Over the last 60 years, the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s University Museum of Contemporary Art has amassed a collection of over 3,600 prints, drawings, photographs, and three dimensional multiples. In comparison to other university museums in the five colleges area, like the Smith College Museum of Art and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, UMass has focused their collecting priorities on the last seventy years of art history.
In response to the 60 year anniversary of their collection, the UMCA launched their 60 Years of Collecting Exhibition, which serves not only as a history of the pieces, but as a retrospective of the development of the museum and its collection. The exhibition consists of 115 works, and features prints by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenschtein, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Sheron Rupp, and three dimensional works by Keith Haring and Kara-Elizabeth Walker, amongst many others.
WMUA News Editor Owen Embury spoke to museum director Loretta Yarlow to discuss the exhibition, its conception, and the history of the University Museum of Contemporary Art.
This episode was produced by Owen Embury
