The Weatherspoon Art Museum, which is located on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in the Southeast, with a particular emphasis on American art. It is one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in the Southeast.
There are fifteen or more exhibitions each year, educational programs all year long, and scholarly publications as part of the museum’s programming. It was accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1995, and it was re-accredited by the same organization the following year, in 2005.
Established in 1941 by Gregory Ivy, first head of the Art Department at Woman’s College, now known as UNCG, the Woman’s College Art Gallery is housed in a former physics lab in the McIver Building on the UNCG campus. This made it the first art gallery in the University of North Carolina system, and it was dedicated in 1989.
It was the next year that the gallery was officially named in honor of Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon, an art instructor and Woman’s College alumna who passed away in 2007. She also happened to be the sister of the late president of the college, Charles Duncan McIver. After seventy years, the Weatherspoon Museum has evolved from a small teaching gallery to a fully authorized professional museum with an international reputation.
When the Anne and Benjamin Cone Building was completed in 1985, the Weatherspoon obtained funds for its construction. With six galleries, the Weatherspoon Art Museum occupies a large portion of the 42,000-square-foot structure designed by Romaldo Giurgola of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects, which has offices in Philadelphia and New York. In addition to other characteristics shared with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Department of Art, they include a sculpture garden, an atrium, an auditorium, and two storage vaults.
Since its foundation, the Weatherspoon has been dedicated to the development of a permanent collection of modern and contemporary artwork. The permanent collection, which contains about 6,000 pieces of art, the majority of which are American, represents all major art movements from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present.
The exhibition includes works by Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Knox Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, John Marin, Alexander Calder, Robert Henri, Cindy Sherman, Sol Le Witt, Louise Nevelson, Eva Hesse, and Andy Warhol, among others.
The Dillard Collection of Art on Paper, the Etta and Claribel Cone Collection, the Lenoir C. Wright Collection of Japanese Prints, and the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States are among the other highlights of the collection.