Williams College Museum of Art
The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), with Louise Bourgeois' Eyes (Nine Elements) (2001) in the foreground
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| Established | 1926 |
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| Location | 15 Lawrence Hall Drive, Ste 2, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
| Coordinates | 42°42′40.27″N 73°12′9.69″W / 42.7111861°N 73.2026917°W |
| Type | Art museum |
| Accreditation | American Alliance of Museums, 1993 and 2004 |
| Collections | Contemporary art, photography, prints, Indian painting |
| Collection size | 14,000 |
| Founder | Karl Weston |
| Director | Christina Olsen |
| Website | wcma |
The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is a college art museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Situated at the Williams College campus close to Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and the Clark Art Institute. Its growing collection encompasses more than 14,000 works, with particular strengths in contemporary art, photography, prints, and Indian painting. The museum is free and open to the public.
WCMA was established in 1926 by Karl Weston, an art history professor who made it his mission to provide students a venue for firsthand experience of art. The College's art collection, in large part donated by Eliza Peters Field in 1897, had been housed in two small wings of what was then the College library, Lawrence Hall, designed by Thomas A. Tefft in 1846. When the library was moved to Stetson Hall in 1920, however, Weston transformed the octagonal brick building into an art museum, adding a T-shaped wing in order to provide additional space for galleries and the College's rapidly expanding art history curriculum.
Over the next half-century, under a series of directors, the College enlarged the art department and the museum's collection. In 1981, Director Franklin W. Robinson hired Charles Moore to redesign the building in order to raise facilities to professional standards and double exhibition space. This coincided with an expansion of WCMA's staff, educational programs, and exhibition schedule.
Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1993 and re-accredited in 2004, the museum has been the site of dozens of exhibitions (see Past Exhibitions, below). In 2012, WCMA hired its current director, Christina Olsen.
Made up of 14,000 individual works, the collection has particular strengths in ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greco-Roman objects, Indian Painting, African Sculpture, photography, art of the U.S., and international modern and contemporary art. The museum is also home to the world's largest assembly of works by the artist brothers Maurice Prendergast and Charles Prendergast. These works were donated in 1983 by Charles's widow Eugenie Prendergast, and were the basis for WCMA's Prendergast Archive and Study Center, which is maintained as a center for scholarship on the brothers and their contemporaries.
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