The SUArt Galleries is the newest campus venue for the visual arts. Accessible though the Shaffer Art Building, the facility hosts a variety of temporary and permanent exhibitions throughout the year in its nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space. The new department’s mission is to enhance the cultural environment of the University and the Syracuse area through meaningful educational experiences and encounters with the University’s permanent collection and traveling exhibitions.

ABOUT THE ART COLLECTION

The Syracuse University Art Collection began in 1873 with a series of plaster casts purchased for the studio arts program and is the cumulative result of over 130 years of active acquisition of world art. In 1949, George Arents, a university trustee, donated a group of 19th century European and American paintings collected by his mother, Annie Walters Arents. This gift laid the foundation for the modern collection and invigorated the university to build its holdings.

The University embarked on its most intensive period of collecting with the appointment of Laurence Schmeckebier as dean of the School of Art in 1954. Working closely with Chancellor William P. Tolley, Schmeckebier brought an impressive number of objects to Syracuse throughout the 1960's. Ranging from the Cloud Wampler Collection of Prints to the Ruth Reeves Collection of Indian Folk Art, Schmeckebier and Tolley were able to maintain an equally impressive level of quality. In addition, the dean devised and implemented programs to heighten campus and community awareness of the arts' role in education. Chief among these were a mural program where visiting artists executed large scale paintings for various university buildings and an outdoor sculpture program which located monumental pieces on several campus sites. Dean Schmeckebier was cognizant of the need to maintain direction given such a diverse collection of objects. He decided to concentrate on strengthening the collection of American paintings and purchased John Steuart Curry's Gospel Train, Reginald Marsh's Coney Island, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Forbidden Fruit. American art continues to be the primary focus of the Collection's activity.

The collection of prints surveys the international history of printmaking. The focus is American artists, particularly those whose work pre-dates World War II. Three-dimensional objects -- sculpture and decorative arts -- make up a smaller but significant portion of the Collection. Of special interest in the area of sculpture are the works from the estates of James and Laura Fraser, and of Anna Hyatt Huntington. Among the decorative arts collections are Korean, Japanese, and American ceramics, as well as pre-Columbian and modern Peruvian ceramics. The Ruth Reeves Collection of Indian Folk Art, and the Andrei Nitecki Collection of West African Art represent comprehensive surveys of these two areas of artistic endeavor.

Another focus of the Collections is the Petty-Dunn Center for Social Cartooning. Established in 1978 through a bequest given to the University by Mary Petty and Alan Dunn, the Center houses a collection of several thousand cartoons by Petty, Dunn, as well as such artists as Constantin Alajalov, Boris Artzybasheff, and William Gropper. The primary objective of the Center is the active utilization of the holdings as research material for the study of social cartooning.

Today, the Syracuse University Art Collections, now comprised of nearly 45,000 objects, is housed in a temperature and humidity controlled area of Sims Hall, adjacent to the Lowe Art Gallery. It serves as a repository for the art collections of the University; the care, maintenance, documentation and interpretation of the works are its primary concern. The facility has undergone several renovations beginning in 1994 to develop a series of galleries to accomplish programming objectives as they relate to students, faculty and staff. These include exhibitions, and areas designed to enable classes and groups to come in more intimate contact with objects. Individual objects are made available to other institutions and museums for their exhibition programs and entire exhibitions are rented to museums and galleries around the country through the Department’s Traveling Exhibition Program.

A large part of the Collection is found in many of the offices and public areas of the University buildings, and a selection of sculpture is displayed at various outdoor sites. Also of interest are the numerous murals on campus. Supported by the Division of Summer Sessions, the Campus Mural Program made possible the execution of important, large-scale works by American artists of merit. Of special note, is Ben Shahn's mosaic, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, located on the east wall of Huntington Beard Crouse Hall.