Campaign Impact: Key Gifts Broaden Museum’s Offerings

A new Asian art gallery, two new curatorships, a few transformational acquisitions—the Smith College Museum of Art wouldn’t be the place it is today without the Women for the World campaign.

“Special collections at the college were identified prominently as a $60 million target in this campaign,” says Jessica Nicoll ’83, the museum’s director and chief curator. In addition to the museum’s holdings, Smith’s unique collections and resources include its digital assets, libraries, the Poetry Center and the School for Social Work. “The museum is generously supported all the time, but the fact that the designers of the campaign made an explicit funding goal of support for bolstering these unique collections at Smith was really important to us,” Nicoll says.

During its non-public phase, the campaign got off to a great start at the museum in 2010 with Mary Gordon Roberts ’60’s gift of George Bellows’ Pennsylvania Excavation (1907), which Nicoll calls a “phenomenally important” painting. “It’s a work that we could never have purchased for the museum in the current marketplace,” she says. “That came right as the campaign was being launched, and was really a signal moment for us.”

Then, in 2015, the museum unveiled the Carol T. Christ Asian Art Gallery. The 1,250-square-foot gallery is named for Smith’s 10th president and provides dedicated space for an evolving collection of Asian art. It was funded by a leadership gift from Peggy Block Danziger ’62, who was then joined by many other alumnae—including the entire board of trustees—in making gifts in honor of Christ, who retired in 2013, to support the creation of the gallery.

“That was a significant piece of the campaign,” Nicoll says.

But what’s an impressive new gallery without someone to curate the works within it? That’s where a pair of sisters—Jane Chace Carroll ’53 and Eliot Chace Nolen ’54, daughters of the late Beatrice Oenslager Chace ’28—come in. Carroll endowed a curatorship in Asian art, and Nolen put in place a fund to support the curator’s work. Then the sisters teamed up to establish an endowment for the acquisition of Asian art.

The museum’s inaugural Jane Chace Carroll Curator of Asian Art is Yao Wu, a doctoral candidate at Stanford who previously worked at the Guggenheim in New York City. Nicoll says an Asian-art curator is a first for Smith and a rarity among U.S. academic museums. “We’ve been in a kind of pilot phase for almost a decade of testing what it would mean to have a more robust program around Asian art,” she adds. “Within this campaign we received gifts to secure that, with a gallery and curator and funds for programming and acquisition.”

Another area that will get a significant boost is 19th- and 20th-century master drawings. A promised gift from the collection of Carol Osuchowski Selle ’54 will, in President Kathleen McCartney’s words, “make it possible for students to learn not only from studying the master drawings themselves but also from Carol’s own experience as a collector.”

Near the end of the campaign the museum received a $2.5 million gift from Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 to endow a curatorship in contemporary art. The new position, which carries Ford’s name, will allow the college to hire a curator focused on that burgeoning field, making Smith one of the only academic museums in the country to have a position dedicated to contemporary work.

“We’re super-excited about that gift and that new position,” Nicoll says. “We feel really fortunate. We’ve effectively doubled the size of our curatorial staff. We have a collection of more than 25,000 objects, from antiquity to the present, and it’s growing all the time. These positions are giving us targeted expertise, but they’re also acknowledging that we’ll be able to do a lot more with a deeper curatorial staff.”

President Emerita Carol Christ at the new Asian art gallery named in her honor at the Smith College Museum of Art.