Q14715853

The Smith College Museum of Art, abbreviated SCMA, is the art museum of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Established in 1870, it is considered one of the most important university museums in the United States. The museum holds nearly 25,000 works of art and serves as a cultural and educational resource for Smith College, the Five College Consortium, and the Audubon Society. It is a member of the American Alliance of Museums, the Five College Consortium, and the Museums10 consortium, a collective of art, science, and history museums in western Massachusetts.

The museum was founded in 1870, making it one of the oldest college art museums in the country. Collection building began in earnest in 1879 under President Laurenus Clark Seelye, who initiated the art history degree program at Smith College in the 1870s. At the tenth Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art in Rome in 1912, Smith was one of only sixty-eight American institutions of higher learning with a professorship in art history. The museum has been led by several notable directors, including Alfred Vance Churchill (1905-1932), Jere Abbott (1932-1946), Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1949-1955), Charles Scott Chetham (1962-1988), Charles Percy Parkhurst (1990-1991), Suzannah Fabing (1992-2005), and Jessica Nicoll (2005, present). In 2003, after a two-year, $35 million renovation, the museum moved into the newly opened Brown Fine Arts Center.

The collection encompasses paintings, sculptures, works on paper, antiquities, and decorative arts from diverse cultures worldwide. The museum is widely known for its strength in American and European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also maintains a diverse collection of non-Western art, including Asian, African, and Islamic works. The museum has actively procured artworks by female artists and female artists of color, reflecting the diverse student body of the college and campaigns to raise awareness of underrepresented groups. Notable figures represented include Carmen Lomas Garza, Susan Rothenberg, Betye Saar, and Marja Vallila. The collection is housed across four floors of galleries.

The museum's holdings include works by Albert Bierstadt, Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, and Georges Seurat. Specific notable works include Albert Bierstadt's Landscape in the Bahamas (circa 1870-1875), Paul Cézanne's A Turn in the Road at la Roche-Guyon (circa 1885), Gustave Courbet's La Toilette de la morte (circa 1850-1855), Edgar Degas's Dancer on the Stage (circa 1877-1880), Claude Monet's Cathédrale de Rouen. La Cour d'Albane (1892-1894), Mary Cassatt's By the Pond (1898), Georgia O'Keeffe's Squash Flowers 1 (1925), Pablo Picasso's Table, Guitar and Bottle (1919), and Diego Rivera's Juanita Rosas (1930). The Cunningham Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings and Photographs houses more than 1,600 drawings, over 5,700 photographs, and more than 8,000 prints ranging from old masters to contemporary printmakers. The museum also features two bathrooms designed by artists Ellen Driscoll and Sandy Skoglund as examples of functional art.

Since 2003, the museum has been housed in the Brown Fine Arts Center, a 164,000-gross-square-foot (15,236 m²) building designed by New York-based Polshek Partnership Architects. The building was created to link the college with its neighboring community and also houses the art library and the Smith College Art Department. The Art Department offers art history degrees and has evolved into one of the most respected programs in American undergraduate education. Notable faculty members have included Harriet Boyd Hawes, Oliver Larkin, Charles Rufus Morey, Phyllis Williams Lehmann, and Edgar Wind.

The Smith College Museum of Art is located in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is accessible through its official website at www.smith.edu/artmuseum. The museum functions as a learning space for students, particularly those enrolled in art-related courses, and serves the broader community as part of the Museums10 consortium. The institution continues to operate under the leadership of director Jessica Nicoll, maintaining its role as a major cultural and educational institution in western Massachusetts.