After two years of construction, the renovated Muscarelle Museum of Art at The Martha Wren Briggs Center for the Visual Arts opens this month with more amenities, more art and a reinvigorated mission to be a social and educational hub.

“We can’t wait to welcome William & Mary students, faculty and staff, as well as the wider community, back into the Muscarelle,” said David Brashear HON ’07, the museum’s director. “We’ve worked hard to create a welcoming and inspiring space — one that will bring people together to experience the visual arts in new and exciting ways.”

The expansion has tripled the size of the museum and created a destination for students, visitors and the community. Curators will have vastly more room to showcase world-class traveling exhibitions as well as works from the oldest university-based art collection in America, dating to 1732, which now totals nearly 8,000 objects.

The museum will host opening celebrations for its members, William & Mary faculty, staff and students from 5 to 8 p.m. on Feb. 7, and for the wider community from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Feb. 8. Saturday’s community grand opening will feature tours, art activities for kids and a unique opportunity to witness a large-scale printmaking activity with the use of a steamroller, presented by students from William & Mary, Old Dominion University and East Carolina University.

The galleries’ opening exhibitions will feature works including “Haiti to Harlem,” 15 original silkscreens created by Jacob Lawrence detailing the life of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, and “William & Mary Collects III,” displaying more than 70 artworks on loan from alumni and friends of the university.

The opening follows William & Mary’s celebration of the Year of the Arts.

Art in an artful place

The renovation added 42,000 square feet to the existing building, increasing the number of galleries from five to 14.  Designed by Pelli Clarke & Partners, the mission was to build a museum that offered more than blank walls and polished floors. Everyone involved in the decade-long project wanted a welcoming space for students and a gathering spot for the community at large.

To wit: The new building offers dedicated study spaces and flexible event space that can accommodate up to 185 people for lectures, board meetings or workshops. There are seminar rooms for study and research, as well as a library accessible year-round to the campus community. These features expressly honor the wishes of the late Martha Wren Briggs ’55, the lead donor for the expansion, who wanted “lots of educational spaces.”

“This was an integral part of her vision,” said Julie Tucker ’01, the museum’s marketing and events manager. “She wanted the visual arts to be a part of every student’s experience.”

There will also be a museum store and a new café which will open later this month to serve coffee, snacks, lunches, wine and even a cheese plate.

Appropriately for an art museum, attention was paid to beauty: The striking entrance features a two-story atrium with a floating, 12-foot-wide staircase. Floor-to-ceiling windows on every floor frame students making their way around campus outside.

The new building also has features that the original museum, at 17,000 square feet, could not accommodate. The Muscarelle has fragile art, some of it centuries old, but did not have space to store much of it onsite. The collection is purposefully broad, so students can study art from a wide range of eras, cultures and media. Now there is expansive and accessible on site for the collection, so curatorial staff can make more works available for study to faculty and students.

The Department of Art & Art History plans to make full use of this unique resource, said Alan Braddock, the department’s chair.

“With its expanded and updated exhibition spaces, the Muscarelle promises to make a valuable contribution to the university’s educational mission,” he said. “As an academic department committed to teaching students how to create and understand art, we look forward to sharing knowledge and collaborating with museum staff in pursuing that mission.”

A highly anticipated opening

The original Muscarelle opened in 1983, led by a $1 million gift from Joseph L. Muscarelle Sr. ’27 and Margaret Muscarelle.

It had been bursting at the seams for a while when Briggs, an art history major and an art historian herself, made a foundational gift to spearhead the expansion.

Now there will be a gallery on the ground floor dedicated to the history of William & Mary.
The docents have an office. Student interns have dedicated workspace. The museum’s 16 employees have room to spread out a bit. “When I started,” Tucker said, “I had a cubicle that was literally in a closet. We were crammed into every nook and cranny of that old building.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is the eye-catching architecture that made the Muscarelle a landmark along Jamestown Road for more than 40 years. The original oversized display of vertical colors, the “world’s first solar painting,” was designed by Washington Color School painter Gene Davis. Titled “Sun Sonata,” it consisted of 126 fiberglass tubes of tinted water, backlit by fluorescent lights. In 2013, sheets of vinyl replaced the tinted water, which had proved challenging to maintain. The new building maintains its signature artwork and doubles down on another distinctive feature: its V-shaped wing.

It was Brashear who suggested the design “lean into the V,” said Tom Gillman, M.B.A. ’93, chair of the museum’s board of trustees. “It was David’s idea to honor the existing Carlton Abbott design by shaping the addition as a complementary V-wing,” Gillman recalled. “It seemed right! In the best William & Mary tradition, the new Muscarelle honors the past, while making the future better.”

Now, there is palpable anticipation among students and community members who have waited two years for the ribbon cutting.

“There’s naturally a lot of buzz; people are really excited,” said Barbara Vollmer, one of the museum’s 45 docents. “Anybody I speak to in the community wants to know, ‘When’s the Muscarelle going to open?’”

The center will be part of the William & Mary Arts Quarter, which features the expanded museum along with a renovated Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall and the new Music Arts Center.

In addition to the Feb. 8 community grand opening, the Muscarelle will also host a student night on Feb. 20 from 5 to 8 p.m. geared specifically for W&M students with a scavenger hunt, free refreshments and art activities.

Regular operating hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday beginning Feb. 8. Free parking is available in all adjacent parking lots along Jamestown Road on weekends. During the week, designated visitor spaces will be available for visitors to the Muscarelle.

“Whether you come to the Muscarelle with a class, or to attend a workshop, lecture or exhibition, or simply to use our new study and café spaces, we hope you’ll return often and make it a part of your W&M experience,” Brashear said.