Museums Must Reach Into Communities

February 05, 2016 Art | University of Maryland Art Gallery | The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center | College of Arts and Humanities | David C. Driskell Center for the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora | School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun discusses the importance of the UMD-Phillips Collection partnership and the NEH-funded "Baltimore Stories" project.

Written by Dorothy Kosinski, The Baltimore Sun

Photo courtesy of iStock

Museums and cultural institutions have long acted as a sort of glue, binding disparate individuals together through a shared interest in art, culture and the humanities. According to the American Alliance of Museums, there are nearly 850 million visits annually to American museums — more than attendance for all major league sporting events and theme parks combined.

This week, when the College Art Association opens its annual conference in Washington, nearly 4,000 artists, art historians, educators, museum directors and curators will descend on the nation's capital for in-depth discussion of issues in the arts today. Some of those conversations will be about how the landscape is changing: Simply bringing visitors through a museum's doors is no longer enough; museums must reach outward and stretch programming into new spaces to better serve their communities.

Along these lines, this month, the Phillips Collection entered its 95th year on the heels of announcing two very important community partnerships: one with the University of Maryland in College Park, and the other with Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus (THEARC) in Southeast Washington.

The partnership with the University of Maryland is transformative, aligning one of the nation's preeminent public research universities with America's first museum of modern art. (Our permanent collection includes works from Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.) It immediately creates a new arts curriculum for UMD students, joint publication of a book prize, collaborative music programming, graduate fellowships in a variety of disciplines and community outreach opportunities, both in Washington, D.C., through public programs off-site and at the Phillips and in College Park through our work with Prince George's County Public Schools. We will also explore new conversations between art and science through a new postdoctoral fellowship in Virtual Culture, which will research emerging forms of virtual culture and the advancement of technology to enhance the museum visitor's experience.