Off-Center Views: 60 Years of Collecting at UMass

University Museum of Contemporary Art

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Through May 14, 2023

[Click on Image for full size]

The Morrill Act of 1862 is one of the lesser known pieces of legislation to bear President Abraham Lincoln’s signature. It–and a second Morrill Act in 1890–set up “land grant” colleges. They were supposed to offer “practical” degrees in four fields: science, military science, engineering, and agriculture. The first three bear little resemblance to the fields of study those terms conjure today and the fourth, agriculture, was the true centerpiece for most land grant colleges. In 1862, farming was still the largest occupation in the United States and so it remained until the 1920s.

Amherst, Massachusetts received a land grant college, one affectionately nicknamed “Mass Aggie.” As late as 1941, what was then called Massachusetts College had just over 1,000 students–a far cry from the more than today’s 31,000 students. UMass Amherst did not become a university until 1947.

What this means insofar as this post is concerned is that UMass and most other land grant schools haven’t been around long enough to accumulate the huge endowments and gifts of Ivy League schools or elite private colleges. Nor did they have the resources of museums such as the Metropolitan in New York or the MFA in Boston. Want to buy a Van Gogh? It could cost over $80 million and not even a school whose current budget is $3.4 billion can afford to allocate that much of its operating costs for one work of art. So how does a relatively new university acquire collections befitting what they have become? Collect contemporary art, especially that of yet-unknown, up-and-coming, or generous visiting artists.

Collecting contemporary art is a crap shoot though. How valuable is it? In many cases no one knows until years later. After all, who was Andy Warhol when he was just another kid from Pittsburgh who moved to New York to try to establish himself as an artist? You know, like untold hundreds of others! What the UMass Museum of Contemporary Art did was simply collect–photographs, prints, graphics, lesser known paintings, architectural mockups–and hope for the best. The last of those is particularly risky, as many interesting designs never get built.

UMass is now at a place where it can mount an exhibit of what it has acquired since the early 1960s when it grew like topsy. Photographs dominate Sixty Years of Collecting but you will recognize the shutterbugs and perhaps a few artists from other mediums. When you do, it means the staff chose well and that’s true as well of names that perhaps don’t ring a bell.

Below is a sampling from the exhibit. Hurry to see it though, as it closes about the time of 2023’s commencement.