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About the Collection

A Landmark Collection
The WAAM Permanent Collection was established in 1973 to preserve and promote the work of important American artists who lived and created in the Woodstock area.  In 1992 the Phoebe and Belmont Towbin Museum Wing opened for the exhibition of the collection, as well as loans from prominent museums and private collections illuminating Woodstock’s formidable artistic heritage.  In recent years, a series of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts has facilitated digital documentation and improved storage for the over 1500 paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and crafts in the collection.  Featured artists include George Ault, Milton Avery, Peggy Bacon, George Bellows, Konrad Cramer, Andrew Dasburg, Philip Guston, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Andrée Ruellan, Eugene Speicher, and Bradley Walker Tomlin.  Museums throughout the United States have requested loans from the WAA Permanent Collection.  Our exhibition catalogues and the WAAM Archives provide a valuable resource for art historians, students, collectors, and the general public.

Most works in the collection have been donated by collectors or directly from artists and their families.  Purchase funds have been made available through bequests from Karl E. Fortess in 1993 and Aileen B. Cramer in 2006.

Past exhibitions in the WAAM Towbin Museum Wing include Philip Guston:  Brave New World, George Ault:  the Woodstock Years, Andrée Ruellan:  A Retrospective, At Woodstock, Kuniyoshi and The Maverick: Hervey White's Colony of the Arts.

Permanent Collection News  updated February 2011              

Online Digital Database

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz (Dorsky Museum), the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Women's Studio Workshop-members of a newly-formed Hudson Valley Visual Arts Collections Consortium-announce the launch of a digital collections pilot project featuring 250 Hudson Valley-related artworks from their combined collections.

Collection images and information are available for viewing on the Hudson River Valley Heritage website at www.hrvh.org/hvvacc. 

The permanent collections of the above organizations, which are largely hidden from public view except through periodic exhibitions of selected works, contain outstanding examples of American art.  Artworks include works from the Hudson River School of Art, the first American school of art, as well as a survey of works from the Woodstock colony-one of the oldest artist colonies in the country-photographs by American masters both historic and contemporary, art from well-known New York City-based painters and sculptors from the 1920s-1970s, and unique contemporary art from the country's largest repository of hand-printed artists' books.

The current digital project is part of a larger, three-year effort to feature all 15,000 objects from the partners' permanent collections on a dedicated website, where they will be available to the public 24 hours a day. Over time, it is anticipated that other organizations in the region will join the Consortium and add images and information from their collections to the digital collection available on the Consortium website.

This pilot project is made possible through funding from the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area (through a grant to the Dorsky Museum) and from the County of Ulster's Ulster County Cultural Promotion and Services Fund administrated by Dutchess County Arts Council (through a grant to the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild). Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Dorsky Museum is providing support for the multi-year digitization process that involves the remainder of the 15,000 collection objects.

Recent Acquisitions to the WAAM Permanent Collection

Thank you to our generous 2010 donors to our Permanent Collection.  Many of them are “repeat” donors and we appreciate their ongoing interest in preserving Woodstock’s art heritage through gifts of art. Last year’s donors are Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz, Ruth Drake, Henry T. Ford and Michael Knauth, Calvin Grimm, Peter and Chagit Heller, Robert Kipniss, Gabriele E. Margules, Janet Nelson, Alan Siegel, and Sylvia L Wolf.

Our photography collection expanded exponentially this past year with two major gifts. Howard & Ellen Greenberg donated ninety-two photographs mostly by Konrad Cramer but including works by others such as Florence Ballin Cramer, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Adrian Siegel. The Greenberg gift also included portraits of Konrad Cramer by Edward Johnson, Alfred Stieglitz, and Stowall Studios.  Eleven photographs by Manuel Komroff and twenty-seven by Nathan Resnick were donated by Jean Young, adding to a collection of works by these two artists that Young gave in 2009.  Selections from each of these gifts were featured in last fall’s exhibition The Third Eye.

WAAM maintains a small purchase fund and we were fortunate to acquire three important paintings this year: Arnold Blanch’s Portrait of Hervey White (1930s) and Lucile Blanch’s Self Portrait (1922) and Men at Work (1940s).

For information regarding donating works of art, please contact Josephine Bloodgood, director and curator of the Permanent Collection, at josephine@woodstockart.org or by calling 845-679-2198, x 103.