Weatherspoon Art Museum: First in the UNC System
Near Greensboro, North Carolina
The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina Greensboro opened in nineteen forty-one, making it the first art gallery in the entire UNC system. It started humbly, in a converted physics lab, founded by art department head Gregory Ivy.
The collection got a transformative boost in nineteen fifty when the estate of Claribel and Etta Cone of Baltimore donated prints, bronzes by Henri Matisse, and works by European and American modernists. The Cone sisters had been personal friends of Matisse and Gertrude Stein, and their gift gave Weatherspoon a collection that punches well above its institutional weight. Named for alumna and art educator Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon, the museum eventually moved into a purpose-built forty-two-thousand-square-foot facility, funded in nineteen eighty-five. It remains one of the Southeast's most respected university art museums.
