Museum Info
Collections
Exhibitions
Education & Tours
Events
Membership & Volunteers
Contact Us


  

1900-1960
1960-now
recent
art-on-paper
cone
wright



The Weatherspoon Art Museum’s permanent collection is the foremost of its kind in North Carolina and one of the leading such collections in the Southeast. Since the museum began collecting in the early 1940s, it has maintained a commitment to the art of its time. Now comprised of nearly 6,000 objects, the focus of the collection is in modern and contemporary art, primarily post-World War II American.

Among key early acquisitions were Alexander Calder’s Yellow Sail, 1950 (purchased in 1951) and Willem de Kooning’s Woman, 1949-50 (purchased in 1954). Highlights of subsequent acquisitions from the 1960s to the 1980s include major works by Alex Katz, Al Held, Louise Nevelson, David Smith, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Richard Stankiewicz, Sol LeWitt, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Rauschenberg. An untitled mixed media work by Eva Hesse, 1967 (purchased that year) and Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria by Robert Smithson, 1969 (purchased that year) are the first works of these artists to enter a museum collection.

The museum’s modernist collection concentrates on regional and scene painters and the work of the American Abstract Artists group. Included are 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, Arthur Dove, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Lee Krasner, to name a small selection.

The Dillard Collection of Art on Paper, begun in 1965 with annual exhibitions, now numbers more than 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, Roni Horn, Brad Kalhammer, Amy Cutler, and many others.

Two special categories within the collection are: the Claribel and Etta Cone Collection of Matisse prints and bronzes, and works on paper by other European and American modernists; and the Lenoir C. Wright Collection of Japanese Prints, a group of 600 Japanese woodblock prints dating from the 18th century to the early 20th century.

The Weatherspoon’s collecting activities are supported today by acquisition endowment funds, private contributions, and gifts of art. Recent purchases include works by Ann Hamilton, Mel Chin, Ana Mendieta, Alison Saar, Kiki Smith, Lesley Dill, Francesca Woodman, Stuart Klipper, Leon Golub, Robert Overby, and Gregory Crewdson. Among recent gifts are works by Mark di Suvero, Tom Friedman, St. Clair Cemin, Nancy Grossman, David Reed, and Magdalena Abakanowicz.