The Davis is home to distinguished permanent collections from around the globe; holdings include paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, and decorative objects, from antiquity to the contemporary moment. Dynamic gallery presentations and richly varied temporary exhibitions are designed to engage visitors in looking anew at the visual arts, and enhance the Davis’s role as a vital campus resource for cross-disciplinary teaching and study.
History
The Davis Museum and Cultural Center traces its origins to the October 23, 1889 dedication of the Farnsworth Art Building on the Wellesley College campus. It housed collections that dated to the founding of the College in 1875, when founder Henry Fowle Durant (1822-81) began a campaign to acquire original paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs, as well as plaster casts of classical sculpture, in service of a liberal arts education for women. Drawing and painting were integral to the first curriculum at the College; when Wellesley introduced the teaching of art history in 1885, it distinguished itself as one of the first American colleges to offer the subject.
Alice Van Vechten Brown, appointed in 1897 as museum director and head of the art department, modeled the new institution after the populist South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum) in London. In keeping with Wellesley’s emphasis on learning and community service, Brown described the museum as “a place for classes and students, but also a place in which the public may linger and enjoy; a place to bring children, and in which teachers may study; a model to every college student of what a museum may do for any town in the land.” Brown is best known for her development of an influential art history curriculum, which focused on original art objects and was later called “The Wellesley Method.”
In 1926, Brown hired Alfred H. Barr, Jr. as an associate professor. At Wellesley, Barr developed the first modern art course in the United States. It included painting, sculpture, film, photography, architecture, and design— categories Barr later used to define the curatorial departments he devised as founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
John McAndrew, the first curator of architecture at MoMA, was appointed Wellesley College Museum Director in 1947. He was a robust collections builder, and under his leadership the collections came to include works by many pioneers of European modernism. In 1958, he moved the museum into expanded quarters in the Jewett Arts Center, designed by architect Paul Rudolph.
With the opening of Jewett, the visual arts at Wellesley entered a new era. Studios, classrooms, and offices provided students and faculty with new teaching and work areas. A dedicated gallery space offered a place for the study of Wellesley’s growing permanent collections and an opportunity to see temporary exhibitions. Jewett provided an intimate environment that enhanced Wellesley’s teaching resources as well as made the collections available to the entire College community.
The Museum’s collections expanded significantly through the next decade, particularly with the donation of a number of important modern works in honor of John McAndrew. During the directorship of Ann Gabhart (1972-1986), the Museum codified its professional policies, launched new educational programs, and further developed its collections. By 1982, the Museum’s holdings had doubled in size and the institution, previously administered by the Art Department, became an independent entity within the College.
The early 1980s also found the gallery in Jewett devoted exclusively to the display of special exhibitions. The need for dedicated, professionally maintained space in which to safeguard and exhibit the Museum’s permanent collections, along with a concomitant desire to maintain Wellesley’s leadership in arts education, prompted a call for enhanced facilities. In 1984, the Board of Trustees undertook a feasibility study to explore how best to meet the College’s needs for the teaching and presentation of art. The study’s findings recommended the construction of a new campus museum, and launched a capital campaign to support the project.
In 1988, Trustee and alumna Kathryn Wasserman Davis (Class of 1928) and her husband Shelby Cullom Davis gave the cornerstone gift to the campaign specifically to benefit the construction of a new museum. Their generosity made possible the conception and realization of a museum with ample facilities for exhibitions and programs, and increased opportunities to build connections to the broader educational mission of the College. Under the directorship of Susan Taylor, the new facility was conceived as both a museum and a cultural center. “We view this place not only as a museum, but as a true cultural destination,” said Susan Taylor; as “…a literal and figurative crossroads where students and faculty as well as artists, scholars, and the public can meet to exchange ideas and share in the mingling of disciplines… an environment in which art can educate, inspire, delight, provoke, and, perhaps, compel us to think in new ways while ever being aware of antecedents and traditions.”
In 1993, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center opened its doors in a new building designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, Rafael Moneo. This facility, Moneo’s first North American commission, immediately distinguished the Davis among its academic museum peers, and among the art museums and cultural institutions of the Greater Boston area. The building also rearticulated and revitalized the longstanding commitment to the central role of the visual arts in undergraduate liberal arts education at Wellesley College.
Appointed Director in the fall of 2001, David Mickenberg refocused the Museum’s efforts toward building and researching the collections and increasing opportunities for collaboration with students and faculty across all academic disciplines. During his tenure, the Museum made several important acquisitions, introduced an adjunct curatorial program with College faculty members, and created several new internship opportunities for students.
In December 2009, Lisa Fischman was appointed Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis by President H. Kim Bottomly.
Building
The Davis Museum is one of Wellesley College’s great resources, providing for the care and inventive display of distinguished permanent collections of some 11,000 objects and for the presentation of a rich and varied schedule of temporary exhibitions and programs. The study of original art objects has been integral to teaching in the arts and humanities at Wellesley since its founding in 1875, and active collecting in support of the curriculum dates to the 1880s.
In 1993, when the Davis Museum and Cultural Center opened its doors, it was not the first building on campus to house the College’s collections but it was the first and only one designed exclusively as a museum. The Davis also was the first building in North America to have been designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rafael Moneo, whose notion of the museum as a “treasury” or “treasure chamber” informs its design. Adjacent to the Academic Quad and connected by enclosed bridge to the Jewett Arts Center, the Davis is at the heart of the arts on the Wellesley campus. As a resource for academic research and study, and a source of innovative programming, the Davis occupies a prominent space at the center of the intellectual and aesthetic life of the College community.
The mass of the Museum was going to be very simple — much more radical than the delicately crafted mass of the Jewett. The cubic space could be understood as a coffer, presenting all at once the pieces in the collection. The artworks in the collection are like memories of those alumnae who lived here and who thought there could be no better place than Wellesley to which to leave the objects they loved so much. Therefore, I very much wanted the Museum to be understood as a treasury, a treasury that speaks about the lives of those people who received their education here.
— Rafael Moneo, May 1993
The Davis’s facilities for the display and study of art include four floors of galleries; a print study room; a seminar room linked by elevator to permanent collection storage areas; collection care areas, staff workspaces and offices. The complex also houses the Collins Cinema, a 168 seat lecture theater fully equipped for presenting film and electronic media, and the Collins Café. Contained within three simple interconnected cubic masses, the structure’s formal language contrasts with the many earlier campus buildings that were rendered in the style known as collegiate gothic. The flat roofs of the lower two blocks of the Davis complex are juxtaposed against the simple, even severe, saw-tooth skylights that define the top of the taller central portion of the complex, flooding the top floor gallery of the Davis with natural light, and providing a signature feature visible from many places on campus.
In his choice of exterior materials for the Davis, architect Rafael Moneo did refer to his predecessors’ work. The building is rendered in a restrained palette of brick and exposed concrete. Several simple metal accents are inserted into the masonry facades of the building. The planar forms of the building’s exterior walls are articulated with unadorned window openings that on the north wall, where they are set in deep reveals, mark the levels of the three main gallery floors of the building above grade. Elsewhere windows signal the locations of entrances to the museum and the cinema, the lobby, and office spaces.
Moneo also used concrete inside the Davis. The material is found at one side of the entrance and lobby in a row of columns and the sofit they support, and is left exposed as flooring on the top level and in the staircase that connects the four floors of gallery spaces. This stair is one of two major vertical elements of the design of the interior and, as it rises through all five floors of public space, provides a point of reference to visitors as they walk through the Davis. Through most of its length, the staircase is a contained volume, its sides defined by maple paneling. Where the paneling is interrupted at landings it is possible to view the gallery spaces above and below. Between the second and third floors of these galleries, the walls that define the staircase are transformed into parapets, opening the last two flights of stairs to the natural light from the skylight above.
On each floor, galleries are arranged around the staircase and the skylit void which brings natural light down into the building. The galleries are rectangular spaces of deceptive simplicity that provide neutral settings for the installation of the Davis collections. Their carefully studied proportions are ample but not overwhelming and transitions are subtly marked — that between floor and wall, for example, by a thin metal strip at the edge of a reveal. Balconies on the upper two floors of galleries and at staircase landings offer views into the three-story volume rising up to the skylight. Natural light from the skylight also flows down light wells at the east and west sides of the top floor to the second level of galleries, and through large north facing windows into a smaller gallery on each floor.
