The Weatherspoon Art Museum is located at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in the southeast with a focus on American art. Its programming includes fifteen or more exhibitions per year, year-round educational activities, and scholarly publications. The Weatherspoon Art Museum was accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1995 and earned reaccreditation status in 2005.
Founded in 1941 by Gregory Ivy, first head of the Art Department at Woman’s College (now UNCG), the Woman’s College Art Gallery opened in a former physics lab in the McIver Building, making it the first art gallery within The University of North Carolina system. [1] The following year, the gallery was officially named in honor of Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon, an art educator and Woman’s College alumna, and the sister of the college’s late president Charles Duncan McIver. [2] Over the course of seventy years, the Weatherspoon has grown from a teaching gallery to a fully accredited professional museum.
In 1985, the Weatherspoon received funding to construct the Anne and Benjamin Cone Building. Occupying a majority of the 42,000-square-foot building designed by Romaldo Giurgola of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in Philadelphia and New York, the Weatherspoon features six galleries, a sculpture garden, atrium, auditorium, and two storage vaults, in addition to other features shared with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Department of Art.
From its inception, the Weatherspoon has focused on building a permanent collection of modern and contemporary art. Numbering close to 6,000 artworks, primarily American, the permanent collection represents all major art movements from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. [3] Work by Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Huma Bhabha, Knox Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, John Marin, Alexander Calder, Robert Henri, Cindy Sherman, Sol Le Witt, Louise Nevelson, Eva Hesse, and Andy Warhol are included. Other collection highlights include The Dillard Collection of Art on Paper; the Etta and Claribel Cone Collection; the Lenoir C. Wright Collection of Japanese Prints; and The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States.
Since 1965, the Weatherspoon Art Museum has received corporate funding from the Dillard Paper Company—now xpedx—to present Art on Paper, a biennial exhibition that features regional, national and international artists who have produced significant works made on or of paper. [4] Through the Dillard Fund, the collection of works on paper purchased from those shows numbers close to 550 objects and includes work by Louise Bourgeois, Brice Marden, Knox Martin, Joan Mitchell, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Eva Hesse, and Amy Cutler.
In 1950, 242 works of art were given through a bequest from Etta and Dr. Claribel Cone. The collection features prints and bronzes by Henri Matisse as well as a large number of modern prints and drawings, including works by Pablo Picasso, Felix Valloton, Raoul Dufy and John Graham. [5]
Dr. Lenoir C. Wright, a professor emeritus at UNCG before his death in 2003, systematically built a collection of Japanese prints initially as a teaching tool and later gave his collection to the Weatherspoon Art Museum. The Wright Collection of Japanese woodblock prints numbers over 500 works of art and includes major printmakers such as Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Yoshitoshi. [6] The collection was the focus of a major traveling exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue by Dr. Allen Hockley of Dartmouth College.
In 2008 the Weatherspoon Art Museum was selected as the North Carolina museum to receive 50 works on paper from the collection of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. With the help of the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the couple gave 2,500 works from their collection of 4,000+ to public institutions throughout the nation, calling the program The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. [7] The Vogels’ donation to the Weatherspoon includes the work of Stephen Antonakos, Robert Barry, Lynda Benglis, Charles Clough, Don Hazlitt, Ralph Iwamoto, Bill Jensen, Alain Kirili, Michael Lucero, Lucio Pozzi, Edda Renouf, Judy Rifka, Lori Taschler and Richard Tuttle.
The Weatherspoon's sculpture garden features 7,000 square feet of natural plantings, flowers and shrubs, and showcases work by modern and contemporary artists including Elie Nadelman, George Rickey, Dan Graham, Deborah Butterfield, and Antony Gormley.
The Falk Visiting Artist program, named after and supported by an endowment from benefactors Herbert and Louise Falk, was launched in 1982. A collaboration between the Weatherspoon and the UNCG Art Department, the program brings nationally and internationally renowned artists to campus. In both the Fall and Spring semesters, the Weatherspoon organizes an exhibition of the visiting artist’s work and, during a several-day residency, s/he makes studio visits with MFA graduate students and presents a public lecture to the Greensboro and campus communities.
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is a public research university in Greensboro, North Carolina. It is part of the University of North Carolina system. Like all members of the UNC system, UNCG is a stand-alone university and awards its own degrees. It is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges to award baccalaureate, masters, specialist and doctoral degrees. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
Romaldo "Aldo" Giurgola AO was an Italian academic, architect, professor, and author. Giurgola was born in Rome, Italy in 1920. After service in the Italian armed forces during World War II, he was educated at the Sapienza University of Rome. He studied architecture at the University of Rome, completing the equivalent of a B.Arch. with honors in 1949. That same year, he moved to the United States and received a master's degree in architecture from Columbia University. In 1954, Giurgola accepted a position as an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Shortly thereafter, Giurgola formed Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in Philadelphia with Ehrman B. Mitchell in 1958. In 1966, Giurgola became chair of the Columbia University School of Architecture and Planning in New York City, where he opened a second office of the firm. In 1980 under Giurgola's direction, the firm won an international competition to design a new Australian parliament building. Giurgola moved to Canberra, Australia to oversee the project. In 1989, after its completion and official opening in 1988, the Parliament House was recognized with the top award for public architecture in Australia.
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, is an art museum that was founded in 1914. The BMA's collection of 95,000 objects encompasses more than 1,000 works by Henri Matisse anchored by the Cone Collection of modern art, as well as one of the nation's finest holdings of prints, drawings, and photographs. The galleries currently showcase collections of art from Africa; works by established and emerging contemporary artists; European and American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts; ancient Antioch mosaics; art from Asia, and textiles from around the world.
Damien Smith is a Canadian artist.
Claribel Cone (1864–1929) and Etta Cone (1870–1949), collectively known as the Cone sisters, were active as American art collectors, world travelers, and socialites during the first part of the 20th century. Claribel trained as a physician and Etta as a pianist. Their social circle included Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. They gathered one of the best known collections of modern art in the United States at their Baltimore apartments, and the collection now makes up a wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Their collection was estimated to be worth almost a billion US dollars in 2002.
Robe violette et Anémones is a 1937 painting by Henri Matisse featuring a woman wearing a purple robe sitting next to a vase of anemones.
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro University Libraries system has two branches on campus, both located in Greensboro, NC. These include the Walter Clinton Jackson Library and the Harold Schiffman Music Library. Affiliated campus libraries include the Teaching Resource Center and SELF Design Studio in the School of Education, the Interior Architecture Library in the Gatewood Studio Arts Building, and the Intercultural Resource Center located in the Elliot University Center. During the fall and spring semesters, Jackson Library provides a 24/5 study space for UNCG students, faculty and staff with UNCG ID from 12 am Monday – 7:00 am Friday. Michael A. Crumpton is the current Interim Dean of the libraries.
Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She received a degree in fashion design at Parsons School of Design in 1969 and a BFA in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works. Her career has three distinct phases: The use of cloth and clothing forms from 1974 to 1981; Hollow cast metal clothing-figure forms from 1982 until 1991; and carved full-figure statues made of wood, cloth, clay, foam and hair beginning in 1990 to present.
David Reed is a contemporary American conceptual and visual artist.
Herbert Vogel and Dorothy Vogel, once described as "proletarian art collectors," worked as civil servants in New York City for more than a half-century while amassing what has been called one of the most important post-1960s art collections in the United States, mostly of minimalist and conceptual art. Herbert Vogel died on July 22, 2012, in a Manhattan nursing home.
Carol Lorraine Sutton is a multidisciplinary artist born in Norfolk, Virginia, USA and now living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is a painter whose works on canvas and paper have been shown in 32 solo exhibits as well as being included in 94 group shows. Her work, which ranges from complete abstraction to the use of organic and architectural images, relates to the formalist ideas of Clement Greenberg and is noted for the use of color. Some of Sutton paintings have been related to ontology.
Arnold Doren (1935–2003) was an American photographer.
Alvin D. Loving Jr., better known as Al Loving, was an African-American abstract expressionist painter. His work is known for hard-edge abstraction, fabric constructions, and large paper collages, all exploring complicated color relationships.
Lenoir C. Wright was an American academic and attorney who taught Asian history and culture at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Adelyn Dohme Breeskin (1896–1986) was an American curator, museum director, and art historian known for her longtime leadership of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Mary Cassatt scholarship.
David Christopher Newton was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, draftsman, and college art teacher. Newton was born in 1953 in Oakland, California. He lived and worked in California, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and North Carolina with his wife Suzanne McBride Newton. He died in 2011 after battling colon and liver cancer.
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Beverly McIver is a contemporary artist, mostly known for her self-portraits, who was born and raised in Greensboro, NC. She is currently the Esbenshade Professor of the Practice of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University.
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