Archives for January 2022

 
Hello everyone, from the University Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak. Warmest of mid-winter greetings to you all, with gratitude for your support, your sustained memberships, and the walk-in visits that are starting to rise in number. Recall that we are fully open since the holiday break, Tuesday to Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. — and additionally at Rowan Oak on Sundays 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

I’d like to use this month’s letter to share with you a celebration of sorts, an enumeration of all of the local and regional partnerships that we have developed over the years, and which we are so very proud to continue annually. As a newly-launched national museum initiative expresses it, we are of, by, and for all — outward facing and service-to-community focused in all that we do. The organizations I’ll describe here have in most cases consisted of program, event, and community service partners of the University Museum for a considerable period. A separate and subsequent communication will review our campus-based University partners, as I turn a spotlight here on the city, county, and regional collaborations.

Prominently among our partnership cohort is the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, based as you know in the City’s former Powerhouse building. Under the dynamic leadership of its Director Wayne Andrews and his team, the spectrum of Museum / Arts Council shared initiatives is wide-ranging and includes events as diverse as the annual Fiber Art Festival and the monthly Art Crawls. Equally significant are our linkages to Visit Oxford, the city’s tourism bureau which very regularly sends visitors our way and which often hosts travel writers and journalists in tours through both the Museum and Rowan Oak. We’ve been honored to have been a Presenting Sponsor of the Visit Oxford Double Decker Arts Festival on four occasions, including this year’s upcoming April 23–24 event.

We have of course many close relationships with peer museums and historic sites and we’re in regular dialog and partnership-exploration with institutions as geographically dispersed as the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, the Walter Anderson Museum, the Memphis Brooks Museum, the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, and the Metal Museum. We have additional levels of connectivity and involvement with national museums as well, being an Institutional Member of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG), along with Rowan Oak’s status as an original, charter Affiliated Site of the Chicago-based American Writers’ Museum. I’m honored to serve on the national Board of AAMG, the college and university museums’ consortium, and fortunate to participate monthly with both the Southeast Art Museum Directors, and our regional museum association based in Atlanta, the Southeast Museums Conference.

Our acclaimed Education department has sustained many long-term and highly meaningful program partnerships, the sheer length of that list constituting all the evidence you may ever need of our decades-long commitment to youth and families of every demographic: Leap Frog After School Program, Scott Center, Baptist Children’s Health Fair, LOU Reads, Lafayette County Literacy Council, Lafayette County Public Library (First Regional Libraries), Oxford Moms & Tots, Boys & Girls Club of North Mississippi. We have also provided children’s hand-on activities for the Oxford Park Commission and the Oxford Community Market (OXCM), and our Traveling Trunks program has visited countless local and regional schools since its origins in the 1970s.

The Thacker Mountain Radio show has been a long-term partner — we are actively committed to the TMR annual membership party Silent Auction, and on two occasions performances of the show have been broadcast from the grounds of Rowan Oak. Requests for the Director or senior staff to speak publicly include invitations from Rotary Oxford, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, the City of Oxford Historic Properties Commission, and the Cedar Oaks Guild among others. Mission-aligned organizations and groups in Holly Springs, Water Valley, and New Albany are also among our valued collaborators, as is the Jackson based historic preservation-focused Mississippi Heritage Trust.

I’m inspired in reflecting upon these multiple modes of outreach and community alliance that the University Museum has developed, and I want to commend the commitment and dedicated hard work of the Museum’s professional staff to making them the strong and meaningful community service initiatives that they are.

As always, please never hesitate to reach out to me or any of the staff, or to stop by and say hello — we are here to make your visits and your participation with us the best that they can be.

Sincere regards,

 

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director

 
Warmest of January greetings from your University of Mississippi Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, where we look forward to a year ahead of engaging exhibitions, compelling programs, and our traditional multiple modes of service to community and campus. Recent months have seen a return to near-normal visitation numbers since our mid-August re-opening at both sites, and it has been exceptionally gratifying to see our visitors come back to the Museum galleries and the Rowan Oak hallways.

We’d like to encourage all of our Members, friends, and stakeholders to help us in this new year by serving as our ambassadors in recruiting new Members, and new subscribers to this comprehensive monthly overview of all that we are doing, our e-newsletter 5th & University. At the ‘Join’ page of the Museum’s website, all necessary information regarding our Membership tiers and their corresponding benefits can be found, including a printable PDF version of our Membership brochure.

As often occurs late in a calendar year, multiple gifts of support have been received by both the Museum and Rowan Oak from a wide geographic and demographic range of supporters, and if you have been among those either renewing your memberships or sending us contributed support gifts, we thank you! As is the case nationally for so many museums such as ours that have gone to Free Admission — so as to have no income barrier to access, attendance, and participation — we are concurrently that much more reliant on memberships and contributed support.

2022 will constitute year ten of our shift to entirely Free Admission, and this policy remains a source of great pride to the Museum’s professional staff and I. While some children and youth programs, adult workshops, and Rowan Oak admission still have associated fees to sustain their costs, there is no fee at any time to access our galleries, exhibitions, on-site public lectures, or our online (digital, virtual) content.

Museum staff are busily planning the rollout in the coming academic year of a wide range of new exhibitions and youth programs, with each category blending traditional approaches such as mining our extraordinarily wide-ranging Permanent Collection, plus innovations that adopt interpretive and content strategies being explored across the museum field — two examples being an increased number of web-accessible video interviews of artists and scholars, and also high image-resolution digitizing of our collections to permit their web-publishing for worldwide access via our website.

Many of you will have observed the addition of new works of Public Art and outdoor sculpture within the Museum’s University Avenue-facing landscape, and as I write here in the last week of December the final concrete pour of a new curvilinear pathway has just been concluded, that introduces a first-ever connecting of the exteriors of the 1977 building directly to the front patio of the 1939 Mary Buie building. A future phase of the project will add handsome benches and additional lighting to present a true option for experiencing and appreciating — versus just driving past — the Museum’s ‘front yard’.

Please do come by to take a look, as you also enjoy the stunning Jacob Hashimoto exhibition The Other Sun which remains on view until August 20, 2022… or the beautiful renovations to our Museum Shop which has undergone a total transformation of display, furnishings, and inventory. Without question, the Shop has never looked better nor its sale offerings been more frequently updated. Coming full circle, please recall that all Members receive a 10% discount on all items in the Museum Shop.

As always, we extend our warmest regards and gratitude to each of you, and we remain personally available to answer any questions, at any time. If I may ever be of service to you, or simply make myself available in conversation or a galleries’ walkthrough, do not hesitate to reach me at rsaarnio@olemiss.edu or my desk extension of 662-915-7202.

With all best wishes for a wonderful year ahead!

 

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director