Sheldon Museum of Art, Philip Johnson on the Plains
Near Lincoln, Nebraska
On the University of Nebraska campus in Lincoln stands one of the underappreciated architectural jewels of the American Midwest. The Sheldon Museum of Art, opened in nineteen sixty-three, was designed by Philip Johnson, who considered it the best building he ever designed.
Johnson's building is clad in Italian travertine and marked by a colonnade of sculptural pillars topped with flattened arches. Inside, a collection of thirteen thousand works includes major American paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Monumental sculptures by Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, and others are scattered across the surrounding campus. For a state capital city of modest size, it is an extraordinary concentration of twentieth-century American art, set inside a building that holds its own against anything Johnson designed for larger cities.
