Opening Hours
The gallery is open during the academic year, September through May only:
Tuesday - Friday: 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday: 1 p.m. - 5 p.m.

Although the Boston University Art Gallery has no permanent collection, we do have four of the most unusual column capitals decorating our space. You will not find graceful Classical Greek columns here, or the saints and fanciful creatures that populated the archivolts, capitals, and cloisters of the Middle Ages. Our column capitals fuse allusions to both the Classical and the Medieval to produce an unexpectedly specific, and industrial, iconography. The building the Art Gallery occupies was formerly a Buick dealership. Paintings, photographs, sculptures,
and installations now fill the space once taken up by sedans, wagons, sports cars,
and salesmen. Thus, among the acanthus leaves of a typical Corinthian capital we
have mechanics holding wrenches; our gargoyle-like creatures are sporting tires
around their necks instead of spitting water from their mouths; and the weight of the ceiling is borne by men in overalls rather than by togate caryatids.

A Brief History of the BUAG
The Boston University Art Gallery (the Gallery) was originally an entity of the University’s Division of Art (the Division) and traces its origins to Copley Square. The Division (now the School of Visual Arts) was a part of the School of Fine and Applied Arts (SFAA; now the College of Fine Arts), which was formed in 1954 to combine the disciplines of music, theatre, and visual arts; for the previous twenty-two years, the Division had been a department of the College of Practical Arts and Letters. In the SFAA’s building at 27 Garrison Street in Copley, beginning in 1956, the Division held exhibitions of the works of students, faculty, and local artists (1).

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