Weatherspoon Art Museum

The Weatherspoon Art Museum is located at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in the southeast with a focus on American art. Its programming includes fifteen or more exhibitions per year, year-round educational activities, and scholarly publications. The Weatherspoon Art Museum was accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1995 and earned reaccreditation status in 2005.

Founded in 1941 by Gregory Ivy, first head of the Art Department at Woman’s College (now UNCG), the Woman’s College Art Gallery opened in a former physics lab in the McIver Building, making it the first art gallery within The University of North Carolina system. The following year, the gallery was officially named in honor of Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon, an art educator and Woman’s College alumna, and the sister of the college’s late president Charles Duncan McIver. Over the course of seventy years, the Weatherspoon has grown from a teaching gallery to a fully accredited professional museum.

In 1985, the Weatherspoon received funding to construct the Anne and Benjamin Cone Building. Occupying a majority of the 42,000-square-foot building designed by Romaldo Giurgola of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in Philadelphia and New York, the Weatherspoon features six galleries, a sculpture garden, atrium, auditorium, and two storage vaults, in addition to other features shared with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Department of Art.

From its inception, the Weatherspoon has focused on building a permanent collection of modern and contemporary art. Numbering close to 6,000 artworks, primarily American, the permanent collection represents all major art movements from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Work by Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Knox Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, John Marin, Alexander Calder, Robert Henri, Cindy Sherman, Sol Le Witt, Louise Nevelson, Eva Hesse, and Andy Warhol are included. Other collection highlights include The Dillard Collection of Art on Paper; the Etta and Claribel Cone Collection; the Lenoir C. Wright Collection of Japanese Prints; and The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States.

Since 1965, the Weatherspoon Art Museum has received corporate funding from the Dillard Paper Company—now xpedx—to present Art on Paper, a biennial exhibition that features regional, national and international artists who have produced significant works made on or of paper. Through the Dillard Fund, the collection of works on paper purchased from those shows numbers close to 550 objects and includes work by Louise Bourgeois, Brice Marden, Knox Martin, Joan Mitchell, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Eva Hesse, and Amy Cutler.

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