Message from Director

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum has always been dedicated to serving all members of the college community.  We believe that perceptive study of great art enhances learning and understanding in all intellectual disciplines.  Engaging with original works of art demands and fosters the most rigorous critical thinking, and we work steadily and pro-actively to make the museum and its collections available to all faculty and students.

Recently, our success with this comprehensive academic vision drew the attention of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose prestigious College and University Art Museum (CUAM) grants have had a profound influence in the arena of higher education and academic art museums.  In 2008, our achievements, and our ambitions to do more, earned us a CUAM grant.

The Mellon grants are unusual because they are designed to strengthen and deepen, over two three-year periods, the Museum’s engagement with the academic agendas and faculty of the entire College, and ultimately to help establish an endowment to institutionalize the gains that have been made.

When executives from the Mellon Foundation first visited our Museum a year ago, they discovered that we have been engaged in exactly the kind of effort they are promoting.  The grant enables us to create two new full-time staff positions—a coordinator of academic programs and a curatorial assistant—as well as a series of faculty seminars, student internships, and student workshops designed to enhance observational skills.

The benefits will be reciprocal to all.  The wider college will have greater access to the riches of the Museum, and the Museum will be enriched with the intellectual energy of multiple disciplines.  Our collections and programs will gain added meaning and vitality, and the Museum will offer a stimulating training ground not only for future academics and museum professionals, but for future citizens in an increasingly complex world. 

We are very excited about this opportunity and grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their progressive vision of the expanding role college and university museums can and must play in a 21st-century education.

Marianne Doezema
Florence Finch Abbott Director