Northern Norway Art Museum
Art museum for the Norwegian north, in a 1917 post office building on the Tromso waterfront.
The Northern Norway Art Museum, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, was established as a foundation on 1 November 1985 to collect and show the visual art of the Norwegian north. Since 2001 it has occupied Sjogata 1 in central Tromso, a building designed in 1917 by Soren Andreas Wiese-Opsahl for the post and telegraph services and later used as a police station. The museum has since added a site in Bodo, in the former savings bank of 2025, and a small gallery at Longyearbyen on Svalbard.
The permanent collection holds more than 2,250 works from the late eighteenth century to the present, including paintings by Peder Balke and Adelsteen Normann, and works by Harriet Backer, Anna-Eva Bergman and Olav Christopher Jenssen. Sami art and contemporary practice are central to the programme, and Joar Nango's travelling library of Sami architecture, Girjegumpi, is now housed here. The museum was named Norwegian museum of the year in 2017 and is a partner in the Tromso Kulturkvartal planned for 2028.
Highlights
- Collection of more than 2,250 works of northern Norwegian art
- Paintings by Peder Balke and Adelsteen Normann of Arctic landscapes
- Girjegumpi, Joar Nango's library of Sami architecture
- Housed in a 1917 post and telegraph building by Wiese-Opsahl
