by Jon Lackman | 10 September 2009 | Museums
In a recent essay for caa.reviews, Carleton College Director of Exhibitions and Curator of the College Art Collection Laurel Bradley considers the fate of the university art museum, a topic on many minds following the recent Rose Art Museum debacle:
Between 1942 and 2008 campus art museums increased dramatically in number … A new funding formula, drawing on private donors in the community, and foundations and government agencies favoring K–12 programs, increasingly replaced the past system that relied wholly on university coffers. New community-based funding solutions to museum budgeting triggered a realignment of mission. As Susan Taylor, then director of the Wellesley College Art Museum, wrote in 1988: “If a college museum seeks outside funding it is critical that its administration recognize the museum’s responsibility to a broad public” … The campus museum began to resemble the civic or independent art museum not only in its professional practices but also in its audience … Students, despite their status as a captive audience, can be hard to find in a college/university art museum … In the shift to the twenty-first century, the tide may be turning back … There are signs that the art museum is being redefined within the university as an active site for teaching and learning for students and faculty not only in the disciplines of studio art and art history but all across the curriculum.
Bradley reviews this new trend at length, then concludes:
Holland Cotter penned a stirring rebuttal to Reinharz’s devaluing of campus museums in the New York Times this past February. With “Why University Museums Matter,” the critic reviewed three exhibitions at various Yale University museum venues. Cotter sees the academic museum as the ideal vehicle to sustain museums and museum practice through hard times … Apparently, campus museums do not need to choose between serving the outside public and internal campus stakeholders. Research-driven exhibitions, inclusive of the questions and experiments at the heart of academic discourse, can also please outside visitors including New York Times critics, and may be essential to the survival of all museums in the twenty-first century.
