The origins of the Ulrich collection go back to the 1920s, when WSU art instructor Elizabeth Sprague collected prints by regional printmakers for use in her classes. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the university accepted gifts from local donors and purchased prints from nationally prominent contemporary artists using Student Privilege Funds. When the museum was founded in 1974, the 250 works owned by the university became the core of the WSU Foundation art collection. Martin H. Bush, the founding director of the museum, collected aggressively, beginning with the purchase of Chaim Gross's Happy Mother for the outdoor sculpture collection. He solicited and received large gifts of entire collections, including the Edwin A. Ulrich collection of paintings and drawings by Frederick Judd Waugh and Samuel Bell Waugh, and the studio contents of sculptor Charles Grafly. The rapid and omnivorous growth of the collection during this early period, typical of many fledgling institutions, has resulted in a very large collection with several distinct areas of excellence. The museum is best known nationally and internationally for its outdoor sculpture collection, a group of more than sixty 20^th-century monumental works installed across the university's 330-acre campus that includes works by Henry Moore, Auguste Rodin, Louise Nevelson, George Rickey, Luis Jiménez, and Scott Burton. Complementing this collection is a large group of important modern and contemporary art, representing such key figures as Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, and Georges Roualt. The Urlich also holds the world's largest collection of works by esteemed American seascape painter Frederick Judd Waugh and his father, portrait painter Samuel Bell Waugh, as well as several hundred plaster models and drawings by American Beaux-Arts sculptor Charles Grafly donated by the artist's daughter. Portions of the collection are always on exhibition. Legal title to the museum's collection is held by the Wichita State University Foundation, a private, not-for-profit entity that exists solely to support the programs of Wichita State University. A substantial acquisition endowment allows the Ulrich to shape its modern and contemporary collection (particularly in the field of monumental sculpture) with judicious purchases.

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