Description
The Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA), in Jackson, Mississippi, began as a state art association in 1911 and has operated as a professional museum since 1978. In the past ten years, it has produced exhibitions and programs that explore seminal events of the American Civil Rights Movement through the lens of visual artists. Tougaloo College, a historically black college founded in 1869, served as the epicenter and intellectual battleground for the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the 1960s, when it also began collecting American art.
The Museum and the College now seek to serve their missions and communities more effectively through a proposed Art and Civil Rights Initiative, a multi-layered project including joint and complementary efforts in the areas of collections research and development, exhibitions, lectures, public programs, and museum training. The initiative will be strategically timed to coincide with the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the nation’s first state-funded museum devoted to the subject.
Based on the success of its exhibition programming in response to the 50 th anniversary of landmark events in the Civil Rights Movement, the MMA has determined that its strategic goal of relevance to its community is best achieved through a continuation of Civil Rights-centered projects in the visual arts. To that end, MMA’s director, Betsy Bradley, and Tougaloo College Professor Jonnie Mae Maberry have devised a program to advance scholarship on their relevant collections, produce exhibitions and public programs at both institutions, and jointly offer museum training.
Central to this effort is a curatorial and teaching appointment shared equally between the MMA and Tougaloo, which are both severely understaffed. This project leader will focus on the exploration and documentation of the two collections, the development of four small exhibitions (two at each venue) with the aim of exploring artistic perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement, and the training of Tougaloo student interns in art history and museum practice. An alternation of venues will allow the MMA and Tougaloo to share new audiences. A lecture series connected to each exhibition will bring nationally-known scholars in the field to Jackson, and will extend the reach of the exhibitions to a wider regional community, including four other nearby colleges.
Another key aspect of the project will be the full documentation of the Tougaloo College art collection. Initiated by the German émigré art historian Ronald Schnell after his arrival at Tougaloo in 1959, the collection grew in response to his call to American artists for donations of their work. With the rising awareness of the struggle for social justice in Mississippi, the New York Art Committee for Tougaloo College was formed in 1963 under the leadership of the critic Dore Ashton, spurring the collection’s growth. Tougaloo has recently built a permanent home for the collection, including storage and exhibition spaces, but the holdings have yet to be fully documented or published. The project curator, assisted by MMA staff and the project interns, will fully catalogue and digitize the collection of 2,200 objects. The information will be transferred to a collections-management database, making it accessible for the first time to the college and museum communities and to a broad public audience whose awareness of the collection will have been stimulated by the exhibition series.
Each year of the project, four interns will rotate between the two institutions, joining the project curator and the greater museum staff at MMA on all aspects of work with collections, exhibitions, museum education, and public programming. In addition to training in the handling and documentation of art objects, exhibition design and installation, and public speaking in the galleries, they will be introduced to the varied professions throughout the museum in regular meetings with MMA professionals.
Funding from the Luce Foundation would support the project curator, four exhibitions, lecture series, intern program, and the collection documentation project. Components of the MMA/Tougaloo Art and Civil Rights Initiative that are beyond the scope of this grant include: touring the project exhibitions to venues throughout Mississippi; the formation of a national advisory board to support ongoing efforts at both institutions; a biennial symposium; and funding for a permanent MMA/Tougaloo partnership for joint exhibitions, programs and acquisitions.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a two-year grant of $395,000 to the Mississippi Museum of Art for the Art and Civil Rights Initiative, a partnership with Tougaloo College.
Approved by the Board: March 7, 2017