The Atlantic had a thoughtful piece today about college art museums shifting away from their traditional role as teaching museums to becoming tourist destinations in their own right: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/11/why-do-colleges-have-so-much-art/506039/. Indeed, when we visited Bowdoin last year, I was more impressed by the art museum and its exhibition of paintings depicting “Night” than any other building on campus.
While Do Ho Suh’s “Fallen Star” is justly acclaimed, you’d be surprised by how uniformly strong UC San Diego’s outdoor art collection is. Regrettably, despite the re-opening of Davis Museum this fall, Wellesley is mentioned only in the context of the outcry over “Sleepwalker” (Wellesley will never live that down).
Are there are other college museums/collections worth seeking as we gear up for college visits for D2? I’m thinking of lesser known gems …
Williams has an excellent museum. [Williams WCMA Walls](http://wcmawalls.williams.edu/) actually allows students to borrow artwork for display in their dorm rooms (!)
The Clark and Mass MOCA are also in close proximity
Thanks, @winnvanmeter, for posting the Atlantic article.
I wouldn’t call Williams’ art and art history prowess “lesser known” but the Clark and MassMoCA definitely belong on the list of destination museums on or near college campuses.
Both have stellar permanent collections, worldclass exhibitions and starchitect designed buildings, Tadao Ando for the Clark and Simeon Bruner with input from Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi and David Childs for MassMoCA.
Williams College Museum of Art is also impressive in its own right. Quite a few curators and directors of college museums all over the country were influenced by these museums during their time at Williams.
I would also mention Skidmore’s Tang Museum and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
The above list by tk21769 is a good one. When touring smaller colleges with my kids I’d always head off to the art museum to get a sense of the school (my kids would go in a different direction to get their own impressions ) and was immensely impressed with so many of them. Vassar and Brandeis were personal highlights but Bowdoin, Colby, Skidmore, and Smith were also great. Of course the granddaddy of them all is the Yale collection.
One factor to consider is not only a university’s own holdings, but easy access to museums elsewhere in the area. Cleveland’s MoA (mentioned above) is one example. Another is the Baltimore Museum of Art, adjacent to JHU, which also is pretty close to the Walters gallery and to one of the best art schools in the East (MICA). Harvard’s museums, besides being among the best university collections in their own right, are close to the MFA and other great collections in the Boston-Cambridge area.
Clearly, we need to visit Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
@tk21769 - Thanks for the list. I’m glad to see that the Weisman at U-M was featured - I think the Korean furniture collection is unparalleled among college museums.
@Erin’s Dad - We hardly knew anything about Case Western before our visit, and came back as proselytizers.
@momrath - I second that. Williams/The Berkshires has more than its fair share of world-class cultural assets.
The LACs in SoCal suffer in comparison. I don’t believe that Oxy has a permanent collection of visual art, much less a building. That would be a dealbreaker for me.
On a related note, the keeper of the Booth School’s collection, Dr. Canice Prendergast, is also credited with developing the auction model that enabled Feeding America to schedule deliveries to regional food banks more efficiently. Talk about a Renaissance man.
Williams and Amherst both have very nice museums for their size Williams also has a couple of other excellent art museums nearby, while Amherst has the impressive Smith College museum nearby. I was impressed by the Amherst museum for a different reason - it is kept open to students every night until midnight as a study space. So you can do your homework under the gaze of a Winslow Homer, which is pretty cool.
Boston, NYC, and DC are great museum cities and also home to excellent universities.
Ditto for Chicago. In addition to UChicago’s own holdings (including Booth’s, mentioned above), there’s the nearby Museum of Science and Industry. A little farther away is the Field Museum of Natural History and the Art Institute of Chicago. Don’t overlook the wonderful used book stores (like Powell’s) in Hyde Park.
One really interesting micro-museum if one ever gets to Dublin, is the Trinity College Zoological museum. It is currently closed but re-opens in May 2017.
^ Thanks for the link. I wonder if college museums collaborate on traveling exhibitions? Bringing “Reality” to the Hammer or USC or the CA Museum of African American History would be something.
Middlebury’s museum isn’t on par with Amherst and Williams’ offerings, but the nearby Shelburne is easily worth a two-day visit for the circus train and the current circus poster exhibition alone.
) and was immensely impressed with so many of them. Vassar and Brandeis were personal highlights but Bowdoin, Colby, Skidmore, and Smith were also great. Of course the granddaddy of them all is the Yale collection.