Museums - Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College

One of the oldest and most acclaimed academic fine arts museums in the United States, the Davis Museum was founded by the first president of Wellesley College. The Davis Museum and Cultural Center is characterized by collections that span global history from ancient to contemporary times. The collection dates to the opening of the college in 1875, when founder Henry Fowle Durant and his friends began making gifts of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and plaster casts of classical sculpture.
Alice Van Vechten Brown, appointed in 1897 as museum director and head of the art department, modeled the museum after the populist South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London. After expanding its collection over the years, in 1993, the museum entered another era as the Davis Museum and Cultural Center in a new building designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, Rafael Moneo. This facility, Moneo’s first North American project, distinguished the Davis as one of the most prominent college art museums in the country and one of the leading art museums and cultural institutions of the Greater Boston area.
Its Art of the Ancient Americas installation explores the social, religious, and political meaning of works of ancient Mexican, Peruvian, Guatemalan, Costa Rican and Panamanian art drawn both from the Davis holdings and lent from several public and private collections. The African Art Gallery uses examples from the museum’s African collection to introduce visitors to the cultural, moral, and political implications of displaying African art in Western collections. Featured examples include works from, among others, the Asante, Benin, Edo, and Bamana cultures. It features a number of pieces from the Klejman collection.