Future Exhibitions

The American Collection Travels

Immediately after the museum's galleries closed in June 2000, the staff began the complex task of packing the entire collection of 13,000 objects and preparing to move it out of the museum in order to ensure its safety while construction work is underway. Several thousand objects will be put in storage, but certain components of the collection will be lent to other institutions (see the article about the medieval and early Renaissance collection at Boston College, see Exhibition page). Arrangements have been made with the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, to store a large group of American paintings and sculpture. In connection with this loan, plans are underway for a special exhibition focusing on Mount Holyoke's strong American holdings. Featured objects will include Albert Bierstadt's Hetch Hetchy Canyon, which was among the college's first art acquisitions. The painting was acquired to celebrate the opening in 1876 of what was then the new art gallery in Williston Hall. Hetch Hetchy Canyon was a gift from the wives of two trustees, who purchased the painting only a year after Bierstadt completed it. The trustees and faculty recognized as early as the 1870s that a school of the caliber of Mount Holyoke should provide for development of aesthetic appreciation, in addition to the study of math, science, and English, and Mount Holyoke was among the first American colleges to offer formal classes in art history.

Since 1876, the museum's American collection has been enriched by a number of important gifts and purchases. Only a decade following the acquisition of Hetch Hetchy Canyon, another significant American landscape painting came to the museum. George Inness' Saco Ford: Conway Meadows is now the painting most frequently requested for loan by other institutions. The museum's holdings of twentieth-century art were enhanced when financier Roy Neuberger contributed 19 paintings between 1953 and 1963, including a stunning portrait by Robert Henri, Annie Lavelle, and Milton Avery's Discussion. New York art dealers David and Renée McKee have given or facilitated the gift of a number of important modern and contemporary paintings to the museum that will be shown at Colby, including works by Philip Guston, Katherine Porter, and Sean Scully.

Sculpture in the Colby show will range from Hiram Power's neoclassical head entitled Faith to Isamu Noguchi's Strange Bird, which reflects both the biomorphism of the European Surrealists and the spatial conceptions of Cubism.

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