From the Director: 2006 Archives

Reimagining the Museum

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

Many of you will recognize the phrase above—“reimagining the Museum”—as the tag line of the Museum of Art’s ongoing fundraising campaign. With the key target of raising $35.4 million for expansion and restoration now behind us so that construction might begin, I’d like to share a few ways in which you will begin to see us reimagining the Museum in the very near future.

Most notably, UMMA Off/Site—our temporary exhibition venue, opened to the public on June 25—will serve as a laboratory for a number of new ways in which we seek to engage University and community audiences. We have planned a roster of ten exhibitions that we feel make the best of a challenging period of transition—exhibitions that focus on the art of photography, film, and video, and that highlight two central themes. In the first year, we consider the meaning of place, the relationship of the artist to specific sites of meaning, ranging from the Dakota plains to the industrial landscape of southeastern Michigan. In the second year, our range goes global as we look at contemporary film and video by cutting-edge artists in Japan and Iran, at a China in transition in the 1970s, and at two distinct regions of North America. At the same time, Off/Site will see the launch of new outreach tools: we are dramatically extending evening open hours so that visitors can find us at different moments in their day; new programs will be offered for new audiences to underscore the social experience of art.

We will also take the Museum of Art beyond the walls of any gallery space. Both as a response to the space constraints of construction and as a commitment to serving our audiences well, we will be hosting programs in an array of campus and off-campus locations. Perhaps the most important of these will be a series of public lectures to be offered by some of the nation’s leading thinkers (be they writers, philosophers, scholars, or curators) who are serving as consultants to UMMA in our efforts to rethink what a museum of the twenty-first century should be. In addition to their lectures, in which you will hear new concepts of what a forward-looking museum must do, these experts will be advising UMMA on the essential long-term work of planning for and implementing the dramatically expanded collections galleries that will be at the heart of our new museum. I hope these lectures will prompt all of us to challenge our thinking about what a great museum experience is, in an ongoing conversation among provocative speakers, the Museum staff, and the public. Even as we plan for how to present many beloved favorites from our collections—and close looking will remain the key—we are entirely rethinking the strategies through which visitors will experience the works of art, and investing substantial resources in the effort.

For a long time now I have described the purposes of our building project and of our campaign as being not about the building, per se, but about what will happen in it. Even as much of my own time in the past few years has gone into our increasingly successful campaign efforts, I am gratified to see that the content vision we have had is both drawing nearer and remains fresh and necessary. Many of our peer museums around the country have launched new spaces during these years; while each has much to recommend it, none of the projects I have seen has gone as far as we hope to go in building bridges between scholarship and accessibility, between the reflective and the social, between inherited traditions and the new. The Getty Foundation’s recent award of a grant of $250,000 toward rethinking the ways in which we present our collections is a marvelous endorsement of that perspective. I am confident there will be other such endorsements, and that the Museum we are reimagining will have been well worth the effort.

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