“The Fowler is the most relevant museum in Los Angeles.”
Harold Williams, president emeritus, The J. Paul Getty Trust

The Fowler Museum at UCLA is the only museum in Los Angeles exclusively dedicated to exploring non-Western arts and cultures, past and present. Exhibitions and programs cover a wide range of global artistic expression, from historic traditions to contemporary work by artists from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Native and Latin America, and their respective diasporas. They are intended to excite, instruct, involve, and challenge visitors in the exploration of global artistic expression and to promote lifelong learning. Since 2002, the Fowler is one of the few museums in Los Angeles to be free of charge to all visitors.

The Museum comprises a 100,000-sq.-ft. state-of-the-art facility that houses its renowned collections and programs. The complex includes five galleries, research, storage, and conservation facilities, classrooms, a 325-seat auditorium, a lush interior courtyard/garden and reception area, and an amphitheater.

The Fowler Museum was created at UCLA in 1963 to consolidate the multicultural collections on campus and to make them accessible to the University community and the general public. Since then, it has grown to house one of the most significant collections of non-Western arts anywhere, totaling more than 150,000 works and spanning some 4,000 years. From Yoruba beaded arts of Southern Nigeria and pre-Columbian ceramic vessels of Peru, to the batik textiles of Indonesia and papier-mâché sculptures of Mexico, the Fowler’s collections offer a comprehensive resource for exhibitions and scholarship central to the Museum’s mandate. Cross-disciplinary, humanities-based research is integral to the Fowler’s mission and exhibitions showcase the most up-to-date research on a geographical area, culture, and/or artistic phenomenon. A schedule of innovative changing exhibitions complements the Museum's newly opened longterm installation entitled “Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives,” which features more than 250 stellar objects from the permanent collections. The Fowler’s publications are distributed internationally by the University of Washington Press. One hundred and two books have been published by the Museum since its founding in 1963.

Twelve Fowler exhibitions have traveled to 25 museums during the past seven years including the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; American Museum of Natural History, New York; Textile Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum for African Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe; Miami Art Museum; Field Museum, Chicago; and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, among others. Over the past decade, Fowler traveling exhibitions have been seen by more than five million people outside of the Los Angeles area.