Organized by the Muscarelle Museum of Art, Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane Masterpiece Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti will open February 9 and be on view through April 14, 2013.  This landmark exhibition is being organized in honor of the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Muscarelle Museum of Art in 1983. Sacred and Profane follows on the success of Michelangelo: Anatomy as Architecture, Drawings by the Master held at the Muscarelle in 2010. The purpose of the new exhibition, with its unprecedented “sacred and profane” theme, is to investigate the artist’s innermost philosophy as revealed in his original, often […]

Paintings from North American collections in honor of the 400th anniversary of his birth.  |  February 9, 2013 – April 14, 2013

September 28, 2012 – January 6, 2013

Works of the teaching studio art faculty including visiting instructors and emeriti professors at William & Mary were featured in an exhibition at the Muscarelle Museum of Art from October 27, 2012 through January 6, 2013. William & Mary was the first American university to create a department of fine arts and the Muscarelle was the first accredited university museum in the Commonwealth. This exhibition, a long-standing collaboration between the two departments, showcased representations of each artist’s current studio works. Faculty Show 12 presented the diverse talents of the William & Mary faculty in multiple media including drawing, painting, printmaking, […]

August 18, 2012 – October 7, 2012 The vases in this exhibition, from Virginia collections, were selected to display not only a variety of subjects and shapes, but also the principal techniques used to decorate them. Arranged in an approximate chronology, starting with prehistoric pottery and ending with high classical-era red-figure pottery, Athenian Potters and Painters was organized in connection with the international conference Athenian Potters and Painters III.  The labels and wall texts were written by the students of Professor John Oakley in the Department of Classical Studies at the College of William & Mary.

William D. Barnes: Three Decades of Still Life and Landscape, was an exhibition of paintings and monotypes by Professor William Barnes – on view from April 14 to June 24, 2012. Barnes retired from the Department of Art and Art History at William & Mary after thirty-seven years of dedicated teaching and mentoring students in the field of painting. The first major retrospective of this distinguished painter’s career,  the exhibition included more than fifty paintings and fifty monotypes from a span of thirty years. In honor of the occasion, a catalogue designed by Linda Carey with introduction by Dr. Aaron De […]

Curators at Work II presents a new and enlarged version of Curators at Work: 16 Memoranda for the Curatorial Files, a small show in the spring of 2011 that received a popular response. A year ago, many visitors were delighted by the opportunity to discover that the Muscarelle owns original works of art by modern art luminaries like Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Man Ray, and Marino Marini. This year’s edition combines the fruits of the research by the students of two semesters of the Museum’s seminar, Curating, Collecting & Connoisseurship [ARTH 330-01 & ARTH 330-06]. On view in the Sheridan […]

A mysterious gold Merovingian ring dating from the onset of the middle ages, ca. 400 to 600, is among the medieval treasures included in , a special loan exhibition In honor of the retirement of medievalist Professor Barbara Watkinson. The ring’s diamond shaped bezel is inset with blue and green glass and set off by a cabochon garnet on all four corners (lent by the Kathleen Durdin collection). The Merovingian kings in Gaul were suppressed by Charlemagne, but their fame as a ‘realm of the rings’ survives even today in legends and literature. Guest curated by William and Mary senior […]