The Association learns it will receive $225,000 from the estate of Indianapolis real estate investor John Herron to build a permanent art gallery and school.

The John Herron Art Institute opens in temporary quarters in a home at 16th and Pennsylvania Streets, the site on which the Association intends to build. The art school is established.

The John Herron Art Institute formally opens in its permanent home, a building designed by Arthur Bohn of the Indianapolis firm Vonnegut & Bohn, on November 20.

A new art school building, also designed by Vonnegut & Bohn, opens directly north of what will henceforth be know as the Museum building.

The John Herron Art Institute presents a memorial exhibition of the works of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, known for his public commissions honoring Civil War heroes of the North. Attendance totals 56,574.

Sixteen civic leaders found the Gamboliers. For the next few years they will gamble on "promising artists," adding works by Modigliani, Pendergast, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others to the collection – 167 works in all, for a little more than $2,000.

A new and larger school building, designed by renowned architect Paul Phillipe Cret, opens, funded anonymously by board member Caroline Marmon Fesler.

Author Booth Tarkington, Muncie industrialist Frank Ball, and Eli Lilly & Company research director Dr. George J. A. Clowes are among the lenders to an exhibition of paintings and prints by Dutch Masters, including Rembrandt, Hals, Ruisdael, Steen, and Vermeer. Attendance for this exhibition exceeds 34,000.

Art Association president Caroline Marmon Fesler makes the first in a remarkable series of gifts to the collection. Over the years, Fesler gives paintings by Hobbema, Cuyp, Corneille de Lyon, Seurat, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Picasso.

Eli Lilly makes the first of his gifts of Chinese art, Between 1947 and 1961, he will purchase about 200 bronzes, ceramics, jades and paintings for the Museum’s collection.

An addition to the School building opens, designed by Evans Woollen III and funded through the bequest of Caroline Marmon Fesler.

Out of space in the Museum and with no land upon which to build, the board hires development consultants G. A. Brakeley & Company to advise on fundraising and also on a new site for the museum and possibly also the school. News that some sites outside downtown are being considered prompts a firestorm of public criticism. When the Brakeley Report is received, the board is advised to build downtown unless they are given land elsewhere "free and clear."

Early in the year, the board learns that the Herron School of Art has lost its accreditation. Negotiations begin with Indiana University to transfer the school to IUPUI, and board chairman Herman Krannert explores moving the Museum to the IUPUI campus. But in October, Ruth Lilly and Josiah K. Lilly donate their parents’ estate, Oldfields, to the Art Association, to be used as a site for a new museum.

The Herron School of Art becomes part of Indiana University, IUPUI campus, on July 1. The home of the Josiah K. Lilly Jr. family opens to the public as the Lilly Pavilion of Decorative Arts.

The Art Association changes its name to Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Krannert Pavilion, the first in a series of pavilions planned for the new Indianapolis Museum of Art, opens October 25 on the IMA’s new Michigan Road campus. Krannert Pavilion, and later the Clowes and Showalter Pavilions, are designed by Ambrose Richardson, with landscape design by Sasaki, Dawson, DeMay & Associates.

Clowes Pavilion opens, a memorial to Edith Whitehill Clowes. A bequest of approximately $1 million from Mrs. Grace Showalter is received to build Showalter Pavilion, a theater that will be the home of the Indianapolis Civic Theatre. The Sutphin Fountain is dedicated.

During a decade of rampant inflation, the IMA begins to build an operating endowment with the goal of accumulating $35 to $40 million by the Museum’s 100th anniversary in 1983.

The Museum receives W. J. Holliday’s collection of Neo-Impressionist paintings, now the largest public collection of Neo-Impressionist paintings in the U.S. The largest collection of works by J. M. W. Turner outside Great Britain, amassed over many years by Indianapolis attorney Kurt F. Pantzer, becomes a permanent part of the collection.

In connection with the Pan American Games, the Museum organizes Art of the Fantastic: Latin America 1920–1987, the first large-scale presentation of twentieth-century Latin American art in the United States in over 20 years

The IMA’s Mary Fendrich Hulman Pavilion opens, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Eiteljorg donate their collections of African and South Pacific Art, numbering more than 1,500 works, to the Museum.

Through a combination of gift and purchase, the IMA acquires 101 works by Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven from the collection of Samuel Josefowitz.

The Clowes Collection, including 100 works Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco, Cranach, Jan Breugal, Constable, Claude, and other European masters, is committed to the Museum by the Clowes Fund. IMA announces plans to create an Art & Nature park on 100 acres of property west of the main campus.

The Museum acquires 75 hanging scrolls and folding screens representing major artists and styles of Japan’s Edo period.

The IMA unveils the newly restored Lilly House and the historic Oldfields estate mansion. A National Historic Landmark, Oldfields-Lilly House & Gardens is notable as one of the Midwest’s outstanding examples of an intact American country place estate. The IMA also breaks ground for a $74 million Museum expansion project designed to improve visitor services and increase access to the collections. Architect for the project is Jonathan Hess of Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf.

Concluding a two-year national search, IMA selects landscape architect Edward Blake of The Landscape Studio, Hattiesburg, Miss., and architect Marlon Blackwell of Marlon Blackwell Architect, Fayetteville, Ark., to design and oversee the creation of the IMA’s Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park and its Fehnel Visitor Center.

The New IMA opens to the public May 5 featuring the new Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion, Wood Gallery Pavilion and Deer Zink Special Events Pavilion.

Maxwell Anderson is appointed Director and CEO on March 27. On July 1, IMA announces receipt of an $11 million challenge grant from the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation for development of the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park. The European galleries reopen Dec. 3, marking the official completion of the Museum’s expansion and renovation project.

IMA announces 10 artists and collectives selected to create works for the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, including artists Kendall Buster, Sam Easterson, Peter Eisenman, Alfredo Jaar, Tea Mäkipää and Andrea Zittel. The collectives are Atelier Van Lieshout, Los Carpinteros and Type A.