Ruth Gordon Shapiro 'Director Davis Museum

Position: Ruth Gordon Shapiro '37 Director of the Davis Museum
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**** Job Posting Title
** Ruth Gordon Shapiro '37 Director of the Davis Museum
** Job Description Summary
** Admin Exempt
** Job Description
**** The Davis Museum
** The Davis Museum is one of Wellesley College’s great assets, providing for the care and inventive display of distinguished permanent collections and for the presentation of a rich and varied schedule of temporary exhibitions and programs. A teaching museum, the Davis Museum is a critical resource that is used not only to teach art and art history but also to engage Wellesley College students from across the disciplines in exploring the intersections between art and other fields.

The Davis Museum seeks to be a leading academic museum on a liberal arts college campus for the 21st century.

Wellesley College began collecting original works of art upon its founding in 1875 and opened the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1889. The museum moved to the Jewett Arts Center in 1958, and to its current home in the Davis Museum in 1993. The study of original art objects has been integral to teaching across the disciplines at Wellesley since the College’s founding.

Notably, Wellesley introduced the teaching of art history in 1885 and distinguished itself as one of the first American colleges to offer the subject. The College’s collections have served as the foundation for Wellesley’s renown in the field of art history since Alice Van Vechten Brown introduced what became known as “the Wellesley Method” in the late nineteenth-century: an art history pedagogy that intertwined the study of original works of art with art-making, lectures, and reading.

Since the 1990s, the Davis has continued its leadership in the field of academic museums with innovative cross disciplinary education through the visual arts, expanding far beyond its original remit as an extension of the Art Department. Today, the Davis Museum stewards approximately 15,500 works of art and hosts over 100 class visits from departments across Wellesley each academic year. Widely recognized for its adventurous exhibitions and dynamic programming, the Davis attracts diverse audiences from on and off campus and provides unique learning opportunities for Wellesley students.

The Davis Museum was the first building in North America to have been designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rafael Moneo, whose notion of the museum as a “treasury” or “treasure chamber” informs its design. Adjacent to the Academic Quad and connected by enclosed bridge to the Jewett Arts Center, the Davis is at the heart of the arts on the Wellesley campus.

As a resource for academic research and study, and a source of innovative programming, the Davis occupies a prominent space at the center of the intellectual and aesthetic life of the College community. The Davis’s facilities for the display and study of art include four floors of galleries; a print study room; a seminar room linked by elevator to permanent collection storage areas;

collection care areas, staff work spaces and offices. The complex also houses the Collins Cinema, a 168 seat lecture theater fully equipped for presenting film and electronic media, and the Collins Café.The Davis Museum stewards a long-term collection of 15,500 artworks, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, and more. Strengths of the collection include photography, works on paper,…