The museum and the Emily Lowe Gallery were established in 1963, and have been an active presence in the university for more than 50 years.

[1] The Hofstra University Museum holds a collection of more than 5,000 art and ethnographic objects dating from 1,500 BCE to the contemporary period and representing six continents.

The collections have grown primarily through gifts since the founding of Hofstra University in 1935, prior to the establishment of the museum, and there have been many local contributors to the museum's collections.

The Hofstra University Museum owns an early Gauguin oil painting, Portrait of a Woman (1881–82), works by George Grosz, Conrad Felixmüller, Johan Barthold Jongkind, John Thomas Peele, Georges Rouault, Joseph Stella, Jane Peterson, and Alfred Maurer.

Photographs in the collection include works of Berenice Abbott, Lucien Clergue, Danny Lyon, August Sander, Andy Warhol, and Edward Weston.