Exhibitions expanded and in 1941 TFAA presented Southwestern Oils, featuring works and a lecture series given by noted artist Maynard Dixon, hinted of its imminent growth into a major new art museum.

These gifts included significant collections of pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial, and Western American art donated by Mr. and Mrs. Clay Lockett, Mr.and Mrs. John Frikart, as well as Mr. Thomas and Mrs. Cele Peterson.

The largest donation was from Frederick R. Pleasants, whose pre-Columbian collection,"features nearly 600 objects including jewelry, ceremonial vessels, figurines, masks, sculptures, textiles, and feather arts.

The exhibition featured works by Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse, as well as works by Mary Cassatt, Lynn Chadwick, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Csaky, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Raoul Dufy, Paul Gauguin, Alberto Giacometti, Francisco Goya, Oskar Kokoschka, Jacques Lipchitz, Édouard Manet, Amedeo Modigliani, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Diego Rivera, Egon Schiele, Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Andy Warhol and Max Weber.

The Latin America collection includes pre-Columbian art produced by Native Americans prior to the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century.

A donation of ninety-two objects from the Lawrence J. Heller collection of European and American modernists added works by Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Max Weber, William Baziotes, Jacques Lipchitz, and Marino Marini.

[8] The contemporary collection includes works by John Chamberlain, Chuck Close, Chuck Connelly (Bridge to Nowhere, 1988), Vernon Fisher, Jane Hammond, Jasper Johns, Robert Mangold, Olivier Mosset, Miriam Schapiro, James Turrell, and William T. Wiley, and contemporary artists of Arizona including; Barbara Rogers, James Pringle Cook, Jim Waid, and Bailey Doogan.

The collection spans 200 years and includes works by Native American artists Maria Poveka Martinez, Emmi Whitehorse, and Fritz Scholder; and late 19th and early 20th century American West painters Charles Marion Russell, Rudolf Cronau, and Maynard Dixon; and contemporary Western artists Howard Post, Ed Mell, and Bill Schenck.