By: Nicholas Clark
As home to the Worcester Art Museum and the former Higgins Armory Museum, Worcester is truly a cultural and historical treasure.
Unfortunately, in late December of 2013, Worcester lost the prestige of having the second largest collection of medieval arms and armor as well as the only museum solely dedicated to these antiquities in the nation when the Higgins Armory Museum closed its doors due to a lack of funding and city support.
Although the nationally recognized armory museum has closed up shop, its valued – luckily – collection is not at all lost. The Worcester Art Museum has graciously welcomed the collection of over 2,000 medieval antiquities and has made plans to incorporate it with a whole new exhibit.
With major plans underway for a new exhibit that will relight the spark that Higgins Armory once brought to Worcester, a temporary exhibit named “Knights!” has been installed. This was completed last year and houses only a fraction of the new collection of arms and armor, but this is only the beginning.
The museum plans to integrate the entire collection of 2,000+ items within the coming years.
By renovating the library into a new grand hall exhibit, the WAM is anticipating to have more than enough space to display the full collection (something that even the Higgins Armory was unable to do). The plans for moving the library to another site will be completed by 2018.
This means that if all goes right, the Museum will be able to show off the new two story, 4,000+ square foot, fully decorated exhibit in as little as a few years. The Knights and Weaponry exhibits were beloved in Worcester and will be more than welcomed back to grant visitors an experience of the mystical realm that was Medieval Europe.
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