Mills College Art Museum (MCAM) is a museum and art gallery in Oakland, California. The museum hosts contemporary work and exhibitions year-round by nationally and internationally known artists, as well as student thesis exhibitions.
Before Mills College Art Museum was established, Mills College began acquiring art pieces. The founders of Mills College, Susan and Cyrus Mills, were profoundly fond of art and history. By the 1880s, Mills College had amassed 1,000 works of art and reproductions. Susan's sister Jane Tolman, an art historian at the College, developed an art history curriculum in 1875.[1]
Thanks to a bequest from Susan Tolman Mills in 1912, as well as additional gifts, the current museum building was constructed in 1925. The museum was opened the same year as the Mills College Art Gallery. Albert M. Bender, the Mills College Trustee chiefly responsible for the museum's completion, made a gift of 40 paintings and 75 prints by contemporary San Francisco Bay Area artists. Bender's gift became the first public collection of modern art in Northern California. Bender later became a principal founder of what is now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The current Mills College Art Museum building was designed by California architect Walter Ratcliff Jr. Ratcliff served as campus architect from 1923 to 1947 and designed several additional structures at Mills College. The design of the museum combines Beaux-Arts architecture and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture styles. The museum originally functioned as an art gallery as well as a ballroom. Currently the museum houses 6,000 square feet of gallery space.