Description

Tougaloo College (TC) seeks to address the preservation, presentation, and accessibility of its remarkable art collections by advancing upgrades to its art gallery and establishing a visible storage and study gallery in the Bennie G. Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center. The goals of the storage and study gallery will be to improve the care of the permanent collection and establish a learning laboratory for collection-based teaching. The newly equipped space will additionally provide new opportunities for training in museum practice. TC’s administration envisions the TC art collections, exhibition gallery, and study gallery as the anchors of its newly-conceived Center for Cultural Heritage at Tougaloo College, an aggregate of all of TC’s cultural assets, including the 1848 Robert O. Wilder historic house.
 
Tougaloo’s unique and compelling collection originated in the 1960s, when the prominent New York critic Doré Ashton began an effort to acquire art for the college through donations from prominent artists and collectors. The collection grew under the avid guidance of the Tougaloo faculty member Ronald Schnell. While the collection has been the focus of recent attention associated with collection-based exhibitions and public programs funded by the Luce Foundation’s grant to the Mississippi Museum of Art for the Art and Civil Rights Initiative partnership with TC, much remains to be done to secure the TC collection for the long term. Some strides have been made: the Luce grant supported the digitization of the 90% of the American art holdings (although there is still no public access to the images); it also supported basic upgrades to the TC gallery, including the additional of new interior walls. A more recent collection assessment funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services has provided TC with recommendations for further storage and gallery upgrades that will be addressed in part by the grant proposed here.
 
The achievement of further gallery and storage upgrades, and the addition of a study-storage classroom adjacent to the current gallery space, will dramatically enhance the TC faculty’s ability to teach with and through the collection. It will facilitate the collection’s accessibility for gallery staff, TC faculty, and the college’s broader community. TC’s ultimate goal is for its art facilities and collections to serve a site for research and experience around the intersection of art history and the Civil Rights Movement.
 
Grant funds would underwrite: art storage furniture, custom-built crates for at-risk, oversized works; new gallery lighting; classroom furniture; and the salary of the part-time director of collections.
 
When originally conceived, this grant was to be proposed as a three-year grant of $320,000. As the American Art Program began to strategize its response to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the museum sector, we sought to capture funds for emergency-
grantmaking by reconsidering some of the planned June grants. This led to the decision to approach support TC in two phases, with the first phase proposed here. The AAP plans to bring a second grant, for $70,000, before the board in 2021, to complete all of the originally projected work.