How do you make an art museum and why?

On Saturday, April 8th, the department of Art at Sac State, in partnership with the art history program, hosted it’s annual Art History Symposium.  This year, the invited speakers were Rachel Teagel, director of the Manetti Shrem Museum, and Lawrence Rinder, director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).  Both speakers centered their talks around the question: how do you make an art museum, and why?

Rachel Teagel is the founding director of the Manetti Shrem Museum, over-seeing its completion from the ground up, which started in 2012 and was completed in the fall of 2016.  She has a Ph.D is art history from Stanford University, with a focus in U.S Contemporary Art.  She also curated the inagural show in the Shrem Museum.

Rachel Teagel in conversation

Lawrence Rinder is the current director at BAMPFA, holding that postition since 2008.  He oversaw BAMPFA’s move to its current location, a newly renovated $112 million building.  BAMPFA’s mission statement is to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through art and film.  (They) aspire to be locally connected and globally relevant, engaging audiences from the campus, community, and beyond.

Both speakers addressed the topic of the lecture in different ways.  Teagel, having just recently seen her museum completed, spoke more about the process of creating a museum.  For example, part of their process what to involve the public by inviting them to open meetings, so that they may give their opinions regarding what they felt the Shrem Museum should be.  She also spoke about what this museum was created to represent, which was UC Davis’ rich history.  Their collection boasts art by their revered faculty of Robert Arneson, William T. Wiley, Ruth Horsting, Wayne Thiebaud, and Roy DeForest, to name a few.  Also, the architecture of the building was inspired by their specific location in the central valley. 

Rinder spoke more to what a museum is and can be, since the beginnings of BAMPFA can be traced back to 1881, making it the oldest operating UC art museum on the west coast.  BAMPFA is considered an encyclopedic museum, meaning they have a huge collection of art from all different times and locations.  Though they started with only around 12 american and european paintings, their collection now contains well over 17,000 works of art, including a fantastic collection of Japanese prints. 

Between both speakers, the relationship of education and museum was important and essential.  As Rinder said, though collections are great, they are a huge responsibility and not essential.  Instead, art museums need to play an important role in educating and providing an inspirational experience to the public, and part of their job as directors is to figure out how to make a museum relavent and engaging in the twenty-first century.  I feel Mr. Rinder summed this up nicely, when he said that museum’s needed to do something that would add to the conversation, not just represent it.  In thinking about this need to engage with audiences in the twenty-first century, I started to question whether or not the word “museum” helped or hurt this mission.  The connotations associated with the word “museum” are generally old things and the past, so I wonder if renaming or removing the word “museum” can help an institution, like these, eliminate those preconceived notions, allowing it to speak to a larger audience and increase engagement with the public?