Demolition begins on Tulsa’s 73-year-old Thomsas Gilcrease Museum of American Western Art. The facility is being razed to make way for a new building. It will also make use of over 400 acres of land surrounding the museum in the Osage Hills, northwest of downtown, with walking trails and an outdoor amphitheater.
Museum Executive Director Susan Neal says the old building was a hodgepodge of buildings, cobbled together, none of which met current museum code standards.
Gilcrease Museum houses more than 350 years of American painting, sculpture, and works on paper, including the world’s largest public holding of art of the American West, a comprehensive collection of Indigenous works from 12,000 BCE to the 21st century, and more than 100,000 manuscripts, photographs, maps, rare books, and other material related to the history of the Americas from the 15th–20th centuries as part of the Helmerich Center for American Research
The new Gilcrease Museum is funded through a combination of public and private sources. The City of Tulsa contributed $65 million approved by voters as part of Vision Tulsa. The A.R. and Marylouise Tandy Foundation provided a lead gift of $10 million for the new Gilcrease. The museum will continue to raise additional funds for the implementation of its master capital expansion plan and endowment. The construction for the project is being led by Flintco and is expected to be complete by the end of 2024.
The museum is owned by the City of Tulsa and operated by the University of Tulsa. TU also owns this radio station and web site.