Our Story
Since our founding in 1975, the University Museum of Contemporary Art has approached contemporary art in the same way a biologist, anthropologist, or engineer is guided by a quest for knowledge and discovery. It dives into the unknown, challenges the familiar, and encourages artists — emerging and established alike — to experiment, question, and push boundaries.
Its founding mission was to bring contemporary art to the Pioneer Valley through a permanent collection and the presentation of exhibitions. While Smith, Amherst, and Mount Holyoke College had traditional encyclopedic museums, the museum, then known as the University Gallery, set out to bring contemporary art to the Five Colleges and wider community.
To this day, the University Museum of Contemporary Art is the only university-affiliated museum between Boston and the Berkshires to focus full-time on contemporary art exhibitions. It is also the only museum in the region that centers experimental and cross-disciplinary art.
The University Gallery opened concurrently with the Randolph W. Bromery Center for the Arts. Upstairs in the Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall, world-class performers from around brought their art to the stage, while downstairs at the University Gallery, exceptional visual artists were featured in exhibitions and cuators worked to develop a permanent collection of contemporary art.
In its inaugural season, the University Gallery presented two extraordinary shows. The first, an exhibition titled Artist & Fabricator, brought in a collection of monumental outdoor sculptures that had been created by the industrial fabricators. One of those sculptures, the red, abstract Quinnipiac by Robert Murray, still stands prominently on the Haigis Mall plaza outside of the Randolph W. Bromery Center for the Arts.
The museum’s second major show in its spring season, Critical Perspectives in American Art, was an overview of contemporary American art featuring the work of three generations of artists. The show was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, a prestigious international cultural exhibition held in Venice, Italy every two years.
Over the next five decades, the museum has presented extraordinary works by major names in contemporary art.
Among them are Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, mid-twentieth century artists with profound influence on the Pop Art movement. Their contributions have to do with their analytical approach to familiar subjects, with Johns’ being more intellectual and “cool” in his use of American icons as subjects, while Raushenberg is known for his multidisciplinary approach to the art form.
Marina Abramović and Joan Jonas are icons and pioneers lauded for their performance art. Agnes Denes is a pioneer in the environmental/ecological land art movement.
In 2017, the museum presented Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power. Walker, one of the most widely known and controversial artists today, explored the painful history of American race relations and the legacy of slavery through large-scale silhouette installations created with literary sources and historical and pop culture materials.
While the museum’s main focus has always been on the living contemporary artist, in 2009 the museum posthumously curated a successful exhibition featuring the work of the great Andy Warhol. The exhibition was culled from more than a hundred Polaroid photographs and black and white silver gelatin prints.
Perhaps the most notable exhibition over the museum’s fifty year history is DuBois in Our Time, a monumental and incredibly important show featuring works by leading artists including Carrie Mae Weems and Julie Mehretu. The exhibition put a global spotlight on the museum as it explored the legacy of the incredibly influential writer, scholar, and activist W. E. B. DuBois.
Other artists featured on the museum’s walls over the years include: Vito Acconci, Diane Arbus, Yto Barrada, Dawoud Bey, Diana Thater, Tacita Dean, Kimsooja, Carrie Mae Weems, James Welling, Walid Raad, Nicole Eisenman, Roni Horn, Agnes Dennis, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Louise Nevelso, and many more exceptional artists.
The permanent collection
The museum’s permanent collection, which was started by art professor Walter Kamys in 1962, currently comprises 4,000 contemporary photographs, drawings, and prints. It is the largest collection of contemporary art housed in a Massachusetts public institution outside of Boston.
More than twenty-five years ago, the Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium (of which the University Museum of Contemporary Art is a part), integrated their combined collection records and images into a publicly searchable database. The database makes the museums’ respective holdings accessible to students and to the public for the purposes of study and research.
The museum has continued to expand its collection with a focus on underrepresented voices, in recent years through its Collecting 101 course, where UMass students research, select, and present potential acquisitions at a public event called Vote for Art, where the public votes for their favorite artwork to be added to the permanent collection.
The museum’s Dialogue with a Collection program invites local artists to explore the permanent collection and create an exhibition that integrates selected works from the collection with their own work. Artists are encouraged to seek juxtapositions and alignments, both formal and conceptual, between objects to create a dialogue of ideas.
Role as a teaching museum
As the university’s teaching museum, the University Museum of Contemporary Art is not just a place to look at art, but a space to learn from it.
“The combination of the [university’s] very large studio art department with a very active contemporary art museum, that kind of synergy I can’t think of anywhere else." — Hugh Davis, founding director of the museum.
Centering the presence of the living artist on campus, the museum provides students and the community with always-free opportunities to learn directly from the artist, fostering a greater understanding of the art of our time. And visiting artists likewise benefit from being in contact with university scholars and students across disciplines.
This is especially evident in artist residency projects leveraging departments and resources across campus. For example, in 2019, MFA graduate student Emily Tareila curated a pilot project, Fielding: Goldenrod, An Exploration of Connections, organized by the museum and the UMass Natural History Collections. Using the collections for exploration and research, Tareila created an exhibition investigating the history of the goldenrod plant, featuring selections from the collection alongside her own original art.
In 2024, the museum exhibited the work of Courtney M. Leonard in BREACH: LOGBOOK 24 | STACCATO, the result of a multiyear residency between the museum and the UMass College of Natural Resources. After researching extensively in the Natural History Collections and with UMass scientists, Leonard created a powerful set of paintings, sculpture, and video based on the life of Staccato, a North Atlantic right whale killed by a ship strike in 1999, whose remains are housed at UMass.
In fulfilling its mission to teach, the museum also hosts a number of educational programs that provide students with special opportunities to curate exhibitions, complete collections projects, research artworks, and gain experience in the museum’s everyday workings. These include graduate assistantships, a student museum educator program, student internships, a museum collections course, and a yearly graduate student-curated exhibition.