The Pink Marble Palace

Sarah Joslyn was not a native of Omaha. She and her husband George had come to the city from New England in the eighteen eighties, and George had built a fortune in telegraphs and wire services. By the time he died in nineteen sixteen, he was sometimes described as the wealthiest man in Nebraska. Sarah decided that his memorial should be something the whole city could use.

She founded the Society of Liberal Arts and spent years planning a cultural building for Omaha. The structure she commissioned opened on November twenty-ninth, nineteen thirty-one. It was designed by John and Alan McDonald in the Art Deco style then at its height, faced in Georgia pink marble, with thirty-eight different varieties of stone from around the world lining its interior halls. The facade borrowed from Egyptian temples and the Nebraska state capitol then being completed in Lincoln.

Sarah Joslyn's instruction was that the institution should be free to the public. The Joslyn Memorial, as it was first called, held concerts and lectures as well as art exhibitions. It formally became the Joslyn Art Museum in nineteen eighty-seven.

The collection today spans more than twelve thousand objects, from ancient Egyptian artifacts to European Old Masters to an extensive collection of Western American art that includes original Karl Bodmer watercolors depicting the Missouri River valley in the eighteen thirties, among the most detailed visual records that exist of the Northern Plains before large-scale white settlement.

The building itself remains one of the finest examples of Art Deco civic architecture in the American Midwest.