The Smith College Museum of Art has contributed nearly 13,000 images of its permanent collection to the Artstor Digital Library.

The selection in Artstor provides robust representation of the museum’s collection with works and objects in diverse media across many curatorial areas, notably Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, with a rich trove of works on paper — prints, drawings, photographs, and artists’ books from the Cunningham Center. Historically, the selection moves from global antiquities through contemporary art. The range may be exemplified by selected objects from different collecting areas: in Ancient art, a Greek amphora, Roman glass and Chinese jades; from the Americas, a colonial John Copley portrait, another by Diego Rivera, an Inuit Sea Goddess sculpture, a photograph by Ana Mendieta and Betye Saar’s Spirit Chair; from Japan, a traditional Edo period gold-ground screen and the Pop trompe l’oeil Sunkist Lemon Box by Mishima Kimiyo; in western art everything from, Italian and northern panel paintings to a Kandinsky landscape. Works on paper run from medieval manuscripts to 21st century photographs.

The Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) holds one of the nation’s finest teaching collections, encyclopedic in scope, with nearly 25,000 objects. The College began collecting original works of art in 1879, just a few years into its history and the museum was led by its first director in the early 20th century. In 2003, the Brown Fine Arts Center—a complex housing the museum, as well as Smith College’s Department of Art and Hillyer Art Library—was renovated and expanded by Polshek Partnership. The Atrium of the Brown Fine Arts Center is decorated with a mural by the Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo, Nature and the Artist: The Work of Art and the Observer, which was originally commissioned by the college in 1943.