Artists in the permanent collection include Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Tom Otterness, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Bruce Nauman, William Wegman, Nancy Graves, Dale Chihuly, Arthur Dove, Louise Bourgeois, Andrew Wyeth, Fairfield Porter, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank Stella, Lesley Dill, Romare Bearden, Christian Boltanski, Robert Mapplethorpe, Garry Winogrand, Barbara Grad, Kojo Griffin, Jim Hodges, Wayne Thiebaud, Peter Anton, Hung Liu, Marcus Jansen, and Stephen Scott Young.

In 2000, the museum received 15 works by artists including the photographer Nan Goldin from the collection of Peter Norton.

The museum opened in 1994 with an exhibition of rare early series of 28 watercolors by Georgia O'Keeffe, known as the "Canyon Suite" (1916–1918), that had never been shown publicly as a group.

[5][6] Kemper Museum’s 23,200-square-foot concrete, steel, and glass building, constructed from 1992 to 1994 at a cost of $6.6 million, was designed by architect Gunnar Birkerts.

San Francisco Chronicle noted that Birkerts “used concrete, glass and steel in ways that seemed to flow, almost as if shaped by hand”.