Current Features

The University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) is pleased to announce it will present a landmark exhibition of rare works of art and important new scholarship brought together to explore the provocative relationship between photography and painting along the Normandy coast in mid-19th-century France. Organized by UMMA, “The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850–1874” will be on view in Ann Arbor October 10, 2009 through January 3, 2010 and will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art in 2010. >>

University of Michigan Provost Teresa Sullivan has announced the interim management team to lead the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) beginning June 1 and until a new director is in place, pending approval by the Regents. Kathryn Huss, the Museum’s Chief Administrative Officer; Raymond Silverman, Director of the University’s Museum Studies Program and Professor of History of Art and of African and Afroamerican Studies; and Ruth Slavin, UMMA’s Director of Education will serve as Co-Directors in the wake of UMMA Director James Steward’s departure for the directorship at the Princeton University Art Museum at the end of May. >>

Public programs have always been a critical part of the Museum’s role to broaden and deepen its audience’s experience of visual art. While for much of UMMA’s history program offerings had consisted of lectures on artists and art history, over recent years an evolution has taken place, with a broadening in the range of programs to offer a more meaningful place to the literary and performing arts alongside visual culture. As the Museum’s public programs aggressively ramped up, facilitating greater contextualization of its collections and temporary exhibitions, audience demand stepped up, with the result that event spaces in the “old” Museum were often serving double and triple duty. In this compromised set of spaces the Museum, often collaborating with University and community partners, has presented some of the most noteworthy artists of our time, with a special commitment to the written and spoken word. >>

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In my early childhood I had small volition; I simply assumed [museum going]… was what people did and how they viewed the world. Later, when the age of anxiety set in—which is to say, when I first learned to be embarrassed by my parents—I can remember protesting, Do we have to, can’t we stay in the hotel, can we eat something first at least— while [my father] set off, his sons in tow, to the Duomo or Uffizi or Accademia or Louvre or some less trafficked building or church whose guardian was just about to shut the doors when this importunate person approached. In those days the lighting was quite often dim, controlled by some custodian or monk who dozed beside the switch; always my father would walk up to him, a fistful of lire or francs outstretched. >>

By any measure UMMA’s recent campaign, The Museum Reimagined, was an unprecedented success. With over $61 million raised by the end of 2008—the bulk of which supported the $41.9 building project with additional monies going toward building-related costs, the Museum’s endowment, and program costs—this historic achievement was the result of visionary UM alumni across the country and around the world and those committed to the arts as an integral part of our ecology here in Southeastern Michigan. >>

On March 28, 2009, the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) will open a landmark 53,000-square-foot expansion and major restoration of its historic, 41,000-square-foot home, Alumni Memorial Hall. Designed by principal architect Brad Cloepfil and his team at Allied Works Architecture, the $41.9 million transformation not only more than doubles the space available for collections display, temporary exhibitions, programs and educational exploration, but also fulfills the Museum’s mission to bridge visual art and contemporary culture, scholarship and accessibility, tradition and innovation. >>

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