From the Director: 2006 Archives

Reimagining UMMA’s Collections

This article first appeared in the Septemberr–October, 2006 issue of Insight, published by the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Making better use of UMMA’s growing collections is at the core of our facility expansion and restoration, just as collecting, preserving, and displaying works of art is at the core of the Museum’s mission. These collections—which now number some 18,000 items, principally from the Western, Asian, and African traditions—have grown substantially in recent years, and have more than doubled in number since the last significant refurbishment was carried out on our home in Alumni Memorial Hall in 1966-67. With groundbreaking imminent on the addition of The Maxine and Stuart Frankel and The Frankel Family Wing, the long-awaited opportunity to display more of and make better use of our collections at last begins to take shape. In line with this, our staff is now hard at work envisioning how to display and interpret the works of art that will soon fill more than twice the number of galleries we’ve ever had available for the purpose.

UMMA’s collections are the fruit of some 150 years of collecting activity at the University of Michigan. Dating back to the early days of the University, works of art were acquired for use in undergraduate teaching, often collected by the faculty to help bring a variety of disciplines to life in the classroom in an age when travel was difficult and affordable only to the wealthiest. The University’s collecting activity began to pick up speed in 1895, with the gift from Henry C. Lewis of an unusually significant body of art, a group of objects inevitably prized for different qualities then than those for which we most value the same works today. (Coincidentally, this was the same year that Harvard University’s art collecting also took a major step up in quantity and quality—a coincidence that warrants research into late nineteenth-century theories in higher education.) For instance, a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) was singled out at the time the collection came to the University as its particular masterpiece—a particularly interesting perception given the wild swings in critical feeling for the artist over the past 100 years. No purpose-built facility was ever erected to house the University’s art collections, although more than one design was put forward in the late nineteenth century. It was not until 1946, however, that a professionalized museum was established at U of M to care for these collections, and it has awaited our own time to create a facility expressly designed for the care and display of works of art.

The ways in which we will use these new galleries—along with other spaces in which works of original art will be made available to the public, such as open-storage galleries on two levels of the future Museum—will have much to say about how we regard the purposes of a university museum in the twenty-first century. Certain recent UMMA practices will endure, including the display of multiple artistic media in the same galleries, so that paintings will mingle with sculpture, furniture, the decorative arts, even with works on paper. Throughout, we will feature important new acquisitions, made through gift and purchase, such as the great masterwork by Joseph Wright of Derby explored elsewhere in this Insight. New acquisitions, strategically sited, will afford new juxtapositions, fill in previously existing gaps, and add new layers of context to a stunningly rich resource. Existing treasures, often rarely seen in the past, will be cleaned or otherwise restored to make them suitable for display, at last fulfilling the promise of past donors who entrusted their objects to us for care, research, and public exhibition.

Equally significant will be the interpretive framework to be developed for our future galleries and public spaces, and I look forward to elaborating on this ambitious and exciting project in the next Insight.

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