Greetings everyone, from your University of Mississippi Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak.
It gives me great pleasure each month to share news and updates with you from our pair of museum sites, the University of Mississippi Museum and Rowan Oak. Each property has such unique characteristics, content, and community contributions to offer. The Museum celebrates 82 years of existence this month, having opened its door in the summer of 1939. Rowan Oak came to the University by purchase acquisition from the Faulkner descendants a decade after the novelist’s passing, in 1972.
We remain entirely committed to decades of further service to campus and community, and as museums deeply committed to diversity, access, and inclusion for all. In 2013 we dropped all admission fees at the Museum so as to have no barriers of income for any community resident who may wish to visit. Rowan Oak’s nominal house-tour admission fee is among the lowest in the nation, and particularly so for a historic house museum of its stature and reputation. This admission fee for the interiors house tour is made necessary by the high costs of stewardship of not only the main house but also four outbuildings, multiple acres of grounds and landscape, and a federally-designated National Recreation Trail, the Bailey Woods Trail.
We’ve observed often in these pages how exceptionally grateful we have been for the many of you who have sustained your Memberships over the past 18 months, in such trying and uncertain times. When we adopted the Free Admission policy eight years ago we knew we were correspondingly placing a higher degree of importance and reliance upon Memberships as a source of contributed support and revenue. Please share word with any friends, family, or acquaintances of our Museum membership program.
More information about our tiers and membership levels with their corresponding benefits can be found here. You can also directly contact our Membership Coordinator Andrea Drummond at 662-915-7028 / aldrummo@olemiss.edu. I am also of course equally available to answer any questions you may ever have regarding becoming a Museum member. It is no exaggeration to observe that our members not only sustain us, they inspire us.
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Also on my mind as I write this month are our new hires, the new professional staff who have joined us over the past four months following a series of search and hire processes. It is not that many years ago that this was a museum of five total staff plus students and interns; we now have eight staff at the Museum and two full-time at Rowan Oak — making for a brilliant team of talented, highly skilled, and dedicated museum professionals.
I want to mention each of our new team members one additional time, as I have separately over the course of recent issues of 5th & University. First on board was the new Assistant Curator at Rowan Oak, Rachel Hudson who started in early May, working daily alongside Curator William Griffith. Next to join the team has been our Membership, Events, and Communications Coordinator, Andrea Drummond, whose onboarding started July 9. And next to welcome is our incoming Assistant Manager of Exhibitions and Collections, Grace Moorman. In Grace’s case she has been serving daily as a Museum recent graduate intern with the title of Collections Project Assistant since August, 2020, and now joining us this month with her new role and title, working full-time in support of the Museum’s Curator of Exhibitions and Collections Manager, Melanie Antonelli.
I have a purpose in mentioning Rachel, Andrea, and Grace to you once again, and that is to highly encourage you to introduce yourself to each of them as you participate at the Museum and visit Rowan Oak this Fall and during the coming academic year. While strong museums consist of an aggregation of assets, from permanent collections to Exhibitions and our physical facilities, it is our people that really make things sing. Every staff member of the Museum and Rowan Oak is here to serve you, to answer your questions, and to make your visits and participation with us as meaningful and enriching as they can possibly be.
We will warmly welcome every opportunity to see you again following our complete re-opening at both sites on August 17, and for those of you newly becoming part of our community, to meet you in person for what we hope will be the first of many rewarding experiences that you’ll have at both of our distinctive and acclaimed museums.
Onward to a rewarding Fall, 2021 in our beautiful Oxford community, and to a wonderful academic year at our distinguished University of Mississippi! Please feel entirely free to reach out at any time, I’m always available to members, stakeholders, and those exploring a relationship with our two museums, of any nature.
With sincere regards,
Robert Saarnio
Museum Director
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