Last Thursday, I stopped by one of Vassar's greatest resources: the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Founded in 1864, the museum includes more than 17,000 works of art—enormous compared to many other colleges' museums. The endless collection includes countless treasures: ancient Chinese manuscripts, an Egyptian sarcophagus, and the paintings of notables like Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch and Jackson Pollack, to name just a few recognizable names.
Last March, 80 of our paintings traveled for 10-months to Japan. The works were exhibited in five major Japanese museums in an acclaimed exhibition entitled Paris–New York: Modernist Painting in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Masterworks from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College. James Mundy, director of Vassar's museum, helped to organize the exhibition, and felt that it represented the increasing importance of globalization in Vassar's curriculum and in the art world. "A buzzword for the new millennium has been ‘globalization’ and among America’s most important exports is higher education,” said Mundy in an interview with On Campus. The Japanese exhibit coincides with the rapid growth of the Asian Studies program at the College, as well as a new exchange program with the Ochanomizu University in Toyko.
But last week, the 80-plus works happily returned to Poughkeepsie. After my afternoon classes were over, I ducked into the museum to see the returned art first-hand (we had already written about it in The Miscellany News). Just as I remembered them! I don't think I had seen them in person since the first week of my freshmen year, when I wandered over to the museum on a campus exploration. It reminded me that the Art Center is such a unique resource—not ever small liberal arts college also hosts a world-class museum.
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