On the Road

In addition to the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum’s reputation as an established teaching institution, the Museum is also recognized for both the quality and diversity of its collection. It is pleased to accommodate the requests of not only museums within the Five College consortium, but institutions across the globe, that wish to borrow objects from the Permanent Collection for temporary loans. Each year, the Museum thus contributes to a number of off-site and traveling exhibitions, embracing this continuous opportunity to share its collection with a broader audience and, at the same time, bringing artwork to the backyards of alumnae both near and far.

Loans provided during the 2008-2009 academic year:

From the Museum's rich holdings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York requested the loan of the narrative silk hand-scroll Spring Morning at Yanji, by Wang Hui (Chinese, 1632-1717) for their Fall 2008 exhibition Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717). This historic exhibition was the Metropolitan’s first to focus on the works of a solo Chinese painter; the ground-breaking exhibition was positively reviewed in the New York Times article Master of Many Styles and Many Mentors.

When My Ship Comes Sin, a collage by the Beat-era San Francisco artist known as Jess (American, 1923-2004) joined a traveling exhibition organized by Independent Curators International and curated by Mount Holyoke College alumna Ingrid Schaffner (Class of 1983), Senior Curator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art. This captivating collage of newspaper and magazine clippings was one of 50 objects demonstrating the relationship between fine art and the printed word in an exhibition that toured four major venues between March 2008 and April 2009.

Local collaborations have included the loan of the cast bronze Portrait of Maria Lani, 1928, by Chana Orloff (French, 1888-1968), to the Bruce Museum of Greenwich, Connecticut, for their exhibition Paris Portraits: Artists, Friends, and Lovers, Fall 2008. Additionally, The Smith College Museum of Art borrowed two objects from the European collection for their summer 2008 exhibition Beautiful Britain: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Landscapes. The watercolor Landscape with Bridge by David Cox the Elder (British, 1783-1859) and the graphite drawing Wendover Church by Joseph Murray Ince (British, 1806-1859), contributed to the idealized visions of the English countryside that this exhibition portrayed.

Future loans include:

To Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 18 July– 20 September, 2009: Festival Day, Venice, 1898-99, by Charles Prendergast (American, 1859-1924), watercolor on paper, for the exhibition Prendergast in Italy. [Exhibition tour will include the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (October 9, 2009–January 3, 2010)]

To Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, Vermont, 17 September–13 December, 2009: Madonna and Child, ca. 1420, from the School of Lorenzo Ghiberti (Italian, Florentine, ca. 1381-1455), painted and gilded stucco-forte; Madonna and Child, circa 1465-75, by Sano di Piertro (Italian, 1405-1481), tempera and gold on panel; and Stigmatization of Saint Francis, circa 1425-30, by Bartolomeo di Tommaso da Foligno (Italian, ca. 1408-1454), tempera on panel, for the exhibition Art of Devotion: Panel Paintings in Early Renaissance Italy.

To Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, 11 October–3 January, 2010: Black-figure Skyphos with Herakles and Athena, Greek, Attica, ca. 500 BCE, by the Theseus Painter, clay, black glaze, added red and white, for the exhibition Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece. [Exhibition tour will include the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee (January 29–April 25, 2010)].

To Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, Fall 2010: Sacco Ford, Conway Meadows, 1876, by George Inness (American, 1825-1894), oil on canvas, for the exhibition The Crown of New England: Master Paintings of the White Mountains, 1825-1875.