The Campus Art Museum - Samuel H. Kress Foundation

too thin. Nobody could do that position well.” A curator at another recipient
museum was referring to connecting the museum with the academic curriculum
when he stated,
It’s something we have been attuned to… and we all did as much as we could,
but it wasn’t our main job. And now to have someone who is dedicated to doing
that full-time—not only is dedicated to it, but is really good at it—it’s really
taken off. So we didn’t start from zero… but it’s just going like crazy now and
that’s just after a year.
A literature professor at one of the Mellon grant recipient institutions talked
about his appreciation and fears regarding the academic curator position:
That position is vital to what so many of us do now and it’s been on temporary
funding for years. My biggest fear is that [the academic curator’s] funding is
going to disappear and that she or her successor is just going to be far away.
All these great things have happened in my class because [of the academic
curator].
Making the logic and benefit of this position compelling throughout the parent
organization is key, and that seems to be happening at the institutions that received
Mellon support.
Not all institutions will receive such generous external funding. When asked
about this, a director who had put much effort into obtaining the grant replied
that the success of the Mellon programs has “paved the way for arguments we all
need to make to our donors.” She continued that it was “a perfect opportunity for
an academic museum who can’t get a Mellon grant to get a donor and say, ‘Look
this is what they are doing there and this is the success rate. This is something we
can do and even if you are not about the museum, you’re supporting the rest of the
campus.’” As the director acknowledged, this process takes time. At institutions
that are not recipients of Mellon grants, the education curators are busy working
with faculty, students, docents, K-12 students, and the community. One focuses her
outreach at the university on foreign language professors and works with students
to provide language tours for interested classes. An educator at another institution
described her job as working “with all ages, from preschoolers to Alzheimers,”
referring not only to a span of ages, but also a range of needs.
Nonetheless, recipients of the grants are creating prototypes for other
museums to explore. The Mellon Foundation has played an important role in
shifting the attention of campus art museums to a mostly overlooked audience—
university/college students and faculty. The word is spreading. Although only
three of the museums in this study had not received Mellon grants, my sense is
that many museums without such grants are currently figuring out ways to better
involve the campus art museum in the academic life of the campus. For example,
the MU Museum of Art and Archaeology, one of the museums without the benefits
of the Mellon grants, has created a half-time academic coordinator position because
the logic of the position was compelling, even in the absence of an outside mandate
and outside funding.
Foundation Support for Academic Integration of Art Across the Curriculum
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