Mills College Art Museum is a museum and art gallery in

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

. The originally all-girls' school

Mills College Mills College at Northeastern University is a private college in Oakland, California and part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was ...

was founded by Susan and Cyrus Mills, who were both interested in art and history. Susan's sister Jane Tolman was an art historian who developed the art history curriculum in 1875. With a Tolman Mills bequest the present museum building was constructed in 1925 called the Mills College Art Gallery. Albert M. Bender, the Mills College Trustee chiefly responsible for the museum's completion, also made a gift of 40 paintings and 75 prints by contemporary San Francisco Bay Area artists, and since then the gallery has become an important public collection of modern art in Northern California. Bender himself later became a principal founder of what is now the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and wa ...

. File:'Decoration - Wild Geese' by Rowena Meeks Abdy.jpg, ''Wild Geese'', by

Rowena Meeks Abdy Rowena Fischer Meeks Abdy (April 24, 1887 – August 18, 1945) was an American modernist painter. She primarily painted landscapes and worked in Northern California. Early life and education She was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1878 to America ...

File:'Carmel' by Anne Bremer, 1915, Mills College Art Museum.jpg, ''Carmel'', by Anne Bremer File:'Still Life' by Nora Allis Schmalhorst, c. 1895, Mills College Art Museum.jpg, ''Still Life'', by Nora Allis Schmalhorst

References

Official website
Museums in Oakland, California Modern art museums in the United States {{California-museum-stub University museums in California Art museums and galleries in California Mills College