Director's Welcome
I would like to share my excitement about joining the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and about the great work being done today in teaching museums. Around the country, institutions such as MHCAM are moving from the periphery of their host institutions’ educational missions to a more central role. At Mount Holyoke there is a tangible passion for this new curricular mandate and I feel honored to join with the students, faculty, and staff at the College in realizing the Museum’s fullest educational potential.
The Museum is a crossroads, both literally and figuratively. It is a place on campus where students work with faculty, where faculty from different disciplines collaborate with each other, where alumnae return to reengage with campus life, where the communities of the College and the local area converge, and where Mount Holyoke can host the world. It is also an academic space, a place for speculative meetings between the ancient and the present, between Renaissance Italy and Edo Japan, between New Delhi and New York, between the visible and the invisible, between the living and the dead. We who work in, study in, take pleasure in, and support the Museum take this role as a crossroads very seriously and foster it every day and in every way possible.
Teaching art museums have come into their own in the last decade, transformed from smaller versions of their municipal first cousins into highly specialized institutions. We work at the leading edge of two exciting and interrelated pedagogical advances in the liberal arts. Art history has been reinvigorated by the rapid expansion of the field, both in terms of what is studied and how it is approached. And, over the last decade especially, it has become clear that the productive world citizen of the 21st century will have to be well read and visually astute, well trained and boldly creative. The college art museum lies at the center of both curricular developments; it is the place on campus where multi-disciplinary art history joins innovative visual training. Students who train at the college art museum of today, regardless of which subjects lead them there, become intelligent visual learners prepared for life in an increasingly image-based world.
The Museum’s collection makes this educational mission possible by virtue of the wide range of objects in its care. Centuries ago the twin impulses of art and science led to collections of a seemingly endless variety. With their shelves brimming and their walls covered with everything from sculptures, prints, and paintings to exotic animal skeletons, shells, plants, and tools, the Kunstkammer (art-room) and the Wunderkammer (wonder-room) were the antecedents of today’s museums. At Mount Holyoke we are doubly fortunate in having collections that represent both traditions—the Art Museum and the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum.
I invite you to stop in and see what’s new. Whether it’s our changing exhibitions, our recent acquisitions, a great lecture or a concert, there’s always something new going on at the Mount Holyoke College museums.
John R. Stomberg, Ph.D
Florence Finch Abbott Director
