This museum at 100 proves art never goes out of style
The Mills College Art Museum on Northeastern University’s Oakland campus opened as an art gallery with 40 paintings and 75 prints. Today, it is a significant collector of works on paper, photography and Asian ceramics.
OAKLAND, Calif. — Northeastern University student Montse Cadiz paused in front of the painting “Moonlight Landscape” by William Keith in the Mills College Art Museum.
A moody forest scene dominated by the reflection of the moon on a pond, the painting’s subtlety struck Cadiz, a neuroscience and design major who said she has tried art-making herself in multiple mediums.
“There are so many shades of green in those dark areas,” she said.
A 1962 photograph, “In the Box” by Ruth Bernhard, caught Northeastern student Marie Scanlon’s eye. The image shows a nude female reclining inside a cardboard packing box.
“I love to look for the deeper meanings in things,” said Scanlon, an economics and psychology major. “She’s boxed in, like the role of a trophy wife who is stuck in a fabricated box.”
Those works were two of the many pieces of art on exhibit at the museum’s centennial celebration Saturday, when nearly 400 students, staff, faculty and community members gathered to wish the Beaux-Arts Classical/Spanish Colonial Revival building and its collections a happy 100th birthday.
Dan Sachs, dean of the Oakland campus, welcomed guests and praised the museum’s legacy of “nurturing the boundaries between art, education and community.”
The reception filled the museum’s outdoor courtyard and visitors enjoyed lunch, cupcakes and a greenscreen photo booth with a selection of works from the art collection as backgrounds.
The museum opened its doors on Oct. 4, 1925, as the Mills College Art Gallery with a collection anchored by 40 paintings and 75 prints by contemporary San Francisco Bay Area artists. It was the first public collection of modern art in Northern California.
Shepherded over the years by directors and faculty with expertise in graphic arts, photography, Asian art and ceramics, the museum has developed significant strengths as a collection of works on paper, photography, Californian and Asian ceramics and important works by major female artists.
In 1998, the gallery was renamed the Mills College Art Museum to acknowledge its wide array of works and importance as a collecting institution.
Inside the museum, under the building’s geometrically patterned glass ceiling and skylight that allow in natural light, a selection of major works from the permanent collection was on display.
As an academic museum, the museum’s mission has always been to provide opportunities for students to “discover their creative potential through artistic risk-taking and academic connections,” said Stephanie Hanor, its director.
Faculty use the collections to enhance instruction, Hanor says. Students in first-year writing courses on the Oakland campus visit the museum and pick one piece of artwork from the over 12,000 objects in the collection to write about.
The collection includes paintings from the 17th century to the present, including important modernist Diego Rivera. The museum has been a center for photography since the 1930s and holds work by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Man Ray and, in particular, Imogen Cunningham.
“Some faculty use the collection to talk about how we write and think about visual culture,” says Stephanie Young, an associate teaching professor of English. Students might write a memoir, a blog or even a podcast script.
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Using the collection as a writing prompt, Young says, gives both faculty and students flexibility in how they approach writing assignments. “The collections are really this kaleidoscopic way for students with really diverse backgrounds, interests and majors to frame their way of looking.”
Among the museum’s most noted holdings is the Shojiro Nomura Fukusa Collection. Donated in 1953 by the father of a Mills graduate, the collection features traditional Japanese gift covers — called fukusa — that are between 200 and 400 years old. The museum is home to the largest collection of these ornate silk cloths outside Japan.
For the centennial, the museum collaborated with the augmented reality studio Black Terminus to create additional, immersive content that could be viewed through a phone app.
Pairing the museum’s collections with augmented reality, Hanor said, uses technology to “create conversations across time that our founders would never have imagined.”
Sunny Lin lived in Georgia before starting her first year at Northeastern University and, before that, in her hometown in southeastern China. Visiting the Mills College Art Museum was a chance to immerse herself in the place where she lives.
“I wanted to know the history,” said Lin, a business and communications major, sitting outside the museum, “and to be here exactly when it turns 100 years old.”
