Memorial Art Gallery

The Gallery is a memorial to James George Averell, a grandson of Hiram Sibley.[1] After Averell died at age 26, his mother, Emily Sibley Watson (by then the wife of James Sibley Watson), spent several years seeking a way to publicly commemorate him. Meanwhile, Rush Rhees, president of the University of Rochester, had been looking for benefactors to help him add to the University's campus, then located on Prince Street in the City of Rochester. Rhees included a dedicated art gallery on a map of the campus as early as 1905.[2] The Rochester Art Club, which was the focal point for art enthusiasts of the area and which had exhibited and taught at art venues of the time (Reynolds Arcade, the Bevier Memorial Building, and the Powers Block) supported the creation of the gallery.[3] Since its establishment in 1912 the Gallery has existed as a department of the University with an independent board overseeing its collections and programs.[4] Rush Rhees assembled the initial board of managers, including the Art Club's president, George L. Herdle, in November 1912 and by the eighth of the following October, presided over the Gallery's opening.

The Gallery main entrance, also showing the Cutler Union

The inaugural exhibition, curated by George Herdle, consisted of contemporary American paintings, many of which were for sale, on loan from the artists or their dealers.[5] Since the Gallery had no endowment for acquisitions in its first decades, exhibitions were an opportunity for donors to acquire works and then immediately gift their purchases to the gallery to start its permanent collection. Significant early gifts acquired from exhibitions included: Willard Metcalf's [Golden Carnival],[6] Joaquín Sorolla's [Oxen on the Beach][7] and Paul Dougherty's [Coast of Cornwall, near St. Ives].[8]

George Herdle organized an ambitious exhibition schedule with multiple exhibitions changing monthly. Significant early exhibitions included the 1914 exhibition at which the original Kodachrome two-color process was introduced,[9] and in 1919 a controversial solo exhibition by George Bellows.[10] Annual exhibitions of the Rochester Art Club were also held at the Gallery. In the early years, these changing exhibitions were supplemented by summer loan exhibitions from the private collections of George Eastman, the Sibleys, the Watsons, and other prominent Rochester families.[11] With Herdle's untimely death in 1922, his daughter and University of Rochester graduate, Gertrude L. Herdle[12] began what would become a 40-year career as the museum's director. Another daughter, Isabel C. Herdle, served in various curatorial roles beginning in 1932 after schooling at the University of Rochester, with graduate work at Radcliffe College and Paul Sachs' museum studies course at the Fogg, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Before joining her sister at the Memorial Art Gallery, Isabel Herdle worked for one year at the de Young museum.

Today, the Gallery is supported primarily by its membership, the University of Rochester, and public funds from Monroe County and the New York State Council on the Arts.[15]

One of the first works "Morning Star" by Eugen Bracht, acquired in 1913[16]

The Gallery's permanent collection comprises some 12,000 objects, including works by Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Homer and Cassatt. Contemporary masters in the collection include Wendell Castle, Albert Paley and Helen Frankenthaler. Other notable works include:

• George Eastman's collection of about 60 Old Master, British, Dutch, American, and French Barbizon School paintings,[17] including Rembrandt's [Portrait of a Young Man in an Armchair][18]
• The Encyclopedia Britannica collection of twentieth-century American art[19]
• The Charles Rand Penney collection[20]
• Jean-Léon Gérôme's [Interior of a Mosque],[21] the only painting from Hiram Sibley's original collection still in the Gallery's possession
• Egyptian and Eastern Mediterranean antiquities from the collection of Herbert Ocumpaugh, a 19th-century businessman
• Near East antiquities from the collection of Frederic Grinnell Morgan of Aurora, NY[22]
• English and Continental silver from the 17th through 19th centuries from the collection of Ernest Woodward, heir to the Jell-O fortune
• El Greco's [The Apparition of the Virgin to St. Hyacinth],[23] first work to be acquired from the Gallery's Marion Stratton Gould endowment
• Portrait of Colonel Nathaniel Rochester[24]

The permanent collection includes more than 500 objects from the collections of four generations of the Sibley and Watson families.[25]

The Gallery offered programs for area school children as early as 1914.[26] By 1927, a regular program of community art classes for children and adults was established, which by 1949 became known as the Creative Workshop.[27] Today the Gallery offers extensive and intensive K-12 school programs,[28] accessibility programs for individuals with vision or hearing impairment, and community programs for individuals with dementia and their care partners. The Gallery also offers collaborative programs with area colleges and universities[29] and an innovative protocol using the visual arts to enhance skills of observation for medical students and health practitioners.[30]

Besides hosting exhibitions, classes, and educational programs, the Gallery puts on such major events as the biennial Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition and the annual Clothesline Festival.

• The Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition is a biennial competition for artwork from New York's 27 westernmost counties.[31] It is judged by guest jurors, which have included Charles E. Burchfield, John Bauer, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Thomas Messer, former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Past winners include Wendell Castle, Albert Paley, Honoré Sharrer, Hans Christensen, Bill Stewart, Graham Marks, and Kathy Calderwood. It grew out of the Rochester Art Club's annual members-only exhibitions which were held in the Gallery starting in 1914, and became a separate event in 1938 under its current name.
• The Clothesline Festival is an open-air exhibition where visitors buy artwork directly from New York state exhibitors and enjoy live entertainment and family activities.[32] The Gallery reluctantly initiated the Festival as an unjuried show in 1957,[33] and the Festival has consistently proved a crowd-pleaser as well as a means to bolster the Gallery's budget.

The museum is located on the University of Rochester's former Prince Street campus and consists of the following structures:

Structures

Name	Photo	Description
Main gallery	The fountain court in the main gallery	Inspired by the Tempio Malatestiano (which Averell had sketched in a visit to Italy), it was primarily executed by John Gade, though Claude Bragdon was nominally involved. A 1926 expansion designed by Stanford White's son Lawrence White doubled the floor and wall space and added the Fountain Court as a venue for live music performances. The fountain was a 20th-century reproduction after Andrea del Verrocchio's Putto with Dolphin of the Palazzo Vecchio. It houses paintings by Baroque Period painters,including El Greco("Vision of Saint Hyacinth"),Paolo Paolini,Luca Giordano,Domenico Feti("Saint Stephen"),Claude Lorrain,Francesco Solimena,and Francesco Guardi.
1968 wing	The 1968 entrance—still used as an entrance for group tours	The 1968 wing was built as an expansion to provide more configurable exhibit space.[34] It opened in August 1968. It houses American Art, including paintings by John Singleton Copley, George Harvey, John Kensett, Lilly Martin Spencer, John Sloan (Chinese Restaurant), Milton Avery, Georgia O'Keeffe, Colin Campbell Cooper (Main Street Bridge, Rochester), Winslow Homer and Hans Hofmann.
The Cutler Union	The M&T Bank ballroom	Originally constructed as the women's student union for the University of Rochester, funded by a bequest from James Goold Cutler, it was first opened in September 1933.[35] The Gallery held classes in its basement for many years until the University gave it to the Gallery in 1987. It features a massive gothic spire.
The Vanden Brul pavilion	The Vanden Brul pavilion serves as a passage between the 1968 wing and the Cutler Union	An enclosed, skylit sculpture garden linking the 1968 wing to the Cutler Union, opened in May 1987, named for board member and donor Herbert W. Vanden Brul's parents[36]
Centennial Sculpture Park	Family Day in the Centennial Sculpture Park	MAG's Centennial Sculpture Park has recast ten acres of the Gallery’s grounds into a showcase of public art and urban space. Major installations by Wendell Castle, Jackie Ferrara, Tom Otterness, Albert Paley and Jim Sanborn are featured on the grounds,[37] while Poets Walk and Story Walk invoke and inspire connections to Rochester history through poems and stories along University Avenue and Goodman Street.[38]

• List of university art museums and galleries in New York State

Media related to Memorial Art Gallery at Wikimedia Commons

• Official website