Highlights

Found something you like? Here are some artworks currently on view in the Figge's galleries that you may see in person!

Wild Things highlights the animals, plants, and the many imaginary wild things found throughout the museum's collection!

The Haitian Collection documents the flowering of a rich artistic tradition within the island nation of Haiti since the 1940s. In 1967, the Davenport Museum of Art established one of the first collections of Haitian art in the United States. Donations made by Dr. Walter E. Neiswanger, a long-time museum patron and trustee, form the majority of the comprehensive collection which ranges from the first generation to the most recent developments.

Beginning in 1929, through a gift from a local art patron, Clarence T. Lindley, the Figge has been home to a modest but impressive group of American Impressionist and Tonalist inspired landscapes. The Figge's collection of landscape works continues to grow not only by the inclusion of important paintings by artists such as Edward Mitchell Bannister, Jane Peterson, and Martha Walter to better reflect the myriad artists whose practices flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also by contemporary artists whose works embody appreciation and concern for the land that provides sustenance for all.

Among the 334 works of art donated by Charles August Ficke which formed the nucleus of the Davenport Municipal Art Gallery Collection were more than fifty remarkable paintings created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in what is now present day Mexico. Recognized by scholars as early as the 1940s, the small but significant collection of Spanish Viceregal works contains some fine examples of art from some of the most recognized painters of the period. Over the past century, the works by painters such as Baltasar de Echave Rioja, Miguel Cabrerra, and the Reverend Nicolas Rodriguez Juárez have been joined by additional important works by Cabrerra, as well as the painters José de Paez, Fray Miguel de Herrera, Andrés de Islas and Cristóbal de Villalpando. Owing to their significance, paintings from the Figge’s Spanish Viceregal collection have appeared in numerous exhibitions in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe.

For thousands of years, artists have been fascinated with capturing the likeness of individuals through portraiture. The style and the nature of these portrayals have shifted with time and across cultures, evolving from an art form reserved largely for flattering images of the upper classes to today’s more democratized and inclusive vision of humanity. Here we present a selection of portraits dating from prior centuries to the present—from the Figge's collection. The range of portraits presented offer fresh perspectives on the subject and the many ways in which artists see themselves or their fellow citizens. Most importantly, the portraits show us that their power lies in the deep connections they allow us to make with one another.

The Iowa City journalist Edwin B. Green collected numerous clippings, magazine advertisements, novelty T-shirts, liquor bottles, and many other items all playfully inspired by Grant Wood's most famous painting, "American Gothic." Green was a close friend of the artist's sister Nan and often exchanged new cards and clippings with her (knock-offs as he referred to them) as he found them. Both collected parodies beginning in the 1940s-50s up until the 1980s. Green's collection is the foundation of the Figge's American Gothic Parody Collection. Additional items such as the TIME Magazine cover, "Everybody's Hip" from 1994 were added since by Davenport Museum of Art curatorial staff from the late 1980s through most of the 1990s. Other objects, such as the home made "knock-offs" with family members posed in the American Gothic style were sent to the museum unsolicited. The museum retained these too and added them to the collection. Of course, many more parodies have appeared in print and in film since.