Museum Musings

Museum Education Interviews, Reviews, and Spotlights: from the galleries to your inbox.

Elizabeth Downing was the University Museum’s AmeriCorps VISTA Summer Associate this Summer 2023! Elizabeth is a senior Arabic major at the University of Mississippi and has been volunteering in multiple different programs at the Museum since the beginning of this Spring.

Summer 2023 Fantastic Storyteller Campers during their Morning Photo Excursion to the 1939 Mary Buie Museum historic portico entrance.

What was your favorite Museum Summer Memory of 2023?

My favorite memory from this summer at the UM Museum was teaching the first week of summer camp, Fantastic Storytellers. I was so excited to kick off the summer with an awesome camp full of fun art projects and wonderful students. My favorite project from that week was the photo journals the students made. It gave them the chance to learn a little bit about photography and how to tell a story through pictures. 

Share a valuable lesson you learned this Summer as the Museum Education’s VISTA Summer Associate.

This summer gave me the chance to learn about the importance of education through art. There are many ways students can learn about history, culture, and other topics through art. I believe pairing lessons with an art activity solidifies the information in the student’s memory making it a great learning tool.

One way we did this over the summer was through our World Explorers camp. Each day of camp the students learned about a new country or region of the world. After learning about the countries the students would do art projects related to the country of the day. By the end of the week, students were able to locate the countries on a map and name cultural facts about the places they had learned about.  

Tell us about a piece that fascinates you in our collection. 

A piece that fascinates me in the UM Museum’s collection is Georgia O’Keeffe’s Untitled (Abstraction, Lake George). It is exciting to see a piece by an artist that had such a significant impact in the American Modern Art movement displayed in our Museum. 

Why should people visit the UM Museum?

I always encourage people to visit the UM Museum because it is a free and easily accessible place. You can view a wide variety of exhibits in one place: from Southern Folk Art to American Modern Art, and from Greek Antiquities to 19th Century Scientific Instruments, there is something for everyone to enjoy.   

 
Greetings, everyone, and warmest of welcomes to the summer season of Exhibitions and Programs at your University of Mississippi Museum. The warmth of that welcome is not a weather pun, though as I write the forecast indicates up to 102 degrees at week’s end. For this Minnesota-born Scandinavian, that is a bit of a shock to the system, being hard-wired for twenty-degrees below.

I thought that this month I’d undertake just a modicum of museum-world ‘de-mystification’ of sorts, finding that audiences often appreciate an inside view of elements of museum functioning that are not always visible or apparent as one experiences the public-facing side of a museum visit. For this month’s ‘insiders tips’ I have in mind the following: gifts-in-kind, and museum student workers.

 A Gift-in-Kind is defined by the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), as a “non-cash gift made to a nonprofit organization. These contributions can be made in the form of time, services, expertise, and goods, often coming from large businesses but also deriving from individuals.”   Applying this rubric one can perhaps readily then discern that museums receive mission-enhancing in-kind gifts on a very regular basis.

One distinctly visible current example of in-kind gifting is on view daily in the Museum, our major exhibition titled ‘Recent Acquisitions, 2012-Present’. While a limited number of the works in the show were acquired by Museum purchase, the vast majority were gifted to us by exceptionally thoughtful and generous friends, alumni, community members, and stakeholders. Each gifted artwork is classified as a ‘Gift-in-Kind’ by the University of Mississippi Foundation, and formally receipted by the Foundation as such.

With the Permanent Collection thereby in mind, one can immediately see the deep meaningfulness of in-kind gifting to our University Museum, and particularly when one adds to the concept of gifted artworks the category of the gift of volunteer time, services, and expertise. In this regard we can think of those many individuals who support us with their volunteer time and expertise – – most notably of course our Friends of the Museum Board who dedicate themselves through hundreds of hours of annual effort on behalf of our mission and our contributed support needs.

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A separate category of support comes from some often unsung heroes, the University students who work inside the Museum in support of our Education, Collections, Exhibitions, and Visitor Services activities – and additionally at Faulkner’s Rowan Oak. Almost invariably when you visit the Museum you will see direct evidence of students working in a variety of roles, and beginning right at our Admission Desk in the Lobby. But the sheer number of student workers, and their variable points of origin might be quite a surprise when they are enumerated to be as many as thirty+ over the course of any given calendar year.

Their ‘official’ status ranges from unpaid course credit-earning Volunteers, paid Interns, stipended Graduate Assistants, and wage-compensated Museum employees.  Some are with us as a result of curricular or degree-field involvement, others such as our Grad Assistants are farther along their early-career pathways as they derive from Master’s Degree candidacies in Southern Studies and the UM School of Education.

Suffice to say that our Museum and our literary landmark site Rowan Oak would not be the compelling and impactful places that they are without the productivity, dedication, and talents of our student workers…of every category.

Thank you always for your support, attendance and participation at the Museum and Rowan Oak – – we deeply appreciate every one of you, for your involvement and your many gestures of thoughtfulness and care for our well-being and our mission of community-benefit impact.

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director