Museums - Williams College Museum of Art

Karl E. Weston, the museum’s founder and first director, established the Williams College Museum of Art in 1926 to provide Williams College students with the opportunity for firsthand observation of fine works of art, a privilege he maintained was essential to the study of art. For twenty-two years, Weston taught art history and solicited gifts from alumni for the museum. In the 1970s, the collection burgeoned, emphasizing American art, modern and contemporary art, and the art of Asia and other non-Western civilizations. In 1977, faced with inadequate exhibition, office, and storage space, Charles Moore was hired as architect, and in 1981 a six-year building phase began under the newly appointed director, Thomas Krens. The staff was increased, exhibition space doubled, facilities raised to professional standards, a vigorous schedule of changing exhibitions launched, and an education program for schoolchildren inaugurated. Expansion of the facilities and programming has gained the museum a national reputation as one of the finest college art museums in the country.
The museum’s ethnographic collection is relatively small and includes 138 African works, ninety-two pre-Columbian works (including notable Maya and West Coast Mexico objects), and seventeen historic Native American objects. These were acquired through museum purchases and the donations of Mrs. John W. Field, Dr. Oliver Cobb, Ernie Wolfe III, Herbert D. N. Jones (class of 1914), Albert Gordon, Judith Schuchalter, and Suzanne Bach. Currently only a small portion of the collection is on display. Objects in storage are available to researchers by appointment.