MISSION:

 

The exhibits are intended to address the reluctance of contemporary museums to include the work of living artists who communicate in a comprehensible visual language rooted in history. Rarely seen in these venues is the art of representation, two or three-dimensional figuration, however loosely conjured. All but absent are paintings, sculpture and drawings that speak about today in the age-old subtleties of paint, tone, line, mood and apply them as a means of communicating to an audience, much as theater applies the actor’s voice, or poetry and literature, the written word.

Postmodernist museum, anchored in US and Europe and spreading eastward, dismiss these artists in the mistaken belief that students of art history, and the skill and craftsmanship that comprise it, are – by virtue of their careful and applied study -- condemned to mimic historic work rather than elaborate on it or differentiate from it.

This museum will benefit an art and audience weary of minimalist conceit and the reign of shock and despair that has dominated global venues for more than half a century. That’s a long time to avoid what art does best, to speak to the human condition in its pursuit of truth, beauty and compassion. The museum’s mission is to forward this approach through its own contemporary art exhibitions, education and public discussion.

• WMIA recognizes the vital part the spectator plays in the art process by displaying art that addresses him directly in a visual language as old as cave paintings. The collection and rotating exhibitions are designed to bring a often disregarded contemporary voice back into the art discussion. It reflects the principles of aesthetics that have evolved over a 20-thousand year history.  The conversation it seeks is a private one.  It derives from a dialogue, only recently interrupted, between the art and the one who looks at it.   
  
  
• Painting, drawing, sculpture should evoke art history in an effort to contribute to it, not ignore it. While this art reflects its own time on earth, it does so in the context of that which is continuous, timeless. In this and many other ways it departs from the fashionable.
  
  
• Art speaks in the tested language common to all sighted humans. The elements of that tongue are line, form, color, material and craftsmanship expressed in two or three dimensions. 
  
  
• This art speaks a contemporary truth without falling victim to contemporary fashion. It addresses the universal condition of human experience.