The Campus Art Museum - Samuel H. Kress Foundation

I teach in biology and I arrived here in 1996 and started using the museum
around 2006. It was at the time that [the current director] arrived. I feel very
uncultured. I probably don’t go to a museum as often as I should. I find it very
interesting and attractive, but I just don’t have the background or training to
take much from it. But in just chatting with [the director], I had some ideas
and she wanted to explore the holdings since she had just arrived on campus
at that time and there was a synergy and we came up with a particular project
that would fit well with what my students were learning…. [It all began because]
we were just sitting down at lunch or dinner sometime and just chatting.
“Wouldn’t it be fun if you came to the museum,” she probably said. And I said,
“Well, what would I do?” And she, “What are you studying?” And it was just this
playing around with ideas.
Faculty in other departments had similar stories. For example, a business professor
relayed,
I first met [museum personnel] at a reception…. It was given by one of my
neighbors. They invited me and it was part of the Mellon Challenge Grant
to educate the community both about the grant challenge and about the
program to implement art throughout the curriculum…. I got to meet lots of
people involved in the art community and in the… community. So through that
meeting, [the academic curator] arranged a meeting with me where we sat
and mapped out some of the different ideas I had about how we could work
together and I feel like I gave her a grocery list and she filled all my orders.
How these professors and others actually use the museum in their classes is
discussed next.
Meeting Course Objectives through the
Art Museum
Thirty-seven professors were interviewed as part of this research. Seventeen are in
art-related disciplines and twenty are from other areas of study. These faculty, in
conjunction with museum staff, use art and the art museum in multiple ways in
their classes. Their practices suggest six learning objectives that the museum helps
fulfill: skill development, interdisciplinary analysis, comparative analysis, social
critique, research, and creative inspiration. Because these objectives are not always
as distinct as they might at first appear, I am using them to loosely group and
discuss ways in which the museum is incorporated into academic courses. 6
6. Milkova (2011) organizes use of the museum by faculty into five categories or models: visual literacy, art as cultural
context, art as conceptual framework, art as primary text, and art as creative focal point.
Meeting Course Objectives through the Art Museum
10