Allen Memorial Art Museum

• Name — Allen Memorial Art Museum • Established — 1917 • Location — Oberlin College 87 North Main Street Oberlin, Ohio 44074, United States • Type — Art museum • Director — Jon Seydl • Curator — * Marlise Brown (European & American Art) • Sam Adams (Modern & Contemporary Art) • Kevin R. E. Greenwood (Asian Art) • Hannah Kinney (Academic Programs) • Website — https: amam.oberlin.edu/ • Illustration — Founder Dudley Peter Allen by August Reinhold Franzén, 1915

The AMAM is primarily a teaching museum and is aimed at the students, faculty and staff of Oberlin College, in addition to the surrounding community. Notable strengths include seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, nineteenth and early twentieth-century European and contemporary American art, as well as Asian, European and American works on paper. The collection is housed in an Italian Renaissance-style building designed by Cass Gilbert, incorporating ironwork by Samuel Yellin, and named after its founder, Dr. Dudley Peter Allen (B.A., 1875), a graduate and trustee of Oberlin College and the first husband of Elisabeth Severance Prentiss, whose bequest as Mrs. F. F. Prentiss included parts of her art collection started during her first marriage. In 1977, the architecture firm Venturi and Rauch (led by husband and wife Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown) designed the Venturi Wing, an addition that represents one of the earliest examples of postmodern architecture in the United States; an example of their concept of a "decorated shed". In 2011, the historic museum underwent a two-year retrofit, after which it was awarded with USGBC LEED Gold certification.

Purchases made through the Mrs. F.F. Prentiss Fund include a Henry Moore sculpture and other works: • Illustration — Brabant Farmyard by Piet Mondrian • Illustration — Portrait of John, 1st Lord Wodehouse, by Pompeo Batoni

At the beginning of every semester, students camp out in front of the north gate of the museum to get first pick of original etchings, lithographs and paintings by artists including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. For five dollars per semester, students can hang these works on their dorm room walls. The program was started in the 1940s by Ellen H. Johnson, a professor of art at Oberlin, in order to "develop the aesthetic sensibilities of students and encourage ordered thinking and discrimination in other areas of their lives."

• Illustration — Landscape with Dunes by Jan van Goyen, 1647 • Illustration — Portrait of Theodore Jacobsen by William Hogarth, 1742 • Illustration — The Ducal Palace, Dogana and Part of San Giorgio by J.M.W. Turner, 1841 • Illustration — Castle of Chillon, Evening by Gustave Courbet, 1872