From the Director

Serving the Student Experience

This article first appeared in the May–June 2008 issue of Insight, the Museum’s bimonthly magazine.

As I write this, I’m recently returned from one of many trips I take each year (sometimes many in a month!), meeting with alumni and others around the country eager to hear about what we’re doing here in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, and at the Museum of Art, often ready to support our efforts to place the Museum at the heart of University life. On this particular trip, several alumni told me movingly about how their experience at Michigan had formed what became a lifelong love of art, or of museums, or of architecture. In different language, each told me that without Michigan they feel they’d have missed out on something fundamental—that it was the broad richness of possibility at Michigan that led them to new discoveries well beyond their own primary fields of study. Often, that experience translates to a desire to give back, to help ensure that students of today and tomorrow have similar opportunities both in and outside the classroom—opportunities to discover the fullness of their humanity in great works of art.

In recent years the Museum has have drawn heavily on that desire to give back, and it is that desire on the part of alumni and many others that has led to the success of the Museum’s campaign, which will draw to a formal conclusion at the end of the year. While it would be simplistic to characterize the motivations of so many supporters in shared terms, on balance I’d say that the single greatest desire I see in our benefactors is a desire to make a difference in the lives of our students. That meshes well with the Museum’s core mission and what drives me: to serve, engage, and occasionally inspire the 40,000 University of Michigan students who are at the heart of what we do.

A commitment to enriching the student experience is the primary motivator of the Museum’s ongoing expansion, and many new possibilities will emerge when the contractors depart and the art returns later this year. Expanded galleries and open-storage galleries will treble the number of art objects on view, with a diversity of objects and cultures available for discovery that mirror the diversity of our students and the experiences they bring with them to their university years. An auditorium and two classrooms will ensure that many students come to the Museum for their classes, whether in the more obviously related disciplines such as art history, or in fields that share a commitment to creativity such as art practice or creative writing, or in fields more removed from the immediate focus of an art museum such as economics or engineering. Two further “object-study” classrooms will allow graduates and undergraduates to meet in rooms surrounded by original works of art, and discover the benefits of looking at art for fields of study ranging from anthropology to geology.

The public zone in the new Frankel Wing will allow us to keep the building open late into the evening, offering the possibility of late evening poetry slams, or film screenings, or a latte over a study break—thus bringing the Museum more into alignment with the diversity of how our students actually live their lives. The work of our student outreach coordinator—herself currently a UM student—and of our new Student Programming and Advisory Board (about which much more on the facing page) will help ensure that all these efforts don’t merely reflect good intentions but derive from what students actually do, or want. Student voices themselves will increasingly be heard: a new graduate student docent program will begin offering tours of our major temporary exhibitions when we reopen in 2009.

One of the great beauties of this University is that our students don’t exist in a vacuum—they are part of a larger community that is probably more integrated than many would have us believe, that doesn’t draw hard lines between the student population and everyone else. University and community come together, both physically and metaphorically: our campus is no suburban retreat, but is right in the heart of town. The physical point of intersection that I most frequently think of is State Street, at the Museum’s front door—that corridor and intersection where campus buildings, merchants, residents, and visitors come together in a harmony that isn’t always to be found in large university towns.

I often characterize the new Museum as being about building bridges—from past to present, across disparate cultures, between town and gown. Our commitment to the student experience isn’t a process of separation or marginalization, but one of integration. While not being naïve enough to think that one size can fit everyone, I do believe that, fortuitously, what serves our UM students will, more often than not, serve others well, too.

James Christen Steward
Director

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