ENHANCING THE COLLECTION
Collecting for Columbia
rank cultural presence in the Southeastern
United States.
The strengths of the CMA’s collection may
be divided up into the following broad
areas, which have served as the collecting
focus for approximately the past 10 years:
American, European, Contemporary, and
Asian art. The Museum collects paintings,
works on paper, decorative art, and
furniture in each of these broad categories.
Having focus areas for the permanent
collection allows Museum staff, board
members, and interested others to
more easily identify strengths as well as
weaknesses. In European art, for example,
we have a wonderful Monet painting, but
could use a Picasso. To become that firstrank cultural presence we wish to be, the
CMA needs to fill what are thought of as
“holes” in the collection—places where we
are missing the work of an important artist
or an example of an historically
important style.
Osamu Kobayashi, American, born 1984. Frozen Ghost, Black Hole, 2010, oil on canvas. Gift of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, New York; Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Funds, 2013, to the CMA in 2014.
Will South, chief curator
The Columbia Museum of Art is a
living organism. The Museum’s galleries
expand and contract with the breath
of our evolving collection as we grow.
The curatorial process of bringing in
new acquisitions feeds this body. The
goal is to provide the most suitable and
highest-quality art works to cultivate the
Museum’s growth in a sustainable and lifeenriching way that continually inspires our
community, our members, and our visitors.
The CMA is a medium-sized museum
founded in 1950. Our collection numbers
approximately 7,000 objects, a number
2
columbiamuseum.org
that includes the extraordinary Samuel
H. Kress Collection of primarily Italian
and Dutch Renaissance, Baroque, and
17th-century paintings, as well as the
more recent Dorothy and Herbert Vogel
collection of modern art.
The possibilities for every museum’s space,
staff, and resources mean that museums
must grow responsibly and with a view to
what is achievable. Therefore, museums
adopt what are called “collecting strategies,”
which are documents that clearly spell
out the methods that museums use to
reach their goals. This past year, the CMA
adopted a collecting strategy designed to
help us reach the goal of becoming a first-
The CMA actively works to fill these
holes, knowing as an institution that we
can never acquire all the things we ideally
would like to have. Building the collection
is therefore an ongoing compromise: We
know ideally what we would like to add
to our collection, and then work as hard
as we can to come as close as possible to
that ideal. This is where the CMA’s new
collecting strategy comes in handy—it was
written, discussed, rewritten, and discussed
some more until it became a document
pointing out steps we may take to build the
best collection possible.
What are some of those steps?
First, realize that as a mid-sized museum
we realistically cannot collect everything.
What we already collect—European,
American, Asian, and contemporary art—
is a lot! By clarifying our focus areas we