As a teaching museum, the Benton Museum of Art cultivates rigorous collaboration with the Pomona College community to create compelling and innovative art experiences within a welcoming environment.
Our vision is to make the visual arts an essential part of the experience of all Pomona College students. By presenting contemporary and historic works of art for exhibition and study, and placing those works in context, the museum engages, instructs, and delights visitors from a range of audiences. The museum utilizes carefully designed, lively, and innovative exhibitions and programs to link the creative energy of making art and experiencing art. It envisions its collections as a teaching resource, emphasizing first-hand conversation with art objects as a tool for increasing visual literacy and investigating the diversity of human experience. It achieves this by integrating the visual arts into the broader intellectual and disciplinary context of Pomona College. The museum encourages active learning and creative explorations across disciplines, and among the visual arts, performing arts, the humanities, and the natural and social sciences. The museum approaches the arts with the same quest for knowledge, discovery, and understanding that guides practitioners across disciplines—the scientist, the engineer, the policy maker, the sociologist, the economist, the historian, and the performer.
