Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, commonly known as the Loeb, is a teaching museum, major art repository, and exhibition space on the campus of Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. It was founded in 1864 as the Vassar College Art Gallery. It displays works from antiquity to contemporary times. Vassar was the first college or university in the country to include an art museum as part of its original plan. The current 36,000-square-foot (3,300 m2) facility was designed by César Pelli and named in honor of the new building’s primary donor Frances Lehman Loeb, a member of the Class of 1928.

The Lehman Loeb Art Center’s collections chart the history of art from antiquity to the present and comprise over 18,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, textiles, and glass and ceramic wares. Teaching students and working as an important tangible complement to the curriculum is the main focus of the collection. Notable holdings include the Warburg Collection of Old Master prints, an important group of Hudson River School paintings given by Matthew Vassar at the college’s inception, and a wide range of works by major European and American twentieth-century painters.