The Campus Art Museum - Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Metaphor and Meaning of the Campus
Art Museum
Clearly museum is almost the wrong word. It gives off this aura… of exhibits
which just hang on the wall… and people drift past looking at them. It’s not
very interactive and it’s not very engaged…. The rethinking has started to make
it something different, much more a Visual Cultural Center… and not just a
museum. 2 (humanities professor)
This professor’s observation draws attention to the fact that campus art museums
can mean so much more than paintings on a wall or a collection of objects. A
woman with severe Alzheimer’s, for example, stared at a 3rd century tapestry,
thread-bare and full of holes, linked it to her mostly forgotten life as a seamstress,
and told the curator that she could fix it. Study participants perceive the campus
art museum in different ways and spontaneously resort to metaphors to describe
their museum, as illustrated in Table IV.1. Each metaphor portrays a way in which
museums are operating and being used.
Table IV.1. Museum Metaphors with Selected Quotations
Museum Metaphor Quotations
Gem
Narrative
Laboratory
Library
Portal
“It’s a jewel.” (student)
“For its size, it’s spectacular… It’s sort of this little gem.” (faculty)
“The University uses the pearl.... It’s not necessarily the connotation - it’s distinguished,
but that’s not what this is just about, it’s not a temple. I’d like to say bits of the world are
here throughout time and history.... The story of our humanity is here.” (curator)
“I like to think of it as a catalyst. We are trying to ramp up the ways that we can make the
museum and its holdings central to all kinds of discussions that take place at a university,
that they can be points of departure for dialogues, for research, for performace, or
teaching.” (curator)
“We always try to keep in mind that our museums are the equivalent for some of our
faculty of the laboratories that our scientists need, that we need these materials for the
research that some of our faculty do and for teaching.” (administrator)
“The museum is like a library to a lot of people. It’s a place that you have reverence
for knowledge and it’s a place that you know the information and pieces will always
be there. You can always come back to them and they’re not going away and you can
come in whenever you want and they’ll still be there.” (student)
“I see it as one of the portals to the community…. We help make the teaching and
learning at the university visible to the wider community.” (curator)
“It somehow is a gathering place… an intellectual center…. I see us as having this way
to the town and ideally to the rest of the state… as being an intellectual and creative
center. I think we are doing a lot of inspiring students and others to come here and
make their own work - to design programs and write poetry and make art and go and
think about architecture. We are trying to inspire people in all areas of campus and in
the community to view this as a resource and I think we are serving as a kind of creative
caldron of ideas.” (curator)
2. Ellipses (…) indicate that a few words have been edited from the transcripts for the sake of space. Care was taken to
not change the meaning of transcribed responses.
Metaphor and Meaning of the Campus Art Museum
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