The Museum of Art enjoys lending works of art from its collection to special exhibitions at other museums and galleries. In the last year, more than a dozen loans have traveled to venues throughout the United States and on two occasions to exhibitions in Europe.

A committee at the Museum reviews formal requests once a month, paying particular attention to the importance of the exhibition, the fragility of the work under consideration, and a report about security and climate controls at the institution's facility. Though it does not approve every request it receives, the Museum tries to accommodate institutions both large and small that are presenting new and compelling exhibitions.

For example, earlier this fall we were pleased to lend Marsden Hartley's great painting, After the Storm, Vinalhaven (1938-39), to the first Hartley retrospective in Europe, which was presented at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen, Denmark. The Museum's handprinted collage El Salvador (1986) by Nancy Spero was also in Europe earlier this year, when it traveled to a major Spero retrospective at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany.

In the coming year, the Museum has approved loans to such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Middlebury College Museum of Art, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives. Closer to home, we are pleased to make loans to the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Monhegan Museum of Art.

In addition to supporting the projects of our museum colleagues, these loans often result in new information about the work of art and raise the BCMA's visibility in communities near and far.

 

Frank Goodyear, Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art