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Spring 2024

WSU Museum of Art

Tourist woman exploring Europe
Fall 2022

Happiness in the eye of the beholder

Can experiencing art improve your wellbeing? What better way to answer that question than to visit an art museum at Washington State University.

Ryan Hardesty, executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, takes Washington State Magazine editor Larry Clark on a tour of the museum in WSU Pullman’s Crimson Cube. They have plenty to discuss about how people benefit from seeing, hearing, and experiencing art as they visit the exhibits—including Trimpin’s sound sculpture, Keiko Hara’s works of landscapes and dreams, Juventino Aranda’s powerful explorations of identity and home, and Irwin Nash’s photographs of Latino lives in migrant worker communities … » More …

Fall 2014

Where the heart is

Ten years ago, artist Jim Dine left his heart in Pullman. The 12-foot-tall painted bronze sculpture called The Technicolor Heart—a blue beacon covered with ordinary items like hammers, shoes, clamps, and flashlights—has stirred conversation and controversy.

Now the world-famous sculptor and printmaker is giving Washington State University a whole collection of more than 200 prints representing his work from 1967 to 2011. Valued at over $1.8 million, this print donation will be the largest university museum collection of Dine prints in the world and one of the largest collections of his prints ever assembled.

Cincinnati native Dine grew up around his grandfather’s hardware store and … » More …

Museum drawing
Spring 2014

A wider canvas

A new museum of art on the Washington State University campus in Pullman could be a multi-story glass-walled building in which students, alumni, and community members can venture in to an open and intriguing series of galleries.

The new building, now in the conceptual phase, will have more than twice the space of the current 5,000-square-foot museum and include four distinct galleries. It will rise out of the hillside across from the Compton Union Building on the site of the former fire station and current police station.

“It gives an opportunity to complete Terrell Mall in a way that reinforces the public quality of it,” … » More …

Architect Jim Olson’s work featured at the WSU Museum of Art
Winter 2011

Homes for art

Few of us will ever see inside the homes of some of the Pacific Northwest’s major art collectors. But this fall we get a glimpse when the Museum of Art at Washington State University hosts an exhibit of internationally-known architect Jim Olson’s houses built for art.

Olson’s clients collect works by Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, and Henri Matisse, and they seek out modern sculpture, pre-Columbian artifacts, and antique Southeast Asian artworks. Some of them are sharing images of their homes, as well as art from their own collections, with WSU.

With large photographs dominating the gallery space, it will be almost as if you … » More …

Spring 2004

3 Degrees of Cool

Works from the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection

A new exhibition from the collection of Virginia and Bagley Wright, curated by Chris Bruce, director of the Museum of Art at Washington State University, takes the definition of cool to new heights. Viewers “get into the groove” by moving through three conceptual spaces with a mix of hypnotic African and Oceanic masks, haunting minimalist paintings, and electric abstract acrylics.

Virginia and Bagley Wright, international art collectors who live in Seattle, lived in New York during the 1950s and bought works directly from artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg. The Wrights now have one of … » More …

Winter 2005

Pop Art in Pullman

This fall, Washington State University’s Museum of Art is showing more than 70 works by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Entitled Roy Lichtenstein Prints 1956-97, the exhibit offers a comprehensive record of the artist’s evolution. Lichtenstein explored commercial and comic book images and painted them in immense scale, utilizing bright colors, simple lines, and the dot patterns associated with newsprint reproduction. Although his work was controversial in the 1960s, it changed the way America looked at and thought about art.

The exhibit, from the private collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer of Portland, Oregon, continues in Pullman through December 16 before moving to the Henry Art Gallery … » More …