GREENSBORO, NC.- After a summer of gallery and lighting remodeling work, the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro reopened on Tuesday, August 13, and we are ready to reconnect with our visitors and campus. The museum will be welcoming the campus and Greensboro community back with our WAM Fall Open House celebration on Saturday, September 14, 3-6pm.
At this always popular event, you will enjoy refreshments by Chez Genèse, Ben and Jerry's ice cream, music by Rene Roman, and gallery conversations in our three new exhibitions: Interpreting America: Photographs from the Collection, Crip* | Artists Engage with Disability; and Making Connections: Art, Place, and Relationships.
Interpreting America: Photographs from the Collection
August 13–December 21, 2024
Drawn from the Weatherspoon’s stellar collection, these photographs illustrate what artists have had to say about American culture from the late 19th through the early 21st centuries. The period spanned by these images ranges from Civil War battles, Western expansion vistas, and class and racial divisions to life in rural America today, increased economic prosperity, and hints of cultural alienation. Photographs such as these have shaped our ever-evolving definition of what the term “America” means.
Crip* | Artists Engage with Disability
September 7, 2024–April 26, 2025
This group exhibition features contemporary artists who engage with experiences and understandings of disability. They do so by thinking about the ways that one’s personal experience of disability always intersects with other aspects of their life. Collectively, their work in sculptures, drawings, videos, prints, and installations encourages us to fracture and reassemble the ways in which we think about who we are.
Making Connections: Art, Place, and Relationships
September 14, 2024–July 5, 2025
Building on the museum’s desire to engage our stakeholders in more personal and meaningful ways, this installation of artworks from the collection showcases the Weatherspoon as an academic museum with deep connections to and relationships with its campus, Greensboro, and broader communities.
The Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro was founded by Gregory Ivy in 1941 and is the earliest of any art facilities within the UNC system. The museum was founded as a resource for the campus, community, and region, and its early leadership developed an emphasis—maintained to this day—on presenting and acquiring modern and contemporary works of art. A 1950 bequest from the renowned collection of Claribel and Etta Cone, including prints and bronzes by Henri Matisse and other works on paper by American and European modernists, helped establish the Weatherspoon’s permanent collection. During Ivy’s tenure, other prescient acquisitions included a 1951 suspended mobile by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning’s pivotal 1949-50 Woman, and the first drawings by Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson to enter a museum collection.
In 1989, the museum moved into its present location in The Anne and Benjamin Cone Building designed by the architectural firm Mitchell Giurgola. The museum has six galleries and a sculpture courtyard with over 17,000 square feet of exhibition space. The American Alliance of Museums accredited the Weatherspoon in 1995 and renewed its accreditation in 2005 and 2015.
The collection of the Weatherspoon Art Museum is one of the foremost of its kind in the Southeast. It represents all major art movements from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Among the nearly 6,500 objects in the collection are works by such prominent figures as Sanford Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Nick Cave, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Louise Nevelson, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Jackson Pollock, Betye Saar, Cindy Sherman, Amy Sillman, David Smith, Jennifer Steinkamp, Joseph Stella, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Edward Weston. The museum regularly lends to major exhibitions nationally and internationally.
The Weatherspoon is also known for its dynamic exhibition program. Through a lively annual calendar of exhibitions and a multidisciplinary educational program for audiences of all ages, the museum provides an opportunity for visitors to consider artistic, cultural, and social issues of our time—enriching the life of our university, community, and region.
