SUMMER 2025 | 23 photographs, such as the box of Andy Warhol Polaroids donated by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “There’s a lot of passion, care and genuine love for the art that goes into preserving it, and I find that really kind of beautiful,” says Consuelo Zapata ’25, one of Crow’s students who was assessing the condition of artworks earlier this year. As gallery employees researched LUAG’s history for the centennial, they discovered having museums on campus was always a priority, Crow said. There was once a natural history museum in what is today the Clayton University Center at Packer Hall. In 1928, there were plans to build a combination library, museum and auditorium, though it never came to fruition, Crow says. Because of the space limitations, LUAG has become intentional about its collecting, says Mark Wonsidler, curator of exhibitions and collections. “Space is precious, and we can’t just infinitely accept anything that comes to us. We have to try to be laser focused on building a collection that will serve the mission of the museum within the university and the community, and try to think about how to build a collection for the future,” he says. LUAG created a committee that reviews works from varying perspectives to ensure a diverse and vibrant collection. Committee members also discuss how works can be used in programs and education. “Art history has been construed from a Western European and American lens for a very long time. How do we think about all of the folks that lens excluded?” Wonsidler says. “How do we think about African American and Black artists? How do we think about Indigenous artists and women, who have been there the whole time but not given credit in so many ways?” THE EARLY YEARS BY 1926, LEHIGH WAS ACTIVELY COLLECTING AND EXHIBITING ART FROM THE OLD MASTERS TO MODERN ARTISTS, such as Gustave Courbet, Pablo Picasso and photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White, according to LUAG. In the fall of 1927, Lehigh established a fine art department. Garth A. Howland, a Harvard alumnus, joined Lehigh in 1927 as an assistant professor and later became head of the fine arts department. In the years that followed, Lehigh’s art galleries featured prints, photography, American paintings, old European Masters and French Impressionism, according to a history of LUAG compiled by Keidra Daniels Navaroli. Howland also secured loans with publishers such as Currier & Ives, the Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Featured artists included major modernist painters, such as Arthur Davies, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others, according to Navaroli. Most of LUAG’s early exhibitions were sale or loan shows organized by Left: A few of the 160 Polaroids and black-andwhite photographs LUAG received in 2009 from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of its Photographic Legacy Program. Right: Pablo Picasso’s early portrait of his sister, Lola, is one of five works by the famed Spanish painter in LUAG’s collection. Students visit LUAG’s storage area as part of the Intro to Museums and Museum Professions class. CHRISTA NEU BETH MURPHY
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