THE SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY ART COLLECTION

Students in the Print Study Room

The Syracuse University Art Collection is one of the country’s oldest University collections, dating back to 1874. Numbering over 45,000 objects, there are large collections of American and European art, as well as ethnographic holdings including Chinese, Pre-Columbian, Korean, Japanese, African, and Asian Indian materials. Recent renovations in the SUArt Galleries will enable visitors to see more of the university’s permanent collection and its storage facility than ever before. This reconstruction has turned a once closed facility into an open storage space where visitors are welcome to examine over 1450 ethnographic objects illustrating different cultures and time periods in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Additional spaces contain further collections of sculpture, glass and ceramics; creating a loop enabling visitors to move in one continuous direction.

Construction in the west galleries has also created an area to exhibit American objects from the permanent collection. Opening this fall a selection of notable paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture will examine American cities and their inhabitants. An adjacent exhibition space will display important examples of American sculpture, glass and ceramics.

Other permanent collection exhibitions opening this fall include Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints and Monument to a Warlord: Photographs of Nikko and the Temple of Ieyasu. The first reviews the major artists and approaches to the expressionist aesthetic in the early 20th century and the second presents forty 19th century hand colored albumen prints that highlight a tour of Nikko, the final resting place of Ieyasu Tokugawa, Japan’s first shogun of the Edo period. The exhibition's design provides an experience similar to that of a 19th century visitor's tour of the Tosho-gu, the emperor’s burial complex. These exhibitions will be installed in the Print and Photo Study Galleries respectively and will be on view throughout the academic year.