Museum Overview
The Zimmerli Art Museum is one of the largest and most distinguished university-based museums in the country, and is located on the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The museum collects, preserves, researches, and exhibits world-class works of art to provide the university community and diverse regional, national, international audiences with direct experience of the visual arts. Scholarly activities make art accessible through exhibitions, publications, and educational programs.
Founded in 1966 as the Rutgers University Art Gallery, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum was established in 1983 in response to the growth of the permanent collection. The major benefactors for the construction of the museum were Ralph and Alan Voorhees, and the Zimmerli was named for their mother.
In 1991, Dr. Norton Dodge and his wife Nancy Ruyle Dodge donated to the Zimmerli some twenty-five thousand works created between 1956 and 1986 by nearly a thousand artists from Moscow, Leningrad, and the former Soviet republics, to create the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of this kind.
The museum is headquartered in a 70,000-square-foot facility houses more than 75,000 works of art, with strengths in American Art, European Art, Soviet Nonconformist Art and Arts of Eurasia, and Original Illustrations for Children's Literature. The permanent collections include works in all mediums, spanning from antiquity to the present day, providing representative examples of the museum’s research and teaching message at Rutgers.
The Zimmerli’s operations, exhibitions, and programs are funded in part by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and income from the Avenir Foundation Endowment Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Endowment Fund. Additional support comes from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, The Arts Institute of Middlesex County, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the donors, members, and friends of the museum.
About Rutgers
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, stands among America’s highest-ranked, most diverse public research universities, with +71,000 undergraduate and graduate students, as well as 615,500 alumni around the world. Founded in 1766, Rutgers is the oldest, largest, and top-ranked public university in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area.
Rutgers is an academic, health, and research powerhouse, and a university of opportunity. With locations in New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden, it has a major academic and clinical health sciences presence that spans across the state. They’re all different but they’re also all Rutgers—respected, forward-looking, and packed with options.
Rutgers is dedicated to teaching that meets the highest standards of excellence, to conducting research that breaks new ground, and to providing services, solutions, and clinical care that help individuals and the local, national, and global communities where they live.