The building began its life as the West Gymnasium on the UND campus, a solid brick structure that served students for decades before athletic facilities moved elsewhere. In 1989, the old gym was remodeled into exhibition space, and the museum settled into its permanent home. The transformation was not merely architectural. New York artist Barton Lidice Benes designed the gift shop and created the donor wall, constructing it in the style of his own shadow box museums -- miniature worlds encased behind glass. Since 2013, the museum has hosted an even more ambitious Benes project: a full reconstruction of the artist's New York City apartment, titled Barton's Place. Walking through it feels like stepping into a life organized entirely by creative obsession, transported wholesale from Manhattan to the northern prairie.

The museum's exhibition history reveals a deliberate tension between the global and the fiercely local. International contemporary shows rotate through the three galleries alongside work rooted in the specific landscape and history of North Dakota. Under the Whelming Tide documented the devastating 1997 Red River flood that inundated Grand Forks, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of the entire city. Fractured: North Dakota's Oil Boom examined the Bakken formation's transformation of the western part of the state. Songs for Spirit Lake, shown in two parts, engaged with the culture and experience of the Spirit Lake Tribe. In between, the galleries have hosted retrospectives of Robert Rauschenberg's four decades of works on paper and Rick Bartow's paintings exploring Indigenous identity. The range is the point: this is a museum that refuses to choose between the local and the cosmopolitan.

Outside, sculptor Richard Nonas designed the outdoor sculpture garden, adding a physical dimension that extends the museum beyond its gymnasium walls and into the North Dakota air. Inside, the programming extends well beyond the visual. The Sunday Concerts in the Gallery series runs from October to April, filling exhibition spaces with live music during the long northern winter. When summer arrives and daylight stretches past ten at night, Concerts in the Garden move performances outdoors. The museum also partners with the Empire Arts Center downtown for additional programming. Summer Kid's Art Camps, Family Days, adult classes, and a rural arts program that sends exhibitions touring across North Dakota ensure that the museum's reach extends far beyond the university campus and the city limits of Grand Forks.

A significant renovation added skylights to the former gymnasium, flooding the galleries with natural northern light -- the same diffuse, even illumination that painters have sought out for centuries. New flooring and windows completed the transformation, turning a building designed for physical education into one designed for visual contemplation. The permanent collection anchors the space. Alongside Campos Pons, Dyck, and Smith, the collection includes Azerbaijani photojournalist Rena Effendi and North Dakota painter Walter Piehl. It is a deliberately eclectic group, bridging continents and media, united by the museum's conviction that a converted gym on a prairie campus can hold art that matters to the wider world.