The College of William and Mary’s Muscarelle Museum of Art is set for expansion. A $35 million privately-funded addition, which will break ground in 2022, will triple the museum’s gallery space and allow the museum to rethink its collection and outreach.
The current building opened in 1983 under the directorship of Glenn Lowry, who is now director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Then, the collection was uncatalogued and unhoused. Now, it has grown to nearly 7,000 objects. Like many museums, most of those works remain in storage, but the Muscarelle’s Director David Brashear said the added space will allow the museum to display more of the collection.
“This is typically the age-old question for any museum,” Brashear said. “All museums have vast collections, of which a small percentage are ever hanging on the wall at one given moment in time. We’re a little bit more constrained here because we try to straddle the divide of bringing out the works in the collection but also making sure we have other, fresh, not-always-available topics to explore in the form of specially curated exhibitions or travelling exhibitions.”
The Muscarelle has drawn and curated several notable, historically-relevant exhibitions in recent years, including “1619 / 2019,” which marked the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia. “Botticelli and the Search for the Divine” was a Muscarelle-curated major loan exhibition. Currently on view is “Forever Marked by the Day,” which is curated by Brashear and explores the legacy of the 9/11 attacks through an architectural and photographical lens.
Brashear said the problem is that the Muscarelle doesn’t have that much space — only five galleries in total are available to exhibit the thousands of objects in its ever-growing collection. Space constraints also limit the breadth of the exhibitions the museum can curate, as well as whether it can host large traveling shows.
When he came into the role in 2018, Brashear had the idea of a “new” museum in mind and knew that adequate fundraising would be a hurdle. Having served on the Muscarelle’s Board of Trustees since 1999 and as chair of the museum’s capital campaign since 2013, he made the renovation a priority.
“It’s going to be a big deal,” Brashear said. “It’s a long time coming. This museum has been important for a long period of time, especially over the course of the past 20 years.”
“It’s going to be a big deal,” Brashear said. “It’s a long time coming. This museum has been important for a long period of time, especially over the course of the past 20 years.”
Among the museum’s objects include works by big names in the art world — an oil painting by the Italian master Bronzino, several lithographs by the famed sculptor Alexander Calder, a watercolor-like surrealist aquatint by Dalí, works by world-famous Brits Hirst and Hockney, five etchings by Rembrandt. One of the most important works in the collection is a 1932 Georgia O’Keefe painting, “White Flower.” The work was only two years old at the time it was gifted to the College by Abby Rockefeller. The Muscarelle also holds significant collections of 17th and 18th century American and British portraits, as well as a large number of German expressionist paper works by Hans Grohs.
But Brashear said the priority of the museum moving forward is to collect underrepresented artists — works by women and people of color. In 2020, the museum acquired a 1950 photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of children in Soweto, South Africa during apartheid. Bourke-White was a photojournalist for Life Magazine who paved the way for women in photography. Some of her equally groundbreaking contemporaries, like Berenice Abbott and Consuelo Kanaga, also had works added to the Muscarelle’s collection last year.
The Muscarelle has also focused on collecting Native American artists — particularly those who are still living and working.
“We have now some of the powerhouses in the Native American art space in our collection,” Brashear said.
Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, the Muscarelle’s curator of Native American Art, said her role at the museum is to expand the collection of Native American art and curate related exhibitions, which she has been doing since 2007. It’s a position not many museums have — the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York just hired its first curator of Native American art in 2020, and many university museums do not have a similar role.
“I have met some significant goals,” Moretti-Langholtz said. “In acquiring works by several Native women, who I think of as the rockstars in Native art. I’m happy to call them that. These women work in a style that is very, very different from what people may expect from Native artists. That’s what is so very exciting.”
Conversations with Jaune Quick-to-see Smith, the artist featured in Moretti-Langholtz’s first exhibition at the Muscarelle, inspired her to seek out these “rockstars.” Among those new acquisitions include works by Kay WalkingStick, a Cherokee artist, Emmi Whitehorse, a Navajo artist, and Cara Romero, a Chemehuevi artist, which are currently on view in the exhibition “Shared Ideologies.”
“Our current exhibition shows the breadth of contemporary art,” Moretti-Langholtz said. “We have other pieces that are more traditional pieces, but I wanted to show works that are influenced by the Red Power movement and by the establishment of the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe. One thing that Jaune told me that was important to her about Native artists is she didn’t want people to just think, ‘oh Native artists, they do crafts.’ She wanted us at William and Mary, our collection, to reflect the best of trained artists — and these artists are trained in art and they are as good as any trained artists working at this time.”
Despite the museum’s expansive and growing collection, Brashear admitted student attendance remains low.
“I think there’s a good chunk of students on campus who come here all four years and don’t really know where we are, or that we exist,” Brashear said.
Director of Engagement and Distinguished Artist in Residence Steve Prince, who has been with the museum for three years, hopes to mitigate this issue and perceptions of elitism by bringing the Muscarelle to the public.
“And changing the model — not always looking for the community to come here, but going to the community and meeting them where they’re at,” Prince said. “The arts is not just confined to the museum — the arts is everywhere, it’s all around us. And when you can engage with the community and get them to find the arts and the beauty in everything around them, it further entrenches this idea of this space being their space.”
“And changing the model — not always looking for the community to come here, but going to the community and meeting them where they’re at,” Prince said. “The arts is not just confined to the museum — the arts is everywhere, it’s all around us. And when you can engage with the community and get them to find the arts and the beauty in everything around them, it further entrenches this idea of this space being their space.”
During his time at the museum, Prince has sought to engage the Williamsburg community through communal artistic production. Prince is an artist himself — he said he was encouraged by his educators and mentors from a young age and hopes to be that person for other young people.
He recently spearheaded the Links Project to confront and reflect upon the legacy of slavery at the College, which received over 500 woodcut submissions from across the globe. His latest project, The Communal Quilt Project, involves portable quilt-making workshops — Prince hopes to eventually line the length of Duke of Gloucester street in Colonial Williamsburg with the finished quilts.
Bringing art to the community means hearing their stories too, which Prince said was at once inspiring and solemn.
“And that’s why I come up with projects like the Links, because it begins to exemplify what needs to happen in order to make change,” Prince said. “It becomes a symbol of that, because ultimately — 500 people — they didn’t know how their pieces were going to fit together. But they do. And they have a place. And I think that’s how we think of ourselves societally — each one of us has a place, each one of us fits together, and each one of us is connected, regardless of our background.”
As a museum affiliated with a university, the Muscarelle is also hoping to engage with academic departments, professors and student researchers. Though over half of the collection is digitized and searchable, Brashear said work is ongoing to catalogue and photograph every work. The expanded building will house study rooms where students can view these works, and an adjoined upgraded paper storage facility will make documents and prints more accessible.
“In five years, hopefully we’ll be well into our new museum and, I think, having a level of engagement with students that we haven’t yet had the ability to do,” Brashear said. “I can’t wait to come into this building and see students hanging out — having a cup of coffee in the atrium, or studying, or upstairs drawing in the galleries.”
“In five years, hopefully we’ll be well into our new museum and, I think, having a level of engagement with students that we haven’t yet had the ability to do,” Brashear said. “I can’t wait to come into this building and see students hanging out — having a cup of coffee in the atrium, or studying, or upstairs drawing in the galleries.”
For students and the community alike, Prince emphasized the power of art as a force for healing and restoration in the context of difficult issues.
“It is my belief that the artist is truth-sayer,” Prince said. “And what I mean by that is the artist has this beautiful ability to see the world, and see it a little differently than everybody else. An artist doesn’t look at a tree the same way another person will look at a tree, or a blade of grass, or the sunrise or sunset. All of those things have been captured by artists for centuries. When we see the artist’s work, whether it be a sculpture or drawing, painting or computer graphic, it causes us to pause and reflect, and in many instances it helps us to remember.”
“Shared Ideologies” in the Muscarelle’s Sheridan & Spigel Galleries and “Forever Marked by the Day” in the Cheek, Graves & Burns Galleries are on display through Jan. 9, 2022.
