The museum began its activity in 1929 when the building on today’s Piłsudskiego Street was donated for this purpose by the local patrician family and art collectors, the Koschwitz family. The building, which was a non-style villa, housed rich collections, mostly donations from the citizens of Jawor, craft organizations, the Rifle Brotherhood, including the target of the shooting brotherhood in Jawor from 1811, as well as church institutions. It was a typical Regional Museum, created following the model of widely spread cabinets of curiosities and natural history museums in 19th-century Germany.
After World War II, the museum resumed its activity in 1949. In 1964, the museum was moved to the Gothic complex of the Bernardine Fathers dating from the late 15th century. The complex consists of the Church of Our Lady and the monastery, which was adapted for museum purposes during renovations from 1976 to 1986. Constructed from stone and brick, the church is a late Gothic hall-style building with three aisles. The division of the interior into aisles is formed by slender pillars. The building has an interesting facade divided by windows and embrasures, decorated with pinnacles. Valuable 16th-century polychromes were discovered inside during the renovation. The monastery section adjacent to the church was funded by Jan v. Wardein at the turn of the 15th/16th century. The monastery with an inner courtyard (cloister) is built in a quadrilateral shape, from which an arcade gallery runs eastward, ending in a defensive tower protruding beyond a section of the city’s former defensive wall, behind which is a well-preserved section of the moat. The monastery underwent various historical periods and often changed occupants. The church, after its consecration in 1489, was used by the order, and during the Reformation period, it was used by the Evangelical-Augsburg congregation. The last monks left the monastery after the dissolution of the order in 1811. From that moment until 1945, the church served as workshops, warehouses, an armory, and a carriage house, among other purposes.
Since 1994, the Monastery Church has housed the Gallery of Silesian Sacred Art, which consists of sculptures and paintings. In the monastery section, exhibitions have been on display since 1986, mainly showcasing the collections of the Jawor Museum, as well as collections from other museums, private collectors, and works by contemporary Polish and foreign artists. The museum has been organizing the International Artistic Workshops and Exhibition of Visual Arts of the Euroregion Nysa since 1997. It also carries out extensive educational activities, including museum lessons, lectures, historical and artistic competitions, poetry evenings, and concerts. Since 1995, it has organized an international chamber music festival called “Jaworskie Koncerty Pokoju” (Jawor Peace Concerts). Check out the program http://koncertypokoju.pl/
