Loyola University Museum of Art

What is Loyola University Museum of Art?

LUMA builds its exhibitions around one theme: how people of every culture, religion and period have expressed the spiritual through art. That focus gives it a quieter, more reflective feel than the big general museums.

The heart of its permanent holdings is the Martin D'Arcy Collection, more than 300 pieces of art and objects from the medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods, made between about 1150 and 1800. Among them is a work titled Ecce Homo, the Latin phrase for behold the man, a traditional subject in Christian art.

History of Loyola University Museum of Art

The D'Arcy Collection began in 1969, when Jesuit priest Donald Rowe started gathering it. He named it after Martin D'Arcy, a British Jesuit theologian and humanist who had built up an art collection of his own at Campion Hall, part of Oxford University in England. For years the pieces were shown at Loyola's Lake Shore Campus in the Rogers Park neighborhood, inside Cudahy Memorial Library. The museum on Michigan Avenue opened in autumn 2005, bringing the collection downtown, where far more visitors pass by every day on the busy avenue outside.

Visiting Loyola University Museum of Art: tips

The museum has restrooms on site and is listed as wheelchair accessible. Plan on about an hour. It is next door to the Chicago Water Tower, and the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Driehaus Museum are each about 0.2 mile away, so it fits easily into a Near North Side walk.