Last month, Peter Weiss, chair of the RISD Museum's Board of Governors, visited a Student Alliance meeting to discuss the relationship between the Museum and the college's undergraduates, a relationship that has sometimes been strained due to a lack of communication and lingering questions about the Museum's funding and its place in RISD's academic mission.
Weiss told the Alliance that the Museum, which will expand as part of the Chace Center construction project, would try to better publicize its events to the student body and provide student artists with limited gallery space, including the opportunity to sell their work to Museum visitors.
Following Weiss's meeting with the Student Alliance, Interim Museum Director Lora Urbanelli and RISD External Relations Director Ann Hudner spoke at length with The Herald about how major changes now being implemented at the Museum will affect RISD students. After a year of work, the RISD Museum Task Force, a special committee formed by the college's Board of Trustees, is concluding its work. The creation of the task force coincided with the departure of Philip Johnson, the former Museum director.
The task force's work has resulted in an overhaul of the Museum's governance, a redrafting of its mission statement and an investigation into its finances. The task force has also announced a search for a permanent Museum director, for which it has hired an outside executive search firm. Urbanelli is a candidate for the job.
The RISD Board of Trustees had never before undertaken a comprehensive review of the Museum's role within the school, Urbanelli told The Herald, adding that RISD's founders had envisioned the Museum as a sister institution to the college, but that RISD and its museum had not always grown at the same rate.
"There were territorial issues, to be honest, about who does what, where do we get our money, things like that," Urbanelli said.
The task force began its work by creating a new mission and "vision" statement for the Museum that defined the institution as belonging to an internationally recognized art and design school, but having an independent identity as an innovative leader in its field.
"We always used to say we had this dual mission," as a department of the college and a public museum, Urbanelli said, "but we now really see it as an integrated mission."
To facilitate this mission, the task force created a new internal governance structure for the Museum. Under the old structure, the Museum was governed by a subcommittee of the college's Board of Trustees. Under the new system, a Museum Board of Governors will be created. One-third of the members of this body must be members of the Board of Trustees, as must the chair of the Board of Governors, which will guarantee that the Museum "will always have a voice when it comes to the executive business of the institution," Hudner said.
According to Hudner, RISD will soon release a list of the incoming members of the Board of Governors, although it will take as long as three years to fully seat the board. The board will consist of local business leaders with an interest in the arts, outside artists and collectors, members of the RISD community and professionals in the art world, including James Wood, former director of the highly regarded Art Institute of Chicago. Initially, RISD is focusing on recruiting board members with business ties who can help the Museum in its push to raise its visibility and attract outside funding, Urbanelli said.
The Museum's funding has long been a contentious issue on campus. Last month, Student Alliance President Suzannah Park RISD '05 told The Herald that undergraduates did not get enough bang for their buck from the Museum, whose budget is partly drawn from students' tuitions.
Urbanelli said "myths" about the Museum's funding had been "exploded" by the task force, which determined that approximately four cents of every tuition dollar are currently funneled directly to the Museum. With a $4.8 million operating budget, the Museum also relies on outside contributions from donors both affiliated and unaffiliated with the college and shares in the revenue from RISD's overall endowment.
"The library doesn't have to raise money to open its doors, but we do," Urbanelli said. "Why is it a problem for your tuition to help support this system that you hopefully take advantage of?"
And in response to student complaints that the Museum makes it hard for undergraduates to take advantage of its resources, Urbanelli cited the ongoing work of the Museum Student Advisory Group, which helped coordinate a Museum open house in September during RISD's first-year orientation.
The Museum is also searching for a student graphic designer to fill a work-study job designing publicity for the Museum events directed at the student population, Hudner said.
But the Chace Center will be the "purest manifestation" of the relationship between the Museum and RISD students, Urbanelli said. The new building will house a student gallery on the second floor and part of the Museum's collection on its third floor.
