About the museum
With a social justice and equity lens and the experimental, scholarly nature of the university art museum, ASU will have a meteoric impact on museums in the future. The museum harnesses the university’s breadth and depth of expertise to pioneer new models for arts learning, engagement and innovation that integrates relevancy, trust and resilient communities with museum institutions.
Two locations give ASU Art Museum a broad reach in terms of programs and audiences:
Nelson Fine Arts Center
Designed by Antoine Predock and opened in 1989, the Nelson Fine Arts Center facility is located on ASU’s Tempe campus with three floors of year-round exhibitions that rotate seasonally and the award-winning museum store.
The Brickyard located in downtown Tempe on Mill Avenue houses the Ceramics Research Center, a national and international destination for the study and appreciation of ceramics, and the Brickyard Gallery.
The Brickyard
The Brickyard located in downtown Tempe on Mill Avenue houses the Ceramics Research Center, a national and international destination for the study and appreciation of ceramics, and the Brickyard Gallery.
Artist Cruz Ortiz on his design of the new signature graphic for the ASU Art Museum:
The museum should always function as an interactive beacon, where ideas and practice methods create a sacred space for a community. The museum is a place where we should grow as we continue our journey through humanity and the cosmos. The ASU Art Museum is situating itself into this delicate and prudent position for a very specific community. The approach to creating this visual identity was to somehow capture the sense of stability and safety. It is the foundation of how we understand architecture. Placemaking is not an easy thing to establish, and it is even much more difficult to create a symbol that encapsulates how we understand what a museum is supposed to be.
This design is a hand-cut, handmade forged placa (plaque). It was developed using two printmaking styles, woodcut and screen printing. The internal text was cut from hardwood birch-ply, and proof pressed through a 1940s Vandercook Letterpress. The post and lintel shell was created using hand-cut paper and film stencils on my 30-year-old screen printing press. Both of these mediums for me have always been a staple within my art canon, and for good reason. These mediums both articulate a sense of urgency and an importance for democratic distribution. I wanted this signature graphic to be flexible in use and to behave on its own. It was important for this symbol to not only represent a sacred space but to translate into a space for exchange.
We center art and artists in the service of social good and community wellbeing.