The Art Museum of WVU opened in August 2016 to fulfill decades of dreams of establishing an on-campus art museum. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 12:30-4:30 pm with no admission charge. On opening day, the WVU president spoke about how the arts nourish the soul and make lives richer. The museum exhibits works from the university's collection of over 3,000 pieces, including pieces by alumni like Blanche Lazzell that depict scenes of the university and local area. While some dreams for the museum have been realized with its opening, there are still more dreams to be fulfilled about its future impact.

1. The Art Museum of WVU is open from 12:30-4:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
There is no charge for admission. Go online: artmuseum.wvu.edu.
At the museum opening, members of the
class of 2033, so tiny that their feet barely
touched the floor, sat on small stools. The
WVU Nursery School students assembled on
the patio of the sandy-colored building are
inevitably going to grow, much like the mu-
seum has. And as they grow, they will have
this place to experience art.
“The arts, quite simply, nourish the soul,”
WVU President E. Gordon Gee told the mu-
seum’s visitors on opening day. “They make
our lives richer, more compassionate, more
fulfilled. They are what makes us human.”
Inside the walls, you can catch people being
very human. They stop on the stairway and
hold aloft camera phones to capture their fa-
vorite vignettes — a sailboat, a face, a heart
in a bottle — in the two-story mural painted
on the wall by graffiti artists How and Nosm.
As they climb the staircase, they approach
it from different literal and figurative
vantage pints.
At the back of the downstairs gallery is an
Andy Warhol print in black, known as “Un-
titled, 1974.” Each passerby in succession
crouches down and then crouches some
more to see the light reflect a Campbell’s
Soup can or a Brillo box, or both. “It’s almost
like a hologram, isn’t it?” one visitor asks.
“Oh, now this one is too cool!” another says.
You may not know what you’re looking for
on the second-floor gallery. But you’ll see it
anyway. Framed by an alcove’s entrance is
a Blanche Lazzell untitled canvas made in
1934, a bit taller than an average-sized hu-
man. Morgantown folks don’t really need a
title for it. It’s clearly depicting WVU’s Stew-
art Hall, what’s now known as Wesley United
Methodist Church downtown and glass fac-
tory smokestacks that dotted the landscape.
Lazzell graduated from WVU with a fine arts
degree in 1905. She was a West Virginian
who went on to be one of the greats in print
making, part of the Provincetown collective
on Cape Cod. The museum exhibit creates
a sanctuary for 13 of her works in an alcove
that uplifts her art and serves as a reminder
that she was one of us.
She was not likely to have thought of the
class of 2033, but she can remind them, the
class of 2019 and everyone else who visits
the museum that creative inspiration can
make a future, a more meaningful life and an
afternoon that leaves you with a full heart and
a nourished soul.
What you once knew as an empty lot beside
the Creative Arts Center has since sprouted
brick and glass and grown into the Art Mu-
seum of West Virginia University.
For decades, there were those who dreamed
of the University’s first art museum. For de-
cades, WVU amassed an art collection of
more than 3,000 works, visited by scholars
and students with appointments. A consen-
sus built that it was time for a place where
children could take field trips, college stu-
dents could have a space to imagine and
professors could make more connections
between science and art.
When the late 2000s came, most people
weren’t thinking about building art museums.
They were thinking about staying afloat in an
uncertain economy. WVU believed the mu-
seum would become real so strongly that the
University and the College of Creative Arts
selected architects and a museum staff and
talked to supporters who also had a vision of
the museum that wasn’t there yet. They gave
their art, they gave their energy, they gave
from their pocketbooks.
When the crowds rushed inside on Aug. 25,
decades of dreams became reality. There are
still more dreams unrealized — the dreams of
what this place will do.
NOURISHING
THE SOUL
The
A
rt M
useum
of WVU
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