A place for everything

Mark Ostow

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Imagine having enough shelf space. No more stacks of boxes in the basement. All your treasures within easy reach.

This has been the happy state of mind among Yale University Art Gallery curators ever since the Margaret and Angus Wurtele Study Center opened in the fall. The center, on Yale’s West Campus, provides 49,000 square feet of open storage space for thousands of three-dimensional items from the gallery’s collections that were previously kept packed away. (Shown here are ancient Greek vases.) The center “brings more than 30,000 objects out of deep storage and makes them visually accessible to students, scholars, and professionals,” says John Stuart Gordon, associate curator of American decorative arts. “Many are seeing the light of the day for the first time in a generation, allowing curators to see the breadth of their collections, sometimes for the first time.”