Established | 1870 |
---|---|
Location | 20 Elm Street Northampton, Massachusetts |
Coordinates | 42°19′07″N72°38′11″W / 42.3185°N 72.6364°W |
Type | Art museum |
Accreditation | American Alliance of Museums |
Director | Jessica Nicoll |
Architect | Polshek Partnership Architects |
Owner | Smith College |
Website | Official website |
The Smith College Museum of Art, abbreviated SCMA, is the art museum of Smith College, located in Northampton, Massachusetts. First established in 1870, the museum is part of the American Alliance of Museums, Five College Consortium, and Museums10 consortiums. [1]
Throughout the years, the museum collection has expanded to include nearly 25,000 works of art, including a diverse collection of non-Western art. [2] The institution is widely known for its collection of American and European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including works by Albert Bierstadt, Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Georges Seurat, and representation of many other notable artists.
The Smith College Museum of Art was first established in 1870, and has been led by many notable directors over the years, including Jere Abbott, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Charles Percy Parkhurst, and Jessica Nicoll.
The Brown Fine Arts Center opened in 2003 after a two-year, $35 million building renovation, and now houses the art library, Art Department, as well as the Smith College Museum of Art. Designed by the New York-based Polshek Partnership Architects, the 164,000-gross-square-foot (15,236m²) building was created to link the college with its neighboring community. [3]
Housed in the Brown Center, the Art Department of Smith College offers art history degrees, frst initiated by President Laurenus Clark Seelye in the 1870s, has evolved to become one of the most respected programs in American undergraduate education. Notable faculty members have included Harriet Boyd Hawes, Oliver Larkin, Charles Rufus Morey, Phyllis Williams Lehmann, and Edgar Wind. At the tenth Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art, which took place in Rome in 1912, Smith was one of the only sixty-eight American institutions of higher learning with a professorship in art history. [4] The museum is often utilized as a learning space for students, especially those who enroll in art-related courses.
The Smith College Museum of Art has an extensive collection, which includes paintings, sculptures, works on paper, antiquities, decorative arts from diverse cultures around the world. [5] The museum has four floors of galleries that house the permanent collection, as well as the Cunningham Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. [6] The center houses more than 1,600 drawings and over 5,700 photographs spanning the history of the museum, and an extensive collection of more than 8,000 prints by old masters to contemporary printmakers. In addition, the museum also features two bathrooms designed by artists Ellen Driscoll and Sandy Skoglund to represent functional art. [7]
Reflective of diverse student body of the college and campaigns to raise awareness of underrepresented groups of women, the museum has been actively procuring artworks by female artists and female artists of color. Notable figures represented include Carmen Lomas Garza, Susan Rothenberg, Betye Saar, and Marja Vallila. [8]
Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the first and oldest art museum and art school in the United States.
Sir Charles Robert Saumarez Smith is a British cultural historian specialising in the history of art, design and architecture. He was the Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 2007 until he stepped down in 2018. He was replaced by Axel Rϋger, who took up the position in 2019.
The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design is the professional art school of the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1878, the school is housed in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the oldest private cultural institution in Washington, located on The Ellipse, facing the White House. The Corcoran School is part of GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and was formerly an independent college, until 2014.
Lowery Stokes Sims is an American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art known for her expertise in the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native and Asian American artists such as Wifredo Lam, Fritz Scholder, Romare Bearden, Joyce J. Scott and others. She served on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She has frequently served as a guest curator, lectured internationally and published extensively, and has received many public appointments. Sims was featured in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.
The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is a college-affiliated art museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is located on the Williams College campus, close to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Clark Art Institute. Its growing collection encompasses more than 14,000 works, with particular strengths in contemporary art, photography, prints, and Indian painting. The museum is free and open to the public.
Roger Brown was an American artist and painter. Often associated with the Chicago Imagist groups, he was internationally known for his distinctive painting style and shrewd social commentaries on politics, religion, and art.
Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903–1987) was an American architectural historian, and for many years a professor at Smith College and New York University. His writings helped to define the characteristics of modernist architecture.
Saira Wasim is a contemporary artist from Lahore, Pakistan. She currently lives in United States. Wasim uses the miniature style of painting, pioneered by the Persians but extensively used in South Asia, to make primarily political and cultural art. Wasim's art has been shown in a number of museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Asian Art Museum.
The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design is an art museum integrated with the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, US. The museum was co-founded with the school in 1877. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the United States, and has seven curatorial departments.
The Reading Public Museum is a museum in Reading, Pennsylvania located in the 18th Ward, along the Wyomissing Creek. The museum's permanent collection mainly focuses on art, science, and civilization and contains over 280,000 objects. It also has a planetarium and a 25-acre (100,000 m2) arboretum.
Charles Percy Parkhurst was an American museum curator best known for his work on the Roberts Commission, tracking down art looted during World War II.
Jere Abbott was an American art historian and museum director. Abbott was the founding associate director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from 1929 to 1932, and director of the Smith College Museum of Art from 1932 to 1946.
Mark Lindquist is an American sculptor in wood, artist, author, and photographer. Lindquist is a major figure in the redirection and resurgence of woodturning in the United States beginning in the early 1970s. His communication of his ideas through teaching, writing, and exhibiting, has resulted in many of his pioneering aesthetics and techniques becoming common practice. In the exhibition catalog for a 1995 retrospective of Lindquist's works at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, his contributions to woodturning and wood sculpture are described as "so profound and far-reaching that they have reconstituted the field". He has often been credited with being the first turner to synthesize the disparate and diverse influences of the craft field with that of the fine arts world.
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The Colby College Museum of Art is an art museum on the campus of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Founded in 1959 and now comprising five wings, nearly 8,000 works and more than 38,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Colby College Museum of Art has built a collection that specializes in American and contemporary art with additional, select collections of Chinese antiquities and European paintings and works on paper. The museum serves as a teaching resource for Colby College and is a major cultural destination for the residents of Maine and visitors to the state.
Abbott Lawrence Pattison was an American sculptor and abstract artist.
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Carol Brown Goldberg is an American artist working in a variety of media. While primarily a painter creating heavily detailed work as large as 10 feet by 10 feet, she is also known for sculpture, film, and drawing. Her work has ranged from narrative genre paintings to multi-layered abstractions to realistic portraits to intricate gardens and jungles.
Jessica F. Nicoll is an American museum director and curator and an authority on American art and culture. She serves as Director and Louise Ines Doyle '34 Chief Curator of the Smith College Museum of Art. She was previously the Chief Curator and Curator of American Art of the Portland Museum of Art.