The Art Museum on Campus: Problems for the EightiesSource: Art Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1979-1980), pp. 136-137Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776400 .

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museum news

THE ART MUSEUM ON CAMPUS: PROBLEMS FOR THE EIGHTIES

La Fonda. The end of the trail. Overland from Saint Joe to Santa Fe was a hazardous and arduous trek for 19th-century pioneers. For 20th-century visitors the trail to Santa Fe is still something of a trial, the New Mexico cap- ital being perhaps the only one of 50 not regu- larly served by reliable air service. Nevertheless approximately 175 members of the Western Association of Art Museums reached the end of the modern Santa Fe Trail and convened at La Fonda Hotel for the organization's annual meeting in October.

New Mexico in autumn offers distractions aplenty: the brilliant foliage of aspens; the colorful Indian crafts being peddled on the Santa Fe Plaza, as they have been for centuries; the smoke of pinon pine fires perfuming the chill night air; narrow adobe-lined streets freed of summer's tourist traffic. Despite such pleas- ant diversions, the WAAM sessions, held at the Museum of Fine Arts, were well attended. Over a three-day period numerous topics were ad- dressed, ranging from Spanish folk art in New Mexico to the impact of recent state and federal legislation on museums to the presentation, interpretation, and promotion of contemporary art.

One day's sessions were given over to the problems of managing university and college museum and gallery facilities, with remarks de- livered by six administrators of such institu- tions. The range represented by their teaching collections and exhibition programs was consid- erable, extending from small galleries associ- ated with individual art departments to rela- tively large institutions with permanent collec- tions and varied programs serving a university- wide audience.

Campus museums and galleries throughout the west-and presumably nationwide-are a beleaguered lot, caught in the bind created by tighter budgets, stabilizing or even declining student enrollments, and horrendous inflation. How the teaching museum can survive in this new fiscal and political environment constituted the leitmotif that ran throughout the session.

Peter Bermingham, director of the Univer- sity of Arizona Museum of Art, chaired a panel discussion on university museum governance. Bermingham prefaced his remarks by refer- ences to the administrative realignments that several well-known university museums have recently suffered. Local exigencies of teaching museums that have been administratively de- moted from the status of a general university resource to a departmental service unit have occasioned a flurry of surveys, questionnaires, and informal studies over the past three years. Using the results of several of these, Ber-

mingham noted the various alignments of the museum possible within the parent educational institution.

In describing the relationship on his own campus, Bermingham outlined a situation that is common to many, if not most, university museums in the nation. The Arizona director reports directly to the university president; in lieu of the direction offered by a board of trustees, other committees at the University of Arizona advise the director on a variety of administrative and artistic matters. According to Bermingham such focused groups "keep us from lapsing into a state of Olympian isolation" which would compromise the museum's ability to serve the needs of the entire campus.

The relative autonomy of the University of Arizona Museum of Art is exceeded by the freedoms afforded Laural Reuter, director of the University of North Dakota Art Gallery at Grand Forks. Her narration of the gallery's development provided an encouraging model for other smaller galleries afflicted with the same budgetary and administrative woes that once characterized the situation in Grand Forks. Exemplifying the possibilities of personal politics, the U.N.D. Gallery has recently emerged from its status as the orphan of a student union operation to become an integral part of the university proper, with direct re- porting to a university vice president and a budget that has multiplied 20 times over in less than a decade. The freedom with which the gallery director has operated since the early 1970s has obviously been good for Reuter; yet she recognized and cautioned that the lack of checks-no advisory board, no trustees, no committees of any sort-may in the long run not be good for the institution, depriving it of natural allies within the university.

At the University of Michigan such allies abound because of the presence of a Museum Committee, mandated by the board of regents when it established the museum in 1946. This link gives museum director Bret Waller regular contacts with numerous campus user groups while avoiding a parochial obligation to any one faction. Waller pointed out the need to reassert continually the university museum's central im-

portance to the general academic exercise, a need that becomes particularly acute in an era of more stringent university budgets. The

panelists' remarks and personal experiences il- luminated the variety of organizational struc- tures for teaching museums and galleries. Com- mon to all, however, was the recognition of the need to embed the museum or gallery more firmly within the general academic life of the campus, lest that organization become a dis- pensable "frill" in a period of budgetary distress, which all anticipated in the 1980s.

Problems of museum programming were ad- dressed by Waller in a reprise of some of his

comments on governance. Defining the univer- sity museum as "a service organization that can and must play a vital role in the teaching and research programs" of the entire institution, Waller identified some of the traditional prob- lems that have frustrated realization of that goal. He suggested that the "typical university museum is blessed-or afflicted, depending on your point of view-with more different interest groups, each of which sees the museum as its own rightful preserve, than is the typical public museum." Focusing his remarks upon the "full- service" university museum, with collections and research and exhibition programs, he rec- ognized the perennial competition among art- ists and art historians for utilization of the museum resources. Waller claimed that such tension is both inevitable and healthy in a properly programmed teaching museum. Art- ists and art historians provide the campus mu- seum with its best customers, staunchest sup- porters, and most vociferous critics; to each group the museum has a special responsibility. Yet, according to Waller, "neither group can ever be entirely satisfied-unless the museum swings so far into the orbit of one of them that the needs and wishes of the other are neglected. This must not be permitted to happen."

In addition to the traditional clientele of artists and art historians, Waller identified a third audience which has historically been over- looked by university museum personnel-the university administration. Although numeri- cally the smallest, the university administrator is by far the most influential of the teaching museum's audiences. Waller faulted university museum directors for ignoring that fact and criticized the tendency to look upon the univer- sity's budget allocation as "a God-given, inalien- able right." He urged that university adminis- trators be regarded in the same light as a ben- efactor who annually gives $100,000, $500,000 or more to the support of museum operations. Administrators do not necessarily have the same interests or backgrounds as private bene- factors-and in fact most often do not. How- ever, as is the case with private benefactors, their perceptions of the museum's programs and functions are of paramount importance to the continued well-being of the institution.

Budgetary issues related to the operational support allocated by university administrators were addressed by Charles Eldredge, director of the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. He summarized a 1978 survey of salaries and operating budgets at ten state uni- versity "full-service" museums conducted un- der the aegis of the Mid-west Art History So- ciety. That study, the first of its type to examine university museum operations in such detail, illuminated a variety of funding patterns among the participating institutions. The salary survey detailed annual remuneration of all staff from

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directors to secretaries, from carpenters to cu- rators, and revealed a closer parallel among comparable ranks than might have been ex-

pected. (Perhaps the only consolation in this is the knowledge that everyone is equally under-

paid!) More divergent were the patterns of direct

university support of programs ranging from exhibitions to acquisitions to education and ac- ademic support activities and the like. Two conclusions in particular were drawn from the

survey: first, that university museums must im-

prove their strategies for the acquisition of op- erating funds from the parent educational in- stitution and their subsequent management of such funds; and second, that university mu- seums must broaden and blend their sources of

support and not rely exclusively or even pri- marily upon the vagaries of the annual legisla- tive or trustees' budget.

Among the bleaker revelations of the salary and budget survey was the lack of adequate development activity among the museums

polled. Although the situation has improved slightly since the poll, only two of the ten mu- seums studied had full time development per- sonnel on their staffs in fiscal 1978. The need for improving this staffing situation and the benefits of a properly balanced and maintained development program were addressed by Ann Wiklund, director of development at the Spen- cer Museum. Wiklund summarized the variety of development efforts conducted at the Uni-

versity of Kansas museum, among them annual

giving drives, deferred giving programs, the gen- eration of grant proposals, and the initiation of business and corporate membership efforts. Her recent study of university art museum devel-

opment programs indicated that these institu- tions are still generally inadequately prepared to maintain such efforts; therefore she offered numerous specific suggestions on the imple- mentation of special programs, with special ref- erence to the "care and feeding" of membership programs, which could be duplicated at mu- seums and galleries both large and small. Es- sential to the success of any development activ- ities is a proper attitude and philosophy about their importance, so that the essential support generated by them strengthens rather than di- lutes the basic educational mission of the teach-

ing museum. Dextra Frankel, gallery director at California

State University-Fullerton, spoke on the prob- lems of utilizing student staff in her ambitious exhibition program. Although the Fullerton gal- lery is a relatively small one in terms of staff and exhibit space, Frankel has established its reputation as a most lively institution, espe- cially with respect to its exhibition installations. Her slide presentation illustrated the striking transformations of the Fullerton gallery space for changing exhibitions, which are imple- mented with the integral participation of stu- dents and volunteers. At any campus museum or gallery, an educational mission is (or cer- tainly ought to be) the primary goal; the lucky students at Fullerton have the opportunity to work in one of the most active gallery training

programs that is especially imaginative in the areas of exhibition design and installation.

Although the complexities of university gal- lery and museum administration are greater than any single day-long program could cover, WAAM is to be congratulated on providing a forum for discussion of several of the critical concerns. The past few years have seen a grow- ing awareness of some of the issues unique to campus-based museums. The Rhode Island School of Design's 1977 conference on "Mu- seums and the University" provided one land- mark in the evolving consciousness of the teach-

ing museum's special roles and problems. Sim- ilar concerns have been addressed in programs of the College Art Association, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Mid-West Art

History Society and other professional organi- zations. The exchange of information and view-

points has been helpful to participants as they seek to define the special mission of the univer-

sity museum and to search together for solu- tions to the growing artistic, administrative and financial problems of the 1980s.

ANNIVERSARIES, HAPPY AND OTHERWISE

Among the many beauties of Northampton, a number reside in the Smith College Museum of Art-and have for 100 years. In 1879 the

president of the fledgling women's college pur- chased directly from the still little-recognized Thomas Eakins a small oil entitled In Grand- mother's Time, the school's first art acquisition. Last fall Eakins' painting, and the cancelled check for $100 paid to the painter, were in- cluded in a centennial exhibition of art treasures and memorabilia celebrating the growth and richness of the collection. Like any teaching museum with limited resources, the Smith Col-

lege Museum has had to depend largely upon

Thomas Eakins, In Grandmother's Time, oil on canvas, 16 x 12", 1876, was the first work purchased by Smith College for its collection.

the generosity of alumnae for the development of its collection. Happily, Smith women have traditionally been a generous and (better yet!) discriminating lot. The collection's range and richness-from Antioch mosaics to Zoffany por- traiture-is a testament to the graduates' well- trained eyes and loyal hearts.

Several years ago, when Smith was building a superlative new facility for its museum and art department, treasures from the modern col- lection were circulated nationally, introducing audiences who had never experienced the de-

lights of Northampton to the great strength of the College's holdings-its paintings of the 19th and early 20th centuries. During the centennial exhibition masterpieces by Courbet, Degas, C6zanne, Eakins, Homer, Gris, and Picasso

hung adjacent to less familiar but equally com-

pelling works, giving credibility to the claims of the museum's distinguished position among American campus collections.

The year just passed marked other museum

birthdays of note, especially The Museum of Modern Art's well publicized golden anniver-

sary. The occasion was marked with special programs both in Manhattan and far afield. Portuguese aficionados of modern art, for in-

stance, had the opportunity of viewing two ma-

jor anniversary shows circulated by MOMA's International Program, American Art from The Museum of Modern Art, and Jackson Pollock:

Drawing into Painting, which were exhibited

simultaneously in Lisbon in September. The Pollock show included 80 paintings and draw-

ings from public and private collections in America and Europe and was accompanied by a catalog prepared by curator Bernice Rose. The exhibition of MOMA's American collec- tions introduced European and Israeli viewers to the varied departments and programs of The Museum of Modern Art. The handsome catalog for that show was a collaborative effort of MOMA curatorial staff, with each collection

prefaced by a general history of the department and followed by a discussion of a particular strength in that field. Essays on topics as di- verse as D. W. Griffith's films, Charles Eames' furniture designs, and American drawings and watercolors from 1900-1945 acquainted readers more fully with the 50-year-old treasure trove on 53rd Street in New York.

Forty years of modern art in Cincinnati were celebrated with a special anniversary exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in Octo- ber. The Center's parent organization, The Modern Art Society, was founded in 1939 with the intention of generating local support and understanding of contemporary art, a role it has

pursued admirably. In 1948 it gave Juan Gris his first American retrospective and the next

year presented the first exhibition of Jean Arp's sculpture in this country. Other significant sur- veys and single-artist exhibitions followed, and for the 40th-anniversary show curator Ruth

Meyer organized a reprise of CAC exhibition

highlights. The Modern Art Society: The Cen-

WINTER 1979/80 137

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