Skidmore Receives Mellon Grant for Tang Museum

Skidmore College has received a grant of $1.7 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support and enhance interdisciplinary liberal-arts teaching and learning.

The Mellon Foundation grant will expand and consolidate Skidmore’s program of museum-based education, in which exhibitions at the college’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery function as resources for curricular innovation. Funds from the grant will support two new positions, build endowment, and help faculty use the museum in their courses and create exhibitions of their own. The grant funds will also bring visiting speakers and scholars to campus and provide for digital documentation of exhibitions and objects in the permanent collection.

The awarding of the grant represents “an extraordinary endorsement of Skidmore College’s identity as a place where the advancement of learning occurs within a profoundly creative, rigorous context,” said Skidmore President Philip A. Glotzbach. “This grant will help us create new ways to engage students and faculty members through interdisciplinary exhibitions of the highest caliber, and will foster provocative inquiry across all academic disciplines.”

Skidmore will match $1.2 million of the Mellon award at 3:1 over five years, resulting in a $4.8 million endowment that will support and consolidate programs pioneered by the Tang in the emerging area of museum-based teaching. The other $500,000 in grant funds will help pay for current program expenses.

The two new positions made possible by the grant will be associate curator and assistant registrar. To accommodate the increasing demand for Tang programs and services, the associate curator will work with faculty to co-curate their original exhibitions and will also assist with student projects and organize workshops, speaker series, and student internships. The assistant registrar will help faculty use the museum’s permanent collection to create smaller, course-related exhibitions, and to access the Tang’s increasingly sophisticated digital resources.

The Mellon Foundation grant will also provide curatorial stipends, travel and study expenses for faculty co-curators of Tang exhibition projects, and support faculty curriculum development aimed at integrating Tang exhibitions and collections into the classroom. Complementing and sustaining those activities, an ongoing annual faculty seminar and discussion group will help engage both current and new generations of Skidmore faculty in museum-based pedagogical strategies. To date, Skidmore faculty have co-curated six major interdisciplinary exhibitions and many smaller projects; currently, two large faculty-initiated exhibitions are being organized for 2009 and 2010.

Another purpose of the grant funds will be to help create in-depth, multifaceted, digitized audiovisual documentation and commentary on the exhibitions as they appear in the galleries. Interviews with faculty curators and scholars will be coupled with high-resolution 360-degree VR photography of the exhibitions to capture the experience of encountering the objects themselves. An earlier grant from the Mellon Foundation enabled the digitization of objects in the Tang’s collection, soon to be accessible through the college’s ArtStor database.

Conceived as a catalyst for engaged and transformative learning, the Tang Museum opened in 2000. Designed as both a showcase for the finest contemporary art and as a center of ideas, the museum was imagined as a teaching and learning resource to equal the library, the science laboratory, and the art studio. The college’s program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge took shape during the three-year residency of prominent artist and museum critic Fred Wilson, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Wilson helped faculty to build teaching expertise in museum-based pedagogy—teaching that taps the inherent power of objects, artworks, and artifacts, engaging the intellect as well as the eye. Tang exhibitions, which frequently travel and attract national recognition, offer unique opportunities for both learning and visual fascination to a large number of off-campus visitors each year as well as to Skidmore students and faculty.

To date, nearly 25 percent of Skidmore faculty routinely take advantage of the more than 80 exhibitions presented since the museum opened. Faculty members also create and adapt courses using museum exhibitions and integrate exhibitions into their existing courses. In the words of one faculty member, “The special excitement of teaching in the Tang comes from the opportunity to explore works of art in a sustained, focused, collaborative way. The objects we encounter there make cultural preoccupations visible and palpable, challenging us to look more closely, think more deeply, and ask questions about both the past and the present.”