The Kress Endowment
In 1959, a gift of fifty-three Renaissance and Baroque paintings and sculptures from Samuel H. Kress (a native of nearby Cherryville, Pennsylvania) brought the museum to a new level. The Kress gift stimulated community visionaries and museum friends to purchase and refurbish a building, formerly the First Presbyterian Church (originally built 1902), suitable to house the new collection.
In 1975, an Edgar Tafel-designed expansion to the building was completed to enhance the museum's programs and collecting plans. At that time, the Museum installed a room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as part of its permanent collection: the library from the second Francis W. Little House. Another room from that house can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Read more about this topic: Allentown Art Museum
Famous quotes containing the word endowment:
“I wish more and more that health were studied half as much as disease is. Why, with all the endowment of research against cancer is no study made of those who are free from cancer? Why not inquire what foods they eat, what habits of body and mind they cultivate? And why never study animals in health and natural surroundings? why always sickened and in an environment of strangeness and artificiality?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1976–1959)