At the turn of the century, all the elusive promises of the great American myth appeared to have been realized. A high society propped up by wealth, draped in minks and glinting with diamonds, had heightened the allure of American enterprise. The success stories of the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, affirmed the American Dream to stake your claim and strike it rich. This mythos, too, orients the history of Reynolda House. Built in 1917, the once private estate of R.J. and Katharine Reynolds remains today both a celebration and self-critique of its gilded past.

The estate, with its sprawling grounds, was built on the success of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. But in its construction, Katharine Reynolds insisted on something more homey than extravagant. She instructed her architects to create a “squatty house” — a white, bungalow-style home with low green tile rooflines, sweeping porches and solid columns, according to Deputy Director of Reynolda House, Phil Archer. It wasn’t about grandeur for grandeur’s sake. It was about creating a space that embraced comfort while quietly commanding respect. Today, that same ethos persists at Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Though its purpose has evolved, the museum retains its sense of intimacy and approachability. 

Barbara Babcock Millhouse, R.J. and Katharine’s granddaughter, was the driving force in transforming the home into the Reynolda House museum. She opened its doors to the public in 1967 with just nine works of art. From these modest beginnings, it has grown into a collection of more than 200 works.

Babcock Millhouse has been an integral part of the museum’s milestones, including its affiliation with Wake Forest University in 2002, and the successful restoration efforts that have preserved the house’s historic interiors. Her ongoing efforts ensure that Reynolda House remains not only a premier museum destination but also a space where American art and the Reynolds legacy nourish each other in creative symbiosis. 

Each individual piece of the museum’s collection has an immense artistic range, from 18th-century portraiture to 19th-century Hudson River School landscapes to 20th-century abstraction. This dynamism is “a testament to Barbara’s incredible versatility and eye and her focus on getting the best American art that she can get,” says Allison Slaby, the museum’s current curator.

Susan Sontag argues in her Against Interpretation that while content is often privileged in discussions of art, it can be a hindrance, a philistinism that traps us in reductive thinking. 

Art, she suggested, must transcend its content to engage viewers on a deeper, visceral level.

This is what Reynolda does best. 

Winter trudges on and the days grow shorter, and by mid-afternoon, the violet hour approaches. The sun is down and there’s just a little bit of light left in the sky. On those dark, short winter days, the main reception room glows softly with lamplight and the sconces on the wall illuminate the art. 

It’s almost like the room, quietly guarded by the monolithic masterworks, wraps its arms around you and keeps you safe. Frederic Church’s “The Andes of Ecuador” envelops you in its sublime grandeur, the peaks dissolving into mist and mystery. The painting and the house feel almost alive, the dramatic light and shadows build into catharsis: a serene moment of reverence — a reminder of nature’s capacity to dwarf human ambition.

Hanging above the balcony, pulling your eyes heavenward, Albert Bierstadt’s “Sierra Nevada” commands the space with its vast, glowing mountain range cascading into infinity. These Hudson River School landscapes transport you into the uncharted wilderness of 19th-century America, a world teetering between discovery and conquest.

Babcock Millhouse’s acquisition of these early works in 1966 closely coincided with the museum’s opening in 1967. In many ways, it’s hard to determine whether Babcock Millhouse was projecting an ambitious, untapped vision into these early acquisitions, or if these early acquisitions were informing her vision of the untapped field of American art collection.

The collection is continuously modernizing with time as it expands to include bold contemporary art. Babcock Millhouse began purchasing such as Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Pool in the Woods, Lake George” and Stuart Davis’ “For Internal Use Only.” 

Shortly after purchasing the work by Davis, Babcock Millhouse relays that, “The archivist comes up to me and says, ‘Barbara, you need to come and look at some papers that I have in the archives, some papers of your mother’s,’ and there was a box of papers and inside this box was a full page color, illustration of “For Internal Use Only” that have been in Life Magazine in 1945 or ’46, about the time the painting was actually done.” 

This discovery led Babcock Millhouse to reflect on the subtle influence her mother may have had on her collecting instincts and, perhaps more profoundly, the intersections of the lives of women — artists and collectors alike. 

Many of Reynolda’s new acquisitions are by contemporary Black artists, such as the 2022 “Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite” and his piece “Untitled (Garvey Day Parade – Harlem).”

Yet when the museum began, its walls held no works by Black artists, reflecting the narrow definitions of American art at the time. Bari Helms, the museum’s historian, relayed that Reynolda House didn’t receive its first work by a Black artist until 1973 when Horace Pippin’s “The Whipping” was donated to the museum — with perhaps a subtle critique of the museum in its brush strokes.

This occurred five years after the museum opened because a Winston-Salem citizen called the then executive director Nicholas Bragg and challenged the collection, asking, “How can you say you represent American art when the collection doesn’t feature any works by a person of color?”

Corey D.B. Walker, Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, interprets this as part of a broader issue: “The norm has been a very narrow understanding of what constitutes art, a very narrow understanding of who constitutes the artist and a very narrow understanding of what art should contribute.” 

This narrowness, Walker suggests, is not unique to Reynolda but emblematic of American art institutions. Even still, Reynolda’s role is a microcosm of the vast sets of questions around art and what constitutes the criteria of good art, making it an ideal stage for grappling with these questions. One example of such interrogation is Fred Wilson’s famous 1992 exhibit, “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Center for History and Culture. 

As Walker explains, “The exhibit showcased all these things that African Americans had created,” but they were everyday items: some ironwork, some woodwork. He asks, “At what point does it belong in a museum? We have to think about the production and politics of a museum. The answer to those questions can’t be assumed a priori. The conversations have to be much more involved, especially when we’re speaking on oversights. It could be that there’s already so much art in Reynolda and what we need is a Fred Wilson-type mining exhibit. Because, if we’re talking about the workers at Five Row and all of the ways in which they worked at Reynolda House, then it becomes the very idea of Reynolda House that is unable to exist outside of these communities.”

Walker referenced Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, saying, “You can’t think of that outside of those hundreds of enslaved workers, working there each and every day, creating the very Monticello that we now walk through as a museum. The museum does not exist in a certain sense, and it cannot exist outside of Black art. There’s a work of trying to make Reynolda House exist outside of Black art.”

The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis — an imitation of reality. This pretext suggests that art’s power lies in its ability to reflect life’s peculiarities, textures and soft rhythms. American art is a lone branch of art where this mimesis grasps and claws in a vain attempt for any one movement, style or artist to immortalize the undulating, nonlinear essence of the nation. A country in flux decorated with shifting identities and walking contradictions.

Babcock Millhouse is something of a prophetic visionary for her foresight at a time when “collecting American art was a really forward-thinking way of collecting.” When she started collecting in the 1960s, American art wasn’t even taught at the college level. In many ways, Babcock Millhouse determined, at least for the greater Winston-Salem community, what American art is while she occupied the frontier of an emerging art movement.

Perhaps this mimetic nature is why American art allows for the tumultuous realism depicting roiling gray clouds above a withering sapling in George Inness’ “The Storm” to hang mere feet away from the stark non-representation that is Lee Krasner’s “Birth.” By art’s very terms, it challenges art to justify itself. What is it that you’re looking for, what is it that you’re assuming? These works commune and clash in the velvet extravagance that is the historic wing of the museum. 

This juxtaposition is both startling and inevitable. Both works are truths of the American experience — grandeur meets rawness, precision meets chaos and the tension electrifies the space.

“Barbara’s vision was to showcase American art, but also to maintain the house’s role as a cultural and creative mine for the community,” said Slaby. Reynolda has upheld this vision, continuing to serve as an arts and cultural hub for Winston-Salem. Current and upcoming exhibitions such as Wake Forest professor Leigh Ann Hallberg’s “Phenoms” and “Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth” highlight Reynolda’s growing influence in the art world, where America’s origins collide with its multiple horizons.