The Wright Museum of Art: World's Fair Plaster Casts and Six Thousand Objects
Near Rockford, Wisconsin
Beloit College's Wright Museum of Art traces its origins to eighteen ninety-two, when a donor named Helen Brace Emerson gave her personal art collection to the college. Two years later, she arranged for Beloit to receive plaster casts of ancient Greek sculpture that had been displayed at the Chicago World's Fair of eighteen ninety-three. In nineteen thirty, the college partnered with the city of Beloit to build a dedicated museum building.
Today the collection holds roughly six thousand objects by one count, including American Impressionism, German Expressionism, nineteenth-century plaster casts, and a collection of Japanese modern prints. The museum also trains undergraduates directly in museum studies and collections care, making it as much a working laboratory as a gallery. For a liberal arts college in a small Wisconsin city, it is an unusually deep collection with an unusually practical purpose.
