. The most recent capital project, completed in early 2025, tripled the size of the Perry Glass Studio at 245 Grace Street and doubled educational programming. This expansion was funded by a $55 million capital campaign with support from the city of Norfolk and the Commonwealth of Virginia, following a June 2022 groundbreaking.

The collection comprises more than 35,000 objects across multiple media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and decorative arts. New York Times critic John Russell described the Chrysler collection as one any museum in the world would kill for. The core strengths lie in American and European paintings and sculpture from the Middle Ages to the present day. The museum holds one of the world's greatest collections of glass, including outstanding works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and maintains distinguished holdings in decorative arts. Its photographic collection is fine and growing. Geographic and chronological breadth extends to the arts of the ancient world, Asia, Africa, and Pre-Columbian America, with particular strength in Maya ceramics.

The museum's European holdings include Renaissance works by Tintoretto, Veronese, and Peter Paul Rubens; Baroque pieces by Diego Velázquez, Salvator Rosa, and Gianlorenzo Bernini, whose final sculpture, a marble bust of Jesus Christ created as a gift for Queen Christina of Sweden, resides here. Other significant European artists represented include Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Gustave Doré, Auguste Rodin, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque. The American collection features John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Richard Diebenkorn, Franz Kline, and Karen LaMonte. The French Wikipedia source also notes works by Pierre Soulages and Roy Lichtenstein, specifically Les Pommes sur la table, sur fond vert by Matisse and Live Ammo (Ha! Ha! Ha!) by Lichtenstein. The German source additionally identifies Giambattista Pittoni and Bertel Thorvaldsen's marble sculpture Ganymed and the Eagle. A provenance dispute concerning Peter Stephenson's The Wounded Indian, contested by the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association since 1999, was partially resolved in late 2020 with revised attribution of ownership.

The museum occupies a campus on the boundary between downtown Norfolk and the Ghent district. Its main building reopened in 2014 after extensive renovation. The campus includes the Perry Glass Studio, opened in 2011 adjacent to the main building, which originally offered 7,000 square feet of space for daily glassmaking demonstrations and facilities for visiting artists and students. The 2025 expansion at 245 Grace Street tripled this facility's size. Additional campus amenities include a full-service restaurant, gift shop, Kaufman Theater, and the Goode Works on Paper Center. The museum also oversees two historic properties: the Moses Myers House and the Norfolk History Museum at the Willoughby-Baylor House.

The Chrysler Museum of Art is located in Norfolk, Virginia, and operates as a private nonprofit institution with public support. Its campus is accessible from both downtown and the Ghent district. The museum provides guided tours, lectures, films, concerts, family days, gallery story time, travel programs, and publications. More than 60,000 students from Hampton Roads schools tour annually, facilitated by approximately 100 volunteer docents who complete a selective, rigorous year-long training program. The museum displays its permanent collection alongside changing exhibitions, with recent shows including Rembrandt's Etchings: The Embrace and Darkness of Light, From Goya to Sorolla: Masterpieces from The Hispanic Society of America, and in May 2024 a Jewish American History Month exhibition spanning 16th-century to contemporary Jewish art. The Perry Glass Studio maintains a visiting artist series and assistantship program, inviting glass artists from around the world to work, teach, and demonstrate.