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The Graduate Program draws on the rich art history resources--the professional staffs, libraries, and art collections--of not just one, but two institutions, Williams College and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.
The
Clark
The
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in which the Graduate Program is
based, houses one of the largest
art research libraries in North America, consisting of more than 200,000
volumes, 1,000,000 photographs and reproductions, and 149,000 slides. Current
periodical subscriptions number over 600.
The Clark's renowned art collections include a fine small collection of old master paintings; a strong collection of nineteenth-century American paintings with special emphasis on Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent; an extensive and representative group of Barbizon, Impressionist, and academic nineteenth-century French paintings; and important collections of silver, prints, and drawings. Recently the Clark has begun acquiring nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American photography.
Williams College offers further resources for the study of art history: a renovated small art museum of high quality, with special strength in modern American art and with a significant collection of objects from classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and non-Western cultures.
Williams also offers undergraduate majors in studio art as well as art history and complements the Clark's resources with impressive resources of its own: a collection of 185,000 slides, a good undergraduate library of more than 600,000 volumes including 25,000 books on the subjects of art, architecture, and painting; and the Chapin Rare Book Library, one of the finest college repositories in the country of illustrated manuscripts, incunabula, and rare books from the ninth to the twentieth centuries.
Williamstown Art Conservation Center
A third resource is the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, located on the grounds of the Clark, whose staff offers a graduate course each year on methods of art restoration and conservation.
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
Although not a formal part of the college, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a multi-disciplinary center for visual, performing and media arts is located in North Adams only 5 miles from the Williams Campus. MASS MoCA, as it is called, presents exhibitions and performances by renowned artists and cultural institutions. Work/study opportunities are also available to students of the Graduate Program at MASS MoCA.