Greetings everyone, from the University Museum and Faulkner’s Rowan Oak! As you all may doubtless recall we are fully open 12 months a year at both sites, and in these pages you’ll see the wide variety of our Summer programs and exhibitions — to which we warmly welcome you along with friends, associates, and visiting family of any age.
Two developments of very recent weeks deserve particular mention, first and foremost the now filled professional staff roster with the arrival to their positions of Curator of Education Rosa Salas and Museum Preparator Ricky Way. Both Rosa and Ricky, deriving from their own specialized fields, backgrounds, and bodies of professional experience, have added new depth of talent and skill to an already supremely gifted staff team. Upon occasion of your next visit I welcome you to greet them if they cross your path, or find me and I’ll be most pleased to introduce you. With all of our roles now filled with such widely-skilled colleagues, you can entirely count on the Museum and Rowan Oak to sustain our diverse programming and our quality of visitor experience.
Second of note is the honor award received by the Museum on June 9th in Raymond, Mississippi at the conference and annual meeting of the Mississippi Heritage Trust — its 2022 Heritage Award for Stewardship, on behalf of over twenty years of support and oversight of William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak. We are of course deeply humbled to have this recognition by the state’s leading historic preservation advocacy organization, and we’ve received calls from Chancellor Glenn Boyce and Provost Noel Wilkin in recent days extending their congratulations.
As I noted from the podium in accepting this honor, all credit is due to the Curator of Rowan Oak, Bill Griffith, who has served as the site’s daily manager and interpreter for the entirety of the period of the house having been assigned to the Museum by the University, since the late 1990s. Bill is the public face of Rowan Oak, and his leadership is highly notable for its vision, strategic thinking, story-telling skills, and warmth of spirit to diverse visitors from all states and several foreign countries annually.
As I’ve said often, Bill is among a small handful of historic house museum curators nationally who combine the requisite skillsets of raconteur, preservation steward, University ambassador, scholar of the site, and research specialist on the Faulkner era. Many of you may have experienced Bill in action as an interpreter of the house to the visiting public, where a very rare skill is manifested daily: the capacity to observe multiple visitors at one time and pivot instantly to each visitor’s particular area of interest, or expressed question. That each visitor question is answered comprehensively but also with exuberance and derived from a very evident encyclopedic knowledge base, creates a degree of visitor satisfaction in their Rowan Oak experience that in the museum field is priceless.
All that one needs to do is watch as visitors depart the house along the brick pathway or toward the landscape and outbuildings left and right: invariably smiling, and so often commenting on the delight or surprise of their encounter. Now that Assistant Curator Rachel Hudson has joined daily in the public’s experience of the house, we have two skilled staff partnering to augment information and learning outcomes, and the special historic site experience that constitutes a tour of a well-managed and professionally run historic house museum.
Enjoy the warm days ahead, and if they verge too notably toward hot come join us in Oxford’s only air-conditioned, art-filled and antiquities-exhibiting indoor experience … the coolest place in town!
Robert Saarnio
Museum Director
Hear Our Latest News First!