A Year of Learning at the Museum
This has been a year of firsts for the Museum. Against a rather dark global backdrop, how affirming to have welcomed our first visitors and our first course visits to the new Museum; to have mounted our first temporary exhibitions, curated and organized by our own team; to have hosted our first student gala in the new building. A number of mainstays on our calendar are being refreshed and reconsidered: Our traditional summer picnic evolved into our first “summer celebration” emphasizing close looking and creativity; our Nassau Street Sampler, launched in September 2009, enters its seventeenth year (after a pause last year as we prepared to open) with a new emphasis on the galleries and on community and gathering. As I write, we have welcomed some 400,000 visitors in less than nine months—well more than our forecast for the whole of our first year—one marker among many that the Museum has quickly found its footing.
As we face the imminent beginning of our second year (happy birthday to us on October 31!), we are taking a close look at our most urgent priorities for the months and years to come. At the top of the list, as always, is our commitment to University teaching and research, assuring that the Museum is a potent resource for our students inside and outside of the classroom. Whether working from objects brought out for their interrogation in our six object study classrooms or interacting with the works on public view in our galleries, curricular engagement is at the very core of the enterprise.
Just in our first months, faculty from across the University have been effusive in describing their experiences. Bonnie Bassler, professor of molecular biology, describes how her students are inspired by the beauty, history, and meaning of the objects they see at the Museum—and how they return to the lab fired up with new creative energy. For the students of Daniele De Feo in Italian, a Museum visit is always a semester highlight. Jane Cox in theater notes that visits to the Museum are especially important for her design students and lauds the pedagogical brilliance of the Museum staff. Sarah Anderson in English and medieval studies notes that when her students returned to McCosh after a Museum visit to continue their class session, it was “with eyes shining brightly.”
The advent of the new Museum has allowed us to reboot one of my favorite programs—the roster of grants we make to Princeton faculty fostering new course development in which works of art will feature significantly. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, these grants have been instrumental to our role in curricular innovation over the years, and the most recent grant recipient exemplifies this. Regular Museum collaborator Anne Cheng, who teaches in English and gender and sexuality studies, put together a brilliant grant proposal for a course titled “Girls and Dolls” that will use Museum objects to position the doll as a conceptual lens for considering personhood, commodity, and gender. I wait eagerly to see which objects in our collections figure in topics such as shaping a pedagogy of care for mothers, daughters, and citizens; or how the doll can be an agent that transforms or threatens what it is to be human. If you teach on the Princeton faculty, please consider making a proposal this year for your own Mellon grant.
Much of our programming is also designed specifically for the benefit of our University students and faculty. In our first year in the new building, a major symposium on the subject of learning through photography was developed in conversation with Princeton faculty and graduate students and served as an essential platform for dialogue and research development. Annual faculty salons work in a similar mode, investigating a wide array of topics and areas of interest across the years to afford opportunities for many faculty. These salons provide rich collaborative opportunities with partners such as the Council on Science and Technology and the Princeton Materials Institute. Topics range from gold to this year’s focus on ceramics, a medium long marginalized both because it was regarded as craft and for the fact that its makers are often women.
These forums, among others, offer structured opportunities for students and faculty to become part of the life and work of the Museum. In addition to those I name above, the new academic year sees a new cohort joining our Student Advisory Board and a new group of academic-year interns drawn from the Princeton student body. It also sees the launch of an important new program, our first cohort of student visitor experience representatives, or VERs. The VERs play an essential frontline role in creating a welcoming and engaging experience for all our visitors. They are thus a critical part of the “face” of the Museum; I have been committed to ensuring that Princeton students become a key part of that face. With “Year Two” about to begin, all these activities bode well for a dynamic year ahead.
