Armand Castellani, founder of the regional supermarket Tops Friendly Markets, and his wife Eleanor began collecting artworks by contemporary artists in the second half of the twentieth century. Grounded in their original private acquisitions, the collection has grown to include over 5,000 works of art including paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and photographs: dating from the 1850s to the present. The collection illustrates the development of modern art, focused primarily on art from the 1970s to the present. As the largest resource for the visual arts in Niagara County, situated at the heart of a dynamic world-class liberal arts university, our changing exhibitions are diverse and thought-provoking.
The CAM collection includes:
19th century European artists such as Honore Daumier, Jean Baptiste Guillaumin, August Rodin, American artists John H. Twatchman, Albert Bierstadt, and Jasper Francis Cropsey.
Early 20th century European artists such as Maurice Utrillo, Amodeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Mary Cassatt, Salvador Dali, Roberto Matta, and American artists Milton Avery, Charles E. Burchfield, and Bradley Walker Tomlin.
Mid-20th century artists including Robert Motherwell, Willem DeKooning, Romare Bearden, Barbara Hepworth, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Contemporary artists of the last four decades: Jean-Michel Basquiat, April Gornik, Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Sam Gilliam, Judy Pfaff, David Salle, and Keith Haring, to name a few.
Three of the nine gallery spaces are dedicated to permanent collection exhibitions, such as Of Their Time, which chronologically follows the development of modern and contemporary art from the mid nineteenth century to the present.
