McMullen Museum of Art is the university art museum of Boston College in Brighton, Massachusetts, near the main campus in Chestnut Hill.
McMullen Museum of Art is the university art museum of Boston College in Brighton, Massachusetts, near the main campus in Chestnut Hill.
The museum, which opened in Devlin Hall in 1993, was officially named The Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art in 1996 in honor of the parents of the Boston College benefactor, trustee and art collector John J. McMullen. [1]
In September 2016, the museum relocated to 2101 Commonwealth Avenue on Boston College's Brighton Campus. [2] [3] [4] The new facility features nearly two times the exhibition space of its previous location in Devlin Hall, state-of-the art lighting, movable walls, humidity and climate control, and extensive storage for the museum's growing permanent collection. [5]
Despite being a university art museum residing on a college campus, the McMullen Museum of Art organizes multidisciplinary exhibitions that have received national and international recognition. Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times has written that it is in the vanguard of museums creating exhibitions that "reach far beyond traditional art history", providing political, historical, and cultural context for works on view. [6]
The Museum holds an extensive permanent collection that spans the history of art from Europe, Asia and the Americas, and has significant representation of Gothic and Baroque tapestries, Italian paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries, and American paintings of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Well-known artists represented in the museum include Amedeo Modigliani, Frank Stella, Françoise Gilot, Alexander Ney, and John La Farge.
In 2021, the investor and philanthropist Peter Lynch donated 27 paintings and drawings to the museum, including works by Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Pablo Picasso. [7] Lynch also committed $5 million to support the curation of the works, which will become the museum's Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection. [7]
The McMullen Museum has hosted more than sixty exhibitions over two decades. [8] They have been curated by both internal teams of scholars from the Boston College and international specialists. Being a university museum, the focus of the exhibitions is the generation of new knowledge in all disciplinary fields of art history.
Recent significant exhibitions include:
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Orchid and Hummingbirds near a Mountain Lake is a painting by Martin Johnson Heade, which he completed sometime between 1875 and 1890. Some scholars see the sensual depiction of the orchid and the nearly touching beaks of the birds as conveying romantic or even sexual overtones. Others see Heade's interest in orchids and hummingbirds as an exploration of dominance and survival in nature, perhaps inspired by Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory. The work is now in the collection of the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, having been donated as part of the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch collection.
