The collection began with one man's stubborn generosity. Howard Hinton, a retired Sydney shipping company director, started donating paintings to the Armidale Teachers' College in 1929, with a clear and ambitious aim: to illustrate, comprehensively, the development of Australian art from 1880 onward. He did not stop. By his death in 1948 he had given the college more than 1,000 works. Among them were landscapes by the masters of the Heidelberg School and the Sydney artists' camps, crowned by Arthur Streeton's plein-air sketches and, the jewel of the whole bequest, Tom Roberts's luminous Mosman's Bay of 1894. For decades these masterpieces hung in the open corridors of a working college, admired but unprotected, with no climate control and no curator.

By the 1970s it was clear the paintings needed rescuing. Works of national importance could not survive forever in the drafts and sunlight of college hallways. Chandler Coventry, the Armidale boy turned Sydney gallerist, became the driving force behind a proper museum, offering his own collection of some 300 contemporary works — described as one of the most important collections of contemporary Australian art — on the condition that a building be raised to house both his collection and Hinton's. The community rallied, and NERAM was built on crown land near the old teachers' college, the original home of the Hinton Trust. The New South Wales Premier, Neville Wran, formally opened it on 26 March 1983.

What sits inside is extraordinary for any town, let alone one this small. NERAM is custodian to several collections totalling more than 4,500 works, with particular strength in nineteenth and twentieth-century Australian art: the Hinton Collection of the 1880s to 1940s, the Coventry Collection of the 1960s and 70s, the ongoing NERAM Collection, the Armidale City Collection, and a Museum of Printing built around the historic F.T. Wimble type and equipment. The roll of artists reads like a survey of Australian art itself — Streeton, Roberts, Margaret Preston, Nora Heysen, Elioth Gruner, Brett Whiteley, James Gleeson, Tony Tuckson, and Christo. In 2018 the museum opened a permanent salon-hang of more than 130 of Hinton's finest works, prompting the verdict that NERAM had joined the top rank of galleries outside the capital cities.

Great art carries great burdens. By 2006 the museum's debt to the local council had climbed past 480,000 dollars, and a plan emerged to sell a half-share in the Roberts masterpiece Mosman's Bay — valued at 3.6 million dollars — to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, so the painting would spend alternate years in Armidale and Sydney. The proposal split the community between those who wanted the museum solvent and those determined to honour Hinton's intentions. The fight went to the Supreme Court in 2009, which ruled the painting could not be sold: Hinton's own trust deed protected it. NERAM cleared its debt instead through other sales, an anonymous 50,000-dollar gift, and the council's forgiveness of the remainder in 2016. Mosman's Bay stayed in Armidale, exactly as a long-dead shipping magnate had intended.