From the Director

The New UMMA: A Beacon for All the Arts

This article first appeared in the November–December 2008 issue of Insight, the Museum’s bimonthly magazine.

The standard story of the art museum in the modern world has it that the museum has moved in the past 30 years from a focus on the object to a focus on audience. Responding to a desire to remain “relevant,” the activities of the typical museum have evolved, too, placing dramatic emphasis on the traveling exhibition—the “blockbuster” notoriously shaped by Thomas Hoving when director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1970s—to the diminishment of a museum’s collections. The role and authority of curators shifted, too, with the specialist curator dethroned while the role of audience-centric education departments grew.

This story has many truths in it, although arguably fewer for university-based museums than for civic museums that have often been ruthlessly dependent on “gate”—admissions numbers and revenues. Certainly museums have substantially trained audiences to expect a constant turnover in exhibitions, and have come to depend on these to sustain their attendance figures even as collections galleries often became static. But museums in university settings have increasingly been seen as clinging to a focus on rich content, challenging the status quo, and pushing the margins of accepted art—more than has been possible in freestanding museum settings—even as they invite newly diverse audiences in.

Alongside this populist trajectory have sprung up, largely in the years since World War II, “arts centers” (distinct from museums) offering more wide-ranging programming, often including classes in art making as well as other forms of creative expression from film to theater to dance. More often than not, the most advanced art centers of this kind focus substantially if not wholly on contemporary practice and include many of the nation’s most vibrant visual arts institutions, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis or, in university settings, the Hammer at UCLA or the Wexner Center at Ohio State. And while many museums (including UMMA) have come to offer diverse educational programming, few “universal” museums—museums with collections and exhibitions spanning time and the globe—have done so with the vigor and commitment of these contemporary arts centers.

With its reopening, UMMA is poised to become one of a few universal museums to have committed itself to the full range of creative expression. While we will retain our primary role as a museum of the visual arts, UMMA now seeks to be a center for all the arts, one that will link visual practice past and present with creative endeavors in the sister arts—film and video, music, theater, dance, and the written and spoken word. This evolution grows from the fact that the visual arts simply no long operate in isolation, if they ever did, and the view that art can best be seen in an inclusive context. Equally, this evolution comes from a conviction that a more holistic investigation of the arts is desperately needed at a time when many communities have substantially lost the venues in which public life takes place—town squares long since replaced by suburban shopping malls, the town meeting fractured into groups of self-defined homogeneity in which those with fundamentally differing views rarely gather to respectfully discuss their differences and their commonalities.

What makes UMMA’s newly inclusive commitment to the arts possible is two-fold. First, from our reopening in the spring we will now have the room—and the diversity of spaces—in which such activity can take place. The Apse in historic Alumni Memorial Hall remains a brilliant space for music, from classical to contemporary. The new Helmut Stern Auditorium will provide an intimate venue for film, video, dance, and unamplified spoken-word performance. The new Frankel Wing’s “Vertical Gallery” will allow for boundary-crossing events that defy categorization. Second, UMMA has the partners—both on campus and off—with which to take on such an ambitious range of activity. New, sustained partnerships with various University of Michigan units in performance, art, film, and creative writing are being launched that will allow us to draw on a depth and breadth of talent that no freestanding museum could readily muster. Partnerships with community organizations will allow us to connect with broader audiences, maximize our impact, and build bridges between “town” and “gown.”

Such activities will unfold as 2009 advances; our hope is that by fall, a rich stew of offerings across the arts will be taking place at the new UMMA. But this won’t be easy: even with the goodwill of so many partners, moneys will have to be found to launch and sustain these endeavors—and current economic conditions will pose challenges. It’s our view that together we can create for the University of Michigan and for Ann Arbor one of the nation’s most vibrant centers for the arts. We invite you to be a part of this new “museum town square.”

James Christen Steward
Director

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