This catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition Weatherspoon Art Museum: 70 Years of Collecting, on view from February 5-May 11, 2011. In 1941 Gregory D. Ivy, an artist, teacher, and the first head of the art department at Women's College, founded the Weatherspoon Art Gallery. Ivy was motivated by his belief that students should have firsthand experience of the art of their time. During the seven decades following his astute vision, the Weatherspoon has evolved from a small teaching gallery to a fully accredited museum with a national reputation that still places education at the heart of its mission. Ivy also felt the gallery would benefit the community, and he needed its support. This book, begins with a history spun from a collection of stories about the people who so generously heeded the call. Over the years, the Weatherspoon has been the most fortunate recipient of remarkable support, both moral and financial, from the university and the greater Greensboro community. It has also benefited from a host of dedicated employees and key events that have shaped it into a modern and contemporary art museum with a significant collection. Published on the occasion of the Weatherspoon Art Museum's seventieth anniversary year, this beautifully designed and illustrated book reproduces one hundred noteworthy works of art from the collection, each accompanied by a thoughtful essay. The objects included represent each decade from the turn of the twentieth century to the first decade of this century. Among those showcased are works by Henri Matisse, David Smith, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, and Elizabeth Murray. Although the majority of the artists in the Weatherspoon's collection are recognized for their long, successful careers, the inclusion of a few younger artists demonstrates the museum's commitments to promising new voices. The first significant publication to focus on the Weatherspoon's collections, 70 Years of Collecting guarantees to be an informative and enjoyable read. Contributors in this book are K. Porter Aichele, George Dimock, Nancy M. Doll, Xandra Eden, Richard Gantt, Carl Goldstein, Ann Grimaldi, Elaine D. Gustafson, Heather Holian, Elizabeth Perrill, and Will South.

Museum Matters tells the story of Mexico's national collections through the trajectories of its objects. The essays in this book show the many ways in which things matter and affect how Mexico imagines its past, present, and future.

A revealing pairing of two great southern creators

A compelling examination of the art museum from a renowned director, this sweeping book explores how architecture, vision, and funding have transformed art museums around the world over the past eighty years. How have art museums changed in the past century? Where are they headed in the future? Charles Saumarez Smith is uniquely qualified to answer these questions, having been at the helm of three major institutions over the course of his distinguished career. For The Art Museum in Modern Times, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey, visiting art museums across the globe and examining how the experience of art is shaped by the buildings that house it. His story starts with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums to focus squarely on the art of the present rather than the past. When it opened in 1939, MoMA’s boldly modernist building represented a stark riposte to the neoclassicism of most earlier art museums. From there, Saumarez Smith investigates dozens of other museums, including the Tate Modern in London, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He explores our shifting reasons for visiting museums, changes to the way exhibits are organized and displayed, and the spectacular new architectural landmarks that have become destinations in their own right. Global in scope yet full of personal insight, this fully illustrated celebration of the modern art museum will appeal to art lovers, museum professionals, and museum goers alike.

Presents the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago in Illinois, featuring over 7000 objects spanning five centuries of Western and Eastern civilizations. Provides information about exhibitions, events, the collection, educational programs, and membership. Posts contact information via mailing address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail.

A selection of children's poems and drawings reflecting their surroundings in Terezín Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia from 1942 to 1944.

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still. As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.