Housatonic Museum of Art facts for kids
| Location | 900 Lafayette Boulevard Housatonic Community College Bridgeport, Connecticut |
|---|---|
| Type | Art museum |
The Housatonic Museum of Art is a cool place to see art! It's located at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. This museum is special because its art collection is shown all over the college campus. They also have special galleries, called the Burt Chernow Galleries, where they host new art shows.
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What You Can See at the Museum
The museum has a huge collection of art from the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s. It also features amazing objects from different cultures around the world. You can find art from Africa, Oceania (islands in the Pacific Ocean), and the Americas.
Art from Around the World
The museum has many interesting pieces from different parts of the world.
- African Art: Look for a clay head from Ghana, a drum figure, and a helmet mask from Zaire. There are also special headdresses and wood carvings from the Bambara people and Nigeria.
- Oceania and Asia: You can see wood carvings from New Guinea. From India, there's a bronze sculpture, a stone carving from the 1300s, and a painting from the mid-1700s.
- The Americas and China: The collection includes a Mayan stucco head and an Inca storage bottle. There's also a beautiful marble sculpture from China that shows Kuan Yin, a goddess of mercy.
Famous Artists and Their Works
The museum has works by many well-known artists. Here are just a few examples:
- Sculptures: You can see bronze sculptures like Egyptian Motif by Alexander Archipenko and Seated Nude by Aristide Maillol. There's also Movement of the Dance by Auguste Rodin.
- Paintings: Check out Admiral de Ruyter by Ferdinand Bol from 1653, and Voyage of the Poet by Giorgio de Chirico. You can also find Incident by Alex Katz.
- Drawings: The museum has drawings like Sketch Class by Milton Avery and Autobiography by Saul Steinberg.
- Other Art Forms:
- Ansel Adams has a photograph called Wood Stump.
- Marc Chagall created a colorful print called Esther.
- Christo made a unique piece called Wrapped Modern Art Book, which is a book wrapped in plastic and string.
- Roy Lichtenstein has a silkscreen print called The Melody Haunts My Reverie.
- Isamu Noguchi created a sculpture called Alpii using marble and iron.
- Claes Oldenburg made a drawing with paint and crayon called Study: Soft Red Drainpipe.
The museum also has two works by the American abstract painter Stanley Boxer. These include a painting called Lafayette Night Bloom and a tall wooden sculpture called Beach Figure No. 3.
More Artists to Discover
You can also find smaller works by many other famous artists in the collection. These include Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, and Pierre Renoir.
How the Museum Started
The Housatonic Museum of Art was founded in 1967 by a man named Burt Chernow. He was an artist, a professor, and the head of the college's art department. Mr. Chernow had a big dream to bring art closer to students.
From the very beginning, the museum's collection grew thanks to generous gifts. Artists, private collectors, art galleries, and even student groups donated artworks. During Mr. Chernow's time at the college, the museum collected about 4,000 different art objects!
For its first 14 years, the museum didn't have a paid staff or a special budget for buying art. It relied on volunteers and used spaces already available at the college. Mr. Chernow believed that seeing real art every day, right on campus, was much better than just looking at pictures in books.
In the late 1990s, Robbin Zella became the director of the museum. Since 2000, the museum has hosted exciting traveling exhibits. These have included prints by the famous artist Rembrandt, photographs by Ansel Adams, and even a display of postcards from Frank Warren's "PostSecret" project.
