Weatherspoon Art Museum - UNC Greensboro

American Art 1900-1960

American Art 1960-present

Recent Acquisitions

Dillard Collection of Art on Paper

The Claribel and Etta Cone Collection

The Lenoir C. Wright Collection

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Since the Weatherspoon began collecting, it has maintained a commitment to the art of its time and, as a result, the collection documents most of the important movements in art since World War II. The history of the collection pre-dates the 1942 founding of the Weatherspoon Art Gallery; the first recorded accession of a work by what was then Women’s College occurred in 1936. Through the vision of Gregory Ivy, first chair of the Department of Art, and the support of community members, the Weatherspoon took an early lead in acquiring and exhibiting avant-garde American art. Among key early contemporary acquisitions were Alexander Calder’s Yellow Sail, 1950 (purchased the next year) and Willem de Kooning’s Woman, 1949-50 (purchased in 1954). In 1964, Ivy’s successor, Bert Carpenter, initiated aggressive collecting practices that focused on artists with growing reputations. During Carpenter’s 25-year tenure, formative works by Eva Hesse, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Al Held, Louise Nevelson, David Smith, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Richard Stankiewicz, Sol LeWitt, Jackie Ferrara, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others, were acquired by purchase and gift. An untitled mixed media work by Hesse, 1967 (purchased that year), and Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria by Robert Smithson, 1969 (purchased that year), are believed to be the first works by those artists to enter a museum.

At the same time, the Weatherspoon purchased somewhat against fashion, building a modernist collection by focusing on American regional and scene painters and the work of the American Abstract Artists group. The result is that the collection includes paintings, sculptures, and/or works on paper by Thomas Hart Benton, Rockwell Kent, Charles Burchfield, Joseph Stella, Hans Hofmann, Jo Baer, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, David Smith, Arthur Dove, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Lee Krasner, to name a small selection.

The Dillard Collection of Art on Paper, begun in 1965, resulted in other timely acquisitions and provided opportunities to fill in gaps in the collection. A grant from the Dillard Paper Company instituted an annual exhibition of art on paper and established a fund for acquisitions from those exhibitions. In the first year alone, thirty-three works were purchased. The collection now numbers nearly 500 works by artists such as Isabel Bishop, John Graham, Louise Bourgeois, Franz Kline, Romare Bearden, Frank Stella, Joan Brown, Katherine Porter, Brice Marden, Lari Pittman, Jane Hammond, and many others. The 35th anniversary of the collection was marked in 1999 by an exhibition of seventy-five key works accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Joanne Moser, senior curator of graphic arts at the National Museum of American Art.

The Weatherspoon’s collecting activity continues unabated, supported by almost $2 million in acquisition endowment funds and gifts of both additional private funds and contributed works of art. Recent contemporary acquisitions have included work by Ann Hamilton, Mel Chin, Ana Mendieta, Alison Saar, Kiki Smith, Lesley Dill, Francesca Woodman, Stuart Klipper, Leon Golub, Walter Murch, and Robert Overby. Recent gifts have included work by Peter Dean, Nancy Grossman, William Woods, Erik Levine, and Magdalena Abakanowicz. The Weatherspoon was one of 29 institutions selected in 1999 to receive work from the Peter and Eileen Norton Collection. That gift consisted of 17 conceptually based paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Over the last two years, the museum has received substantial gifts from several other major contemporary art collectors like Wynn Kramarsky, Eileen and Michael Cohen, and Anthony T. Podesta.