Bob Jones University
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Bob Jones University (BJU) is a private, for-profit, non-denominational Protestant university in Greenville, South Carolina.
Museum and gallery
Bob Jones, Jr. was a connoisseur of European art and began collecting after World War II on about $30,000 a year authorized by the University Board of Directors. Jones first concentrated on the Italian Baroque, a style then out of favor and relatively inexpensive in the years immediately following the war. Fifty years after the opening of the gallery, the BJU collection included more than 400 European paintings from the 14th to through the 19th centuries (mostly pre-19th century), period furniture, and a notable collection of Russian icons. The museum also includes a variety of Holy Land antiquities collected in the early 20th century by missionaries Frank and Barbara Bowen.
Not surprisingly, the gallery is especially strong in Baroque paintings and includes notable works by Rubens, Tintoretto, Veronese, Cranach, Gerard David, Murillo, Mattia Preti, Ribera, van Dyck, and Doré. Included in the Museum & Gallery collection are seven very large canvases, part of a series by Benjamin West painted for George III, called "The Progress of Revealed Religion," which are displayed in the War Memorial Chapel. (Baroque art was created during—and often for—the Counter-Reformation and so, ironically, BJU has been criticized by some other fundamentalists for promoting “false Catholic doctrine” through its art gallery.)
After the death of Bob Jones, Jr., Erin Jones, the wife of BJU president Stephen Jones became director. According to David Steel, curator of European art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Erin Jones "brought that museum into the modern era," employing "a top-notch curator, John Nolan," and following "best practices in conservation and restoration." The museum now regularly cooperates with other institutions, lending works for outside shows such as a Rembrandt exhibit in 2011.
In 2008, the BJU Museum & Gallery opened a satellite location, the "Museum & Gallery at Heritage Green" near downtown Greenville, which features rotating exhibitions from the main museum as well as interactive children's activities. The Heritage Green building, an extensively remodeled Coca-Cola bottling plant, joined the neighboring Upcountry History Museum and the Greenville Children's Museum, all of which feature "the latest in museum technology.".
Each Easter season, the university and the Museum & Gallery present the Living Gallery, a series of tableaux vivants recreating noted works of religious art using live models disguised as part of two-dimensional paintings.
