Tang Museum

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, widely known as the Tang Museum, stands at the heart of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Conceived as a teaching museum, it was founded on the conviction that art is not an isolated discipline but a living instrument for inquiry across fields of study. Its mission is to awaken curiosity and deepen understanding of the human experience through direct engagement with artworks, ideas, and collaborative exploration. Students and faculty alike use the museum not only as a site of display, but as an active laboratory where exhibitions, storage spaces, and classrooms become extensions of the academic curriculum.

Photography plays a vital role within this interdisciplinary framework. The Tang’s collection of contemporary art includes significant holdings in lens-based work, reflecting photography’s power to document, interpret, and question the world around us. Exhibitions regularly feature photographic practices that range from conceptual investigations to documentary traditions, often placing them in dialogue with painting, sculpture, scientific artifacts, and historical materials. By juxtaposing images with objects from disparate eras—such as Hudson River School landscapes or vernacular archives—the museum highlights photography’s unique capacity to bridge time, narrative, and perception. This approach reinforces the medium’s dual identity as both artistic expression and cultural record.

Designed by renowned architect Antoine Predock, the museum’s striking structure embodies its educational mission. Its dynamic wings and interconnected galleries foster movement and exchange, symbolizing the intersections of the arts, sciences, and humanities. Within spaces such as the Wachenheim Gallery and the Malloy Wing, ambitious exhibitions—nearly all organized in-house—bring together emerging and established artists, often involving students as curators and advisors. Through publications, traveling exhibitions, and sustained engagement with its photography program, the Tang Museum affirms a tradition of rigorous scholarship and hands-on learning, ensuring that visual literacy remains central to a well-rounded liberal arts education.