The Campus Art Museum - Samuel H. Kress Foundation

assignment and promoted it in a campus-wide course for first-year students. 9 Over
ten sections used the assignment the same semester it was promoted.
An example of a formal partnership is The Commons, an interdisciplinary
center at the University of Kansas that connects the Hall Center for the Humanities,
the Biodiversity Institute, and the Spencer Museum of Art. It creates public
events, exhibitions, and provides seed funding for research projects that are
interdisciplinary and collaborative and for art projects that integrate the arts,
sciences, and humanities. The center receives some funding from the provost’s
office, but as one of the Commons directors said, “it’s totally bottom up and not top
down.” Another partnership is the University of Missouri (MU) Museum of Art and
Archaeology collaboration with the autism center, special education department,
and the companion animals program in animal sciences. People from each of these
programs, including the museum, are interested in meeting needs of those easily
overloaded by stimuli and are creating research projects together.
Museum Exhibitions and their Integration
into Classes and Research
As part of the effort to extend the reach of the museum into university/college
teaching and research, museum curators often develop exhibitions that respond
to campus-wide academic themes and sometimes to the research and interests of
faculty and students, increasingly in collaboration with them. The following section
addresses the ways in which exhibitions intersect with the academic work of
institutions by discussing exhibitions of faculty and students’ art, exhibitions that
complement college or university semester themes and courses, and exhibitions
curated by or with faculty and students.
Art Made by Faculty and Students
The work of one or more professors who are also artists is sometimes the focus
of an exhibition that, as a professor in the arts stated, provides the “chance that
students would see them out of context, and go, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is an art
historian who is also a maker’.” Institutions that grant BFAs and MFAs show
students’ work, but not always in the campus museum. Exhibiting in the museum
makes a difference, as a professor in the arts described:
Our MFA/BFA exhibit is in the museum, it’s hosted by the museum and shown
here in the museum. Most schools… tend to have their BFA and MFA shows in
student-run galleries. We use the fact that those that are graduating show their
work in a professionally curated museum as a selling point for our program….
You have to turn it in to the curators here and I think there’s a pressure on
students, a good pressure, that raises the level of our MFA and BFA programs….
It exerts an unspoken pressure to get their technical and conceptual level up
because they know what it is going to be seen with. That event is a big deal, I
9. For the library guide to the Art Minute assignment, see: http://guides.lib.ku.edu/artminute.
Museum Exhibitions and their Integration into Classes and Research
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