Road Trip: Smith College Museum of Art

I’ve been wanting to see the renovated Museum of Art at Smith College (my alma mater) since it reopened in April and finally made it there on Saturday. The sunny fall day made it a nice trip out the Mass. Pike despite all the Columbus Day weekend traffic.

An artist and school chum of mine, Amy, and I arrived in Northampton just before noon, so we stopped at Sylvester’s, a restaurant/bakery that attracts big crowds on weekends. We had a 20-minute wait before being seated by the congenial hostess, then found it nearly impossible to hold a conversation over the din in the dining room. But Amy’s Lox-Ness Omelet and my Caesar salad were both very good.

The Museum

Next we headed up to the museum. I’m glad we waited to use the bathrooms at the museum because they were a hoot. Designed by artist Ellen Driscoll, the ladies room is all blue and decorated with waves and protozoa so you feel like you’re swimming when you enter. Even the, eh-hem, fixtures are painted.

I didn’t see the men’s room, for obvious reasons, but you can see images from both restrooms and an explanation of the designs on the website.

The museum and the college’s art department and art library are part of the new Brown Fine Arts Center, the result of a two-year, $35-million building renovation and expansion. (Left: arts center exterior. Right: Amy in the museum.)

We started in the galleries on the third floor with paintings and sculpture from the museum’s main collection, numbering some 25,000 objects. I was impressed with the range of American and European paintings – Eakins, Cezanne, Picasso, Corot – but also some Asian block prints and Mayan artifacts that are on loan. Perfect for a teaching museum.

Next we visited the Master Drawings exhibit, part 2 (part 1 was earlier in the year). Amy at first balked because she’s not a big fan of drawings, but she was bowled over and said it was the best part of our visit. I have to agree. There were a variety of styles, textures and techniques, but the simplest drawings were the ones that got me – like the Toulouse-Lautrec sketch portrait, where just the right placement, curve and thickness of a line here and there convey the whole story. Or the amazing Seurat studies where the relative density of points suggest the forms of the women.

Georges Seurat, Three Young Women

(from artnet.com)

We got a peek at the next exhibit, Undomesticated Interiors, and it looks wild! Running from Oct. 17 – Jan. 18, it features “more than seventy contemporary sculptures, installations, media works, and photographs that explore the subject of the home as not quite housebroken.” I have to go back!