- The museum had a great first 40 years, but about 30 years in, we realized that we were doing such a great job that maybe we needed a little bit better of a home.

The end result was an expansion of our old museum building.

So we've almost quadrupled our size and expanded quite a bit.

What we can do inside the building.

The New museum is a destination.

We're seeing so many members of the community come in and investigate what's going on, find out what's new, come and experience the space across the board.

People love it.

When we established the museum in 1983 one of its reasons for coming into being was the fact that the university, over the course of three centuries, had received in gifts about 800 works of art that were museum caliber.

This gives us a lot of room to grow the collection.

We are focused on expanding the representation in our collection, and so we're looking to add women artists into the collection.

We're looking to add artists of color and we've really made that a focal point during my time here as director.

Over the last six years, about 75% of the works that we bought into the collection have been by women artists or artists of color.

- When we saw that there was an exhibition of women artists in the abstract expressionist realm, we thought this is a perfect pairing for us.

The American Federation of Arts had a relationship with the collector Christian Levitt, who has an amazing collection of women artists.

It's an amazing opportunity to have these works here.

We're the only East Coast venue.

It is traveling to several other museums in the United States.

It's just been amazing to have this much space.

These are the types of paintings that really need to breathe.

It's a bit like, you know, going into a church where you need to have contemplative experience.

- The museum, especially with its newly renovated and expanded space, is even more committed to the educational mission of the university.

I work closely with a group of students and the museum staff in putting together the Liquid Commonwealth Exhibition.

It seemed like an appropriate topic to look at water since it's such a, an important part of life in Virginia.

So we devised an idea for an exhibition around that theme, and we also decided to do something new, which was to have an invitational exhibition of contemporary art by Virginia artists.

And we thought that would be an interesting way to kind of bring the community into the Muscarelle and to the campus of William and Mary.

They put out a call for artists to submit works of art.

Almost 800 entries were received.

The students in my class had the interesting challenge of selecting about 60 works from that enormous pool of 800.

But it's a great way for students to really see how a museum works.

So they developed these kind of smaller ideas within the bigger theme.

The students selected appropriate works and then started generating interpretive material in the form of the labels that you see on the gallery walls as well as the catalog.

They worked with the museum staff to determine the layout of the exhibition in the galleries, and we thought that this would be a really important addition to the curriculum in art history.

And the museum folks were very enthusiastic about that.

- Liquid Commonwealth brought in a new group of people.

We saw many new faces come to the openings, and we continue to see new faces in the museum.

It is been a great way to build community.