The Campus Art Museum - Samuel H. Kress Foundation

would encourage professors to initiate projects like this outside their disciplines
for their students. In the task of getting involved in the arts, they had to use
the truths and teachings from the sciences.
Some of the museums, the Smart in particular, are working to make faculty
research and interests a major factor in their special exhibitions. They make an
effort to include faculty from across the curriculum and to get them involved in all
aspects of creating an exhibition from planning through execution of a show, as
described by museum personnel:
The first motivation was simply not to wince when a faculty member would say,
“Oh, if only I had known you were doing that exhibition, I would have taught my
related course, but I didn’t know,” so we wanted to get past that. But we wanted
to do something more profound than that. We wanted to be sure that a faculty
member wasn’t just teaching the related course, but that our exhibition got the
benefit of their related knowledge in the field and that we would talk to them
early enough, not just that they could plan to teach their course or maybe that,
if we were really lucky, that they would teach a new course or alter their course
in a way that made a better partner for the exhibition, but that the exhibition
itself would be shaped by what they had to bring to the table…. The model is in
place that we can really draw upon the curriculum and the curriculum and the
exhibition are growing organically together in a way that was not true in the past.
The special exhibition when I visited the Smart demonstrated the crucial
involvement of faculty and, as one respondent stated, “reflects the intellectual dynamics
at the University.” The idea for the exhibition grew out of the dissertation research of
a faculty member who had done her work on Buddhist caves in China, and had been
discussed before the current director of the museum arrived. As he states,
We started talking about the ways in which we could benefit by other elements
of the university. How could we really make use of the university besides
focusing on the research of one individual? This idea of placing the sculpture,
these fragments, in a context was pretty attractive…. We had all this footage
that had been taken not by some professional travelogue maker, but… by
the technical guy who had been working on scanning… and then we got… a
documentary film maker who works on the faculty of the Department of Visual
Arts to select and stitch it together and that’s where the so-called pilgrimage
video came from that’s in the show. And then of course, the grandest element
of all was the digital cave and that is the work of… another faculty member in
the Department of Visual Arts and he uses digital media, that is his art form….
We also talked to our colleagues at the Oriental Institute…. about dispersed
archaeological monuments and what to do about them, about the legitimacy
of presenting work that was looted…. and we wanted to get those perspectives
from the university early enough that the project’s shape could reflect their
participation.... We were showcasing the relationship of the museum’s work and
research done at the university. We were calling upon the talents of an array of
people at the university, but trying to do a project that was not simply aimed
Museum Exhibitions and their Integration into Classes and Research
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