Creating a Collection: A Tour Through the Smith College Museum of Art Main Menu How This Works Instructions on How to Use this Website How to Read a Museum Label This will help you navigate the SCMA and other museums What is "Public Trust"? Why Museums Collect How Museums Collect Why Museums Remove Objects from their Collections How Museums Remove Objects from their Collections

How do museums build and unbuild collections?

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Hi, welcome to “Creating a Collection: A Tour Through the Smith College Museum of Art.” This digital tool will introduce you to the guidelines that museums of all types follow when adding objects to their collections, and when removing them.

To guide you through the collecting “rulebook,” we’ll take a tour of the Smith College Museum of Art. By looking at what artworks are on view—and what’s not on view—we hope you will begin to understand how a museum creates its collection.

To read more before diving in, see:
1. How This Works
2. How to Read a Museum Label
3. What is "Public Trust?"

Contents of this path:

  1. How This Works
  2. How to Read a Museum Label
  3. What is "Public Trust"?
  4. Table of Contents

Contents of this tag:

  1. Why Museums Collect
  2. How Museums Remove Objects from their Collections
  3. Why Museums Remove Objects from their Collections
  4. How Museums Collect
  5. Childe Hassam's "Church at Old Lyme"
  6. Thomas Wilmer Dewing's "Lady with a Lute"
  7. "Luster dish, seated king and queen in center"
  8. Childe Hassam's "Union Square in Spring"
  9. Dwight W. Tryon's "Dawn"
  10. Louis Comfort Tiffany's "Duane Street, New York"
  11. Lockwood De Forest's "Ramesseum at Thebes"
  12. Winslow Homer's "Song of the Lark"
  13. Childe Hassam's "Street Scene, Christmas Morn"
  14. J. Alden Weir's "Delft Plate"
  15. Betye Saar's "Ancestral Spirit Chair"
  16. Abbott Handerson Thayer's "Winged Figure"
  17. George Inness's "Morning"
  18. Dwight W. Tryon's "The First Leaves"
  19. William Merritt Chase's "View of the Brooklyn Navy Yard"
  20. Winslow Homer's "Shipyard at Gloucester"
  21. Thomas Eakins's "In Grandmother's Time"
  22. William Merritt Chase's "Woman in Black"
  23. Elder man entreating young travellers; Detached folio from Persian book on ethics
  24. Roman "Ewer"
  25. Robert Swain Gifford's "Old Orchard Near the Sea, Massachusetts"
  26. Thomas Wilmer Dewing's "Lady with Cello"
  27. George Inness's "Landscape"
  28. Louis Comfort Tiffany's "Vase"
  29. Gimbels Ad
  30. Toyokuni III (Utagawa Kunisada)'s "Two Women and a Child Hunting Mushrooms"