Collection Strengths in Art & Artifacts

The William and Uytendale Scott Memorial Study Collection introduced over 300 works of art on paper by women artists to the College's holdings. This gift enhanced collections that already boasted works by Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Marie Laurencin among others. 

Gifts from Margery Hoffman Smith (Class of 1911), Katherine Fowler Billings (Class of 1925), Eleanor May Morris (Class of 1941, MA 1970), and S. Kathleen Doster (Class of 1978) total nearly 1000 Japanese color woodblock prints by makers including Ando Hiroshige, Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai, Kikugawa Eizan, and Toyohara Chikanobu. 

The photography collection was born in the late 19th century from those photographs used in the study of subjects ranging from art history to geology. Since then it has grown through generous gifts by Seymour Adelman of photographs by Thomas Eakins and by other donors of modernist works by Walker Evans, Lewis Hines, and Lotte Jacobi, among others. More recent acquisitions include those from exhibitions at the College of Gilbert Plantinga, Kris Graves, and Jessica Todd Harper.

Bryn Mawr holds a large collection of Sande Society masks that may be or reference those worn and danced by women in Sierra Leone and Liberia during ceremonies marking significant cultural events. 

The College's painting collection includes works by Romare Bearden, Rosa Bonheur, Cecilia Beaux, Milton Avery, and Susan MacDowell Eakins, as well as portraits by John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, and Violet Oakley. 

Bryn Mawr established one of the first independent archaeology departments in America and the earliest donation to the collection in 1901 included an important group of Greek vases. The anthropology collections were established in the 1950s and 1960s and include significant artifacts from North, Central, and South America, Africa, Asia, and prehistoric Europe.