Walking through the giant doors of Meadows Museum, a person might feel as if they have stepped into a grand museum in Spain. High ceilings and archways give way to gigantic colorful paintings from various periods of Spanish art.
This year, the Meadows Museum will celebrate its 40th anniversary, with 10 exhibitions showcasing over 400 years of Spanish art.
The celebration will include exhibitions on the tapestries of Don Quijote, a prelude to Spanish modernism and the Algur H. Meadows Collection.
The Meadows Museum houses the largest collection of Spanish art outside of Spain.
Meadows Museum was founded by Algur Meadows, who was an art collector and patron of education in the arts.
In 1962, Meadows donated the funds and his collection of Spanish art to Southern Methodist University. The Meadows Museum opened three years later in 1965 in the Owen Arts Center.
The original museum was on the north side of the Owens Arts Center, with huge wooden doors and gilded gates to protect the balconies.
One of the things that make the museum so special, said Carole Brandt, dean of Meadows School of the Arts, is that all the pieces from the old master collection are together. This was not always the case, though.
In the first few years of the museum’s life, the authenticity of many of the pieces that Meadows had bought from Spain was questioned.
Meadows then appointed a scholar to reshape the museum. The museum features paintings from El Greco, Goya, Miro, Picasso and Velazquez.
In March 2001, the museum was moved to its current location on Bishop Boulevard.
The new museum was made possible by a $20 million gift from The Meadows Foundation.
“The smallness of the museum didn’t allow people to see all the art in its grandeur,” said Brandt.
The new plaza also featured “Wave” by Santiago Calatrava, which Brandt commissioned. Calatrava worked on the sculpture for two-and-a-half years, with all the parts fabricated in Spain. The “Wave” features 129 bars, each weighing 500 pounds each.
The original goals of the new museum, according to Brandt, were “to have meaningful and stimulating exhibits, to have programs that are intellectually and aesthetically provocative, to provide an opportunity for faculty and students to have a range of motion with the objects themselves, and to develop the collection in meaningful ways to conserve and steward the collection itself.”
The museum has many future goals, as well.
“The future goals include continuing to bring in national and international exhibitions related to the permanent collection of Spanish art and to expand audience awareness and attendance so we can have more people to the SMU campus and the museum,” said Jo Szymanski, assistant director of the museum.
The museum has also been of assistance to many teachers and students at the university.
Pamela Patton, associate professor of art history, believes that having the museum on campus has allowed her to teach her students more effectively.
“It has offered me the opportunity to teach students from the art object itself, not just from its image,” she said.
Many people believe that having the museum on campus is an exceptional gift.
“It’s very rare for a university as young as SMU to have a museum collection of this quality,” Patton said.
Meadows not only serves the university but the community, as well.
“Meadows is doing what museums do best, that is present to the public a variety of temporary exhibitions that give the public the unique opportunity to experience works that that would not otherwise have seen; paintings from some of the best collections in the world, and, in some cases, never before seen outside of Spain,” said Amanda Dotseth, a graduate assistant at the museum.
So, be sure to check out the Museum and all it has to offer. As Brandt said, “it’s a beautiful little jewel of a museum.”
