Smith Creates Asian Art Teaching Gallery
The Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) will borrow more than 30 Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian objects and add them to pieces from the college’s own collection to create a teaching gallery in 2011-12.
Smith is among six college and university art museums that are expected to receive significant loans to expand opportunities for faculty to teach from works of art and strengthen the diverse community of college art museums. Initiated by the Yale University Art Gallery, the collection-sharing initiative is funded by a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Smith College Museum of Art |
In addition to borrowing artwork from Yale’s extensive collection, Smith will receive four Chinese scrolls from Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum. Together with objects from its own collection, SCMA will create a teaching gallery of works to support the Asian art survey and other courses.
The program supports SCMA’s strategic plan to broaden its links to the Smith curriculum. The Museum’s Freeman/McPherson Post-Doctoral Teaching and Curatorial Fellow in East Asian
Art—whose three-year appointment begins
this fall—will be directly involved with the collection-sharing initiative, collaborating with museum staff and Smith faculty to encourage the broadest academic use of these objects.
In addition to Smith, the partner museums include the Bowdoin College Museum of Art; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College;
Williams College Museum of Art; and the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College.
As a preliminary step, each of the six partner museums considered how works from the Yale University Art Gallery collection could complement or amplify its own holdings, with the aim of enhancing its academic programs. Most projects will last about a year.
Photo by Gipe |
