Over time, the museum occupied several different buildings, including the Onondaga Savings Bank and the Syracuse Public Library, but it outgrew each facility.

[2] In 1941, Helen Everson made a gift of $1 million to the city of Syracuse for the purpose of erecting an art museum.

[3] In 1916, The Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts acquired a group of thirty-two works by renowned Syracuse-based potter Adelaide Alsop Robineau.

After Robineau's death in 1929, the museum acquired a second group of her porcelains, including the famed Scarab Vase, whose carving reportedly took more than 1000 hours.

In 1932, Museum director Anna Wetherill Olmsted founded the Ceramic National exhibitions as a tribute to Robineau.

Purchase prizes were given to artists each year, which added pieces by such artists as Waylande Gregory, Maija Grotell, Marguerite Wildenhain, Peter Voulkos, Otto and Vivika Heino, Maria Martinez, Gertrud and Otto Natzler, and Robert Turner to the museum's collection.

[2] Paintings include one of Gilbert Stuart's portraits of George Washington, Edward Hicks's The Peaceable Kingdom, and works by Eastman Johnson, Charles Burchfield, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock and others as well as outdoors sculptures (Marja Vallila).

In 1980 the Everson introduced Ching Ho Cheng's "Intimate Illuminations", the first Chinese-American contemporary painter to exhibit a one-man show nationally.

In September 2020, the Everson’s board of trustees unanimously voted to remove and sell a Jackson Pollock painting from the museum’s collection under a practice known as “deaccessioning.”[10] The deaccessioned painting, entitled “Red Composition, 1946,” features Pollock’s signature paint-splatter technique on a bright red canvas.

[11] Director Elizabeth Dunbar stated that proceeds from the sale would be used to “fight racism inside and outside our walls” by purchasing art created by members of underrepresented communities.