Collection

The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library’s Permanent collection has upwards of 4500 art objects, artifacts, rare books, maps and historical local documents resulting from over 100 years of nurturing relationships with donors, artists, collectors and benefactors including the Friends of the Library, who annually help fund art purchases, exhibit expenses, restoration costs and gallery infrastructure.

Major collecting areas include but are not limited to: regional paintings and prints, American contemporary ceramics, glass paperweights, West African decorative arts, southwest reliquary woodcarvings and 19th-century Chinese decorative arts. We are currently in the painstaking process of converting more than a century of acquisition records from paper to a digital database using MuseumPlus.

For more information, contact Zan Popp, Collections Manager.