By Dan Nonte, University Relations
The Weatherspoon Art Museum has been awarded a $150,000 conservation grant to better preserve its permanent collection.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services received 144 applications and awarded 40 grants totaling $2.8 million. The Weatherspoon is the only museum in North Carolina to receive a grant.
The museum will use the IMLS funds and matching money it must raise, to purchase and install 32 movable painting screens, doubling its vault’s painting storage capacity. The planned modifications will also create a more easily accessed area for sculpture storage.
“This award enables us to even better address one of the key parts of our mission: to collect and preserve works of art for the public trust and enjoyment of its many audiences,” said museum director Nancy Doll. “It is also a great vote of confidence from the IMLS in the significance of our collection and in our efforts to safeguard it for the future.”
Prominent artists Willem de Kooning, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Cindy Sherman, Al Held, Alex Katz, Henry Tanner, Louise Nevelson, Mark diSuvero and Robert Rauschenberg are all represented among the museum’s collection of almost 5,500 works. Works in the Weatherspoon’s collection increasingly are being requested by museums across the country and in Europe.
For instance, the David Smith sculpture “Interior” is in the artist’s centennial retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York. Later in the year, it will move less than a mile to the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it will be part of an exhibition exploring the influence of Pablo Picasso.
Other works are on loan to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, the Menil Collection in Houston, and the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. In the coming months, works will be loaned to the Pace Gallery and the Berry-Hill Galleries in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.
