What treasures might be lurking in storage at the Allentown Art Museum? We invite you to experience Eclectic Collecting, a delightful romp through some of the lesser-known areas of our collection. From gemstones and seventeenth-century German tankards to ancient Pompeian oil jars, this exhibition celebrates wonderful and unusual artworks that don’t often make it on display.

Like most museums, we are only able to exhibit a small fraction of our collections at a time. With more than twenty thousand objects in our holdings, spatial limitations are a factor—as well as the need to limit light exposure for fragile materials.

Eclectic Collecting explores the changing goals that have informed the Museum’s collecting priorities past and present, and offers opportunities for visitor responses as well as playful participation.