The role of university museums

One thing we've been thinking about a lot lately in light of the controversies over university museums at Brandeis, the University of Connecticut and elsewhere is the specific role of those institutions, which differ in many ways from other kinds of museums. The exhibition that opens today at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is an excellent concrete example of how. Appellations from Antiquity focuses on 19th- and 20th-century works in the Cantor's collection that allude to mythology through their titles, but the subject of the exhibition is less important to our point than how it came to be. The press release reads:

“Appellations from Antiquity” emerged from a 2008 Stanford seminar, taught by Jennifer Marshall, entitled “The Art Museum: History and Practice.” Student Rachel Patt, a classics major (2009), created the exhibition proposal, which was developed for installation under the guidance of Patience Young, the Center's curator for education, for the museum's Lynn Krywick Gibbons Gallery.

This kind of interaction with students that develops out of their work with the collection is unique to university museums and produces new scholarship and new ways of looking at and categorizing art. We have certainly greatly enjoyed our own work with students in this capacity, from the annual MFA exit show to Shaping the Silhouette, a collaboration with Jose Blanco's class in the department of textiles, merchandising and interior, to numerous small exhibitions in the Martha Thompson Dinos gallery that have been organized by students, and while some of that curatorial work with students has been scaled back while we undergo construction and expansion, we hope to pick it up again and pursue the implementation of a museum studies program when we reopen in 2011.