Director's Letter Winter 2012

What does it mean to be a teaching museum? Aren’t all museums in fact teaching museums? Don’t we all teach not only in our classrooms and dedicated study spaces but in our galleries, too? This shorthand designation is often used to describe university-based museums, but to my mind frequently has a desultory whiff about it, conjuring images of students humorlessly engaged in rote learning. The reality of being a museum that teaches is, in the twenty-first century, far more complex and, I hope, far more compelling.

As a museum in one of the world’s great universities, we teach in ways both apparent and subtle. Classroom teaching is one of the more obvious avenues, engaging Princeton’s undergraduate and graduate students through coursework in multiple arts and humanities programs—as an article in this issue of the magazine more fully reveals. Most of the Museum’s curators teach in one way or another every semester, whether offering twelve-week lecture courses or seminars, co-teaching with colleagues in several departments and programs, leading invited discussions, or welcoming precepts to our study rooms. Sponsoring interns—typically drawn from Princeton’s student body—is another way in which we offer structured experiences to more advanced students, as part of preparation for a career in museums or in academia.

Community-oriented programming offers focused experiences for younger students. Through our work with area schools and frequent docent-led class visits to the Museum’s galleries, we offer structured learning opportunities to nearly 10,000 K–12 students each year, exposing them to masterworks of world art and challenging them to draw connections between the art of the past or of other cultures and their own experiences. For many, this might be their first discovery of original great works of art or of museums, and we strive to make these visits dynamic and accessible.

Outreach programming also fits the model of structured learning. Museum staff members regularly teach in lifelong learning programs through such organizations as the Princeton Adult School, Present Day Club, 55Plus group, and the Stonebridge and Princeton Windrows retirement communities. I’m delighted to speak frequently to groups ranging from the Chamber of Commerce to Rotary to the Nassau Club, or alumni chapters across the country.

Our publications program is also very much a part of our teaching. With several book-length publications appearing each year—most often accompanying temporary exhibitions but also presenting new scholarship on the collections (two such collections catalogues are due from us in 2012, on ancient glass and on Spanish drawings)— we are in fact a small publishing house. Commissioning and presenting scholarship from a host of intellectual perspectives is something I think we do better than almost any other mid-sized museum I could name.

To my mind, many of the most compelling ways in which we are a teaching museum are at once more personal and more opportunistic. If we’re doing our work in the galleries well, we are regularly providing moments of deep discovery and learning. An unexpected juxtaposition of objects brings about a new connection for even the most regular visitor, who might not previously have considered Modigliani in the context of African art. The turn of a corner to find a magnificent Yuan dynasty handscroll provides a moment of unexpected transport to another world. The sight of a beloved master in a new location— say, Monet’s Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge against a new field of deep blue—provokes a new relationship and somehow makes that painting your own, one to which you will return again and again. Beyond our galleries, expert lectures invite deepened levels of understanding and a groundbreaking voice on an unexpected topic—such as, recently, the neuroscientist Eric Kandel speaking on the art of Vienna in 1900—brings a new perspective.

I’ve spent most of my career in “teaching museums”— from the University of California at Berkeley to the University of Michigan and now Princeton—each committed to education on multiple and complex levels. This is no accident: what we can do in museums that are part of great research universities is to my mind unrivaled. As Holland Cotter of the New York Times once wrote, the university museum gives us life—“organic, intimate and as fresh as news.” Perhaps it’s time to reclaim, and celebrate, the joyful life of the teaching museum. 

James Christen Steward
Director