Eiteljorg Museum Receives Multimillion-Dollar Art Collection

Imagine, if you will, that you receive a phone call from someone telling you that you soon will be receiving a gift. When that gift arrives, you open it and find inside millions of dollars worth of artwork—paintings by the likes of Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, N. C. Wyeth, and Howard Terpning, along with magnificently crafted Native American artifacts. You are stunned. You are thrilled. And you are grateful.

That is exactly how the folks at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana, felt when the attorney for the estate of the late K. S. “Bud” Adams and his wife Nancy notified them that the museum would be the beneficiary of the Adams’ amazing art collection.

The collection includes 70 paintings by deceased greats such as O. E. Berninghaus, Albert Bierstadt, E. L. Blumenschein, Ed Borein, E. I. Couse, Frank Tenney Johnson, Joseph Sharp, and Henry Farny, as well as by contemporary greats such as Howard Terpning, Kenneth Riley, and Gary Niblett. It also includes several hundred important examples of Plains beadwork, Southwestern pottery and baskets, and other Native American artifacts.