The AMAM’s holdings of arts of the Americas before 1900 encompasses paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, textiles, pottery, decorative arts, and material culture produced in North, Central, and South America over the course of 3,000 years.

Among the highlights of the North American collection are 57 ledger book drawings by the Southern Cheyenne artist Howling Wolf, the only known portrait bust of an African American by the African American and Native American artist Edmonia Lewis, and an early landscape painting by Thomas Cole, an American immigrant from England who became the leading figure of the Hudson River School.

The collection also features paintings by Benjamin West, Ammi Phillips, Severin Roesen, Thomas Satterwhite Noble, William Merritt Chase, and John Singer Sargent, as well as drawings by John Singleton Copley, Mary Cassatt, and Cecilia Beaux. Several works tell local stories, such as Frederick E. Cohen’s painting of the Bentley Simons Runyan Family from Mansfield, Ohio and Sarah Mahan’s Ohio Star Signature Quilt, a poignant record of several generations of women from a 19th-century Oberlin family. While the AMAM does not actively collect Native North American art from this period, it has received gifts of Pueblo pottery, Navajo weavings, and Plains beadwork.

The AMAM’s collection of art from Central and South America spans both the pre-Hispanic and Spanish Colonial periods, with works produced by several cultures of ancient Mesoamerica and South America, as well as an 18th-century Jesuit cross from Cuzco, Peru.