The Eiteljorg Museum was founded in 1989 by Indianapolis philanthropist and businessman Harrison Eiteljorg, and has quickly grown into one of the country’s top repositories of high-quality Native American art and artifacts and Western paintings and sculpture. A 2002 gift by the family of George Gund added a new gallery stocked with 57 pieces of traditional Western art including paintings and bronzes by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.
In 2015, the museum received as a bequest from Bud Adams—former NFL team owner and one of the country’s highest profile businessmen of Native American heritage—a collection of more than 300 Indian cultural artifacts like beadwork, weavings, and pottery, plus almost 100 prominent paintings of the West by Remington, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Charles Russell, N. C. Wyeth, and others. The gift solidified the museum’s position as one of the great collections of art from and about the early American West.
- Indianapolis Star reporting, indystar.com/story/life/2015/09/17/tennesee-titans-owner-donated-historic-art-collection-eiteljorg-museum/72360178