Meadows Museum Reopening July 7
The Meadows Museum at SMU will reopen July 7 at reduced capacity and with protocols in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
The museum shop will also be open with limited capacity. Timed tickets will be available to buy on the museum’s website beginning July 1.
Museum staff members are required to wear face coverings and visitors are “strongly encouraged” to do so. Cloth and disposable masks will be available for a small donation for those who don’t bring their own.
Signage will be installed throughout the museum to remind people to keep their distance from those outside their group. The museum also developed a new cleaning regimen that includes regular sanitizing of high-touch surfaces, such as door handles. As an additional precaution, the museum will continue to conduct all programming online through the fall and will likewise maintain the current pause on docent-guided tours until 2021.
“We are so excited to be able to welcome visitors back to the Meadows Museum, and to share our outstanding collection of Spanish art with them,” said Mark A. Roglán, the Linda P. and William A. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum. “Being closed has been hard, first and foremost because of what our community and our country has been going through, but also because we believe so firmly that people benefit from experiences with great works of art. We, therefore, see reopening as an opportunity for people to engage with art and through art to reflect on the lives of individuals, families, and whole communities.”
Among the standouts of the permanent collection on view are the museum’s collection of old master paintings from Spain’s Golden Age, including works by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, El Greco, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Jusepe de Ribera.
Modern and contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Miquel Barceló and Jaume Plensa are also represented.
The painting Untitled (2019) by Madrid native Secundino Hernández, presented for the launch of the museum’s MAS: Meadows/ARCO Artist Spotlight initiative, will remain on view through this summer.
The Meadows also hopes to present Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain in the fall, the first exhibition devoted to the artist to be presented outside Spain.
The show, organized by the Meadows Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington and in collaboration with the Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, Spain, includes some 45 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper drawn from a range of international collections.
In tandem, the Meadows will also be presenting Berruguete Through the Lens: Photographs from a Barcelona Archive. Drawn from images included in the Archivo Mas, named for its founder, the Barcelona-based photographer Adolf Mas Ginestà (1860–1936), the images provide rare glimpses into the state of preservation of premodern Spanish buildings and their contents during the early twentieth century.
These archival selections drawn from photos taken over several years leading up to and into the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) are being exhibited for the first time, providing visitors insight into the experience of Berruguete’s work.
