The museum was established in 1963 by then UCLA Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy as the Museum and Laboratories of Ethnic Arts and Technology. Its first home was in the basement of Haines Hall on the UCLA campus.

The goal of this new museum was to consolidate the various collections of non-Western art and artifacts on campus. In addition to active collecting, the museum initiated research projects, fieldwork, exhibitions and publications. In 1971 the name was changed to the Museum of Cultural History and by 1975 its collections, in numbers and in quality, ranked it among the top four university museums in the country, a stature it retains to the present day.

A large, state-of-the-art facility called the Fowler Museum of Cultural History opened on September 30, 1992, named in recognition of lead support by the Fowler Foundation and the family of collector and inventor Francis E. Fowler Jr. In 2006 the name of the Museum was formally changed to the Fowler Museum at UCLA.