Newsletter - Spring 2000
From the Director

The museum staff is deinstalling The Moon and the Stars exhibition as I write this letter. Objects that were borrowed from institutions such as the national gallery in Washington, DC, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City are being carefully repacked and prepared for their return shipment. But the traffic of art objects in and out of this museum is by no means limited to loans such as the ones that made our Faustina exhibition such a success. The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum also lends important works of art to other institutions.

Over the next year, for example, loans from our museum will be included in major exhibitions in Siena and Barcelona. As many of you know, Mount Holyoke has an angel pinnacle from one of the great masterpieces of later medieval painting, the altarpiece by Duccio entitled the Maestà. The mote than 40 sections of this altarpiece which have been dispersed throughout Europe and the United States will be brought together again in 2001. We have agreed to participate in this exciting project by lending our pinnacle.

We will also lend our Greek statuette of a youth to an exhibition organized this winter by the Barcelona Center of Contemporary Culture, The Founding of the City: Founding Myths and Rites in the Ancient World. I still remember the call I received two years ago from the curator in Spain. He described the exhibition to me, which sounded very interesting, and then told me the reason for his call: he wanted to make a special plea for the loan of our bronze statuette which has been identified as a figure of Apollo. He told me that in his preparations for this exhibition, he had looked for such a sculpture of Apollo all over the world and concluded that our statuette was the most beautiful one he had seen anywhere. He hoped we would agree to lend. Indeed, our sculpture will be a part of this fascinating exhibition and reproduced in the two-volume publication that will be printed in Spanish and English.

In addition to these loans for special exhibitions, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, will borrow our pair of six-fold screens with Taoist Immortals by the Japanese woman artist Yukinobu Kiyohara. This loan is part of a project funded by the Museum Loan network. A group of artworks coming from three museums will be the focus of education programs and promotional materials at the NMWA during a two-year period. And two American landscape paintings have recently returned from a three-year stay overseas. Paintings by Willis Seaver Adams and Arthur Wesley Dow were lent through the Art in Embassies Program and were on view in the U.S. Embassy residence in N'Djamena, Chad.

Finally, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum will be "on the road" during the renovation and construction project that I will tell you more about in future Newsletters. Plans are underway for showing components of the collection in exhibitions at Boston College, Colby College, and elsewhere. For more about the first of these collaborative projects, see the "Future Exhibitions" page of this Newsletter.

—Marianne Doezema