The university began exploring selling parts of its art collection in 2023, to significant controversy and adverse legal action, and closed the museum in the summer of 2024.

[2] In February 2023, The Brauer came under fire for plans to sell three major works from its collection—Mountain Landscape by Frederic Edwin Church, The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate by Childe Hassam, and Rust Red Hills by Georgia O'Keeffe—to fund improvements to a Valparaiso University dormitory.

The Brauer Museum of Art holds 150 photographs and seven silkscreen prints by Andy Warhol, including an iconic soup can painting.

[5] The museum also holds early modernist paintings by John Marin, Walt Kuhn and Georgia O'Keeffe.

Other contemporary works include artists such as Elaine de Kooning, Ed Paschke, Chuck Close, Diego Lasansky,[6] Dale Chihuly, Frank Dudley John Himmelfarb, and Ansel Adams.