$16 million gift to Museum from Stacie Mathewson

The Nevada Museum of Art announced the naming of the Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center in honor of Charles N. Mathewson and Stacie Mathewson.

The naming of the new wing is in recognition of the couple’s $16 million gift to the Museum’s expansion project to build and endow an Education and Research Center to serve Nevada’s students, educators, scholars, and the larger community.

As people, we visit the museum to see paintings and artwork that we love, and we want to come back over and over again David Walker, CEO of the Nevada Museum of Art. “And we want to create that.”

Staff members want to see the museum become a frequent home to anyone with an interest in art.

The project to build and endow an education and research center to serve Nevada’s students, educators, scholars, and the larger community.

“It will be a great resource for teachers who are building a lesson plan around a particular artwork, instead of being worried that it will go away and not come back in five years or so,” Walker adds.

The museum expansion will provide new education spaces for youth programing; a new library to increase access to books, archives, and research materials; double the square footage of galleries with a goal to display 50 percent of permanent collection artworks year-round; add a new art collections storage and conservation area and enclosed loading dock; implement energy-efficient building upgrades; add parking; a unique bookshop; third-floor sculpture garden, and more.

The museum has about 4,000 objects in its permanent collection, but only a small fraction gets put on display because of the space required by traveling exhibitions.

Teachers who use the museum’s artworks as part of their lesson plans, will highly benefit from this project since some pieces often don’t stay up very long.