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

 
Greetings everyone, from your University Museum! Summer 2023 is filled with Museum happenings and I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight four Program dates upcoming which you will also see referenced elsewhere in this newsletter issue.

Last Summer, 2022 we undertook a return to the popular tradition of Brown Bag Lunches, 12:00 – 1:00 hour special-topic talks by distinguished speakers in their areas of expertise. We adopted the approach of using Museum professional staff expertise and also that of Oxford-based Fine Arts Appraiser Laurie Triplette, and we were excited and gratified by community and stakeholder response and attendance.

This year’s Brown Bag Lunch Series commences June 13 and with following dates of July 11 and August 8, at 12 Noon in the Museum’s front gallery known as the Speakers Gallery. Lunch options will be available in the lobby or brown bag your own lunch. June’s speaker is architect Tom Howorth, Principal of Howorth & Associates Architects of Oxford. July’s speaker will be Andy Reynolds Landscape Architect of A2H, Engineers, Architects, and Planners based in Memphis and Oxford. And in August we’ll hear from University colleague Denny Buchannon, Project Manager of the university’s Facilities Planning office, speaking on the subject of hardscapes such as concrete, and how they contribute to landscaping.

We greatly hope that you will feel welcome for these monthly Tuesday noon walk-in programs this summer, to appreciate their theme of celebrating and learning from local experts sharing their range of experience in architecture, landscape architecture, and hardscapes. Our goal is to be a resource to our community to advance learning across a wide spectrum of subjects beyond our exhibitions and collections. Questions for our speakers are very welcome and will make the sessions a true dialog, so feel free to join in the conversation!

Additionally this Summer is the outdoor concert series known as the Summer Sunset Series, held on the Grove at 6PM on each of the four Sundays of June (6/4, 6/11, 6/18, and 6/25). Chairs and picnics are welcome at this family-friendly annual music series, which is free and open to the public. The Museum is proud to have been an original founding underwriter of the Series, and since its first year we have sponsored one of the presenting bands – this year on Sunday June 18 we present the Perry Family, featuring Bill and Shy Perry.

To keep fully apprised of all that we offer, our full range of ongoing Exhibitions, Programs, and Education offerings, follow us on our social media platforms, at our website, and at our monthly e-newsletter where friends, family, and associates are all welcome to subscribe for the latest word on all things University Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak.

With sincere regards,

 

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director

The University Museum and Rowan Oak will be closed Friday, April 7th, 2023-Monday, April 10th, 2023 for the holiday weekend. We will resume our normal hours on Tuesday.

Museum Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10am-4pm

 
Greetings and happiest of New Year’s, everyone! The professional staff and I have returned from the holiday break to re-open the Museum and Rowan Oak on January 2, which precedes the University’s Spring semester January start. Please feel free to visit any day Tuesday–Friday 10:00AM to 4:00PM—at the Museum itself we’ll re-establish our Saturday hours by Spring, as we await the return of fully-staffed status which has experienced a temporary hiatus. For broadest awareness of our exhibitions, programs, and events you are in the right place, the monthly 5th & University newsletter which compiles all that we are offering across all departments in the month ahead. For additional information and deeper background the website URLs as you may doubtless know are https://museum.olemiss.edu/ and https://rowanoak.com/.

I wanted to take this month’s newsletter opportunity to augment your awareness of some of our behind-the-scenes activity and personnel which may serve to shed further light on our operations—museums being unique environments with a very wide spectrum of functional components, many of which are non-apparent, non ‘front-of-house’, and highly specialized. Among these is the professional staff position known in the museum field as “Preparator”.

This job title is fairly unique to the museum world, and yet its word-formation carries its own degree of explanation: preparing the museum as a facility which installs and exhibits both long-term permanent collection exhibitions, and temporary shows of time-limited duration. In our case the Preparator also serves as the ‘Building Mayor’, a charming term coined by University Facilities Management to describe a staff member designated by all the major University facilities to represent shared awareness of facility-based needs and developments cross-campus.

Since March, 2022 the Museum has been exceptionally fortunate to have brought on board our Preparator, Ricky Way. A Seattle-born native of the Pacific Northwest, Ricky came to us from several years of co-ownership of artisan carpentry business Limber Timber, based in Oxford. Prior to Limber Timber, Ricky served as a propmaker in the film industry while residing here in Oxford with his wife Anna and daughter Julia.

Ricky’s base of operations inside the Museum is a space the public and museum visitors never see, but which is entirely fascinating–a fully-equipped carpentry workshop with a wide range of power and hand tools and an expansive range of work surfaces and supplies storage cabinets and shelving. As many of you may know, watching a highly-skilled carpenter at work is an extraordinarily interesting experience, and never more so than observing Ricky’s work in our-back of house shop.

To annotate all of Ricky’s roles and duties will exceed the parameters of this column, but suffice to say that if we’ve installed it or built it, Ricky has played a major role in not only the implementation and delivery of those projects, but often also the problem solving and fabrication detailing around them.

Organizationally, Ricky is part of the Museum’s Collections and Exhibitions team managed and supervised skillfully by our Curator and Collections Manager Melanie Antonelli. We currently also have a Graduate Assistant from the Southern Studies program (Greta Koshenina) on that team, and an unfilled but soon to be posted position of Assistant Collections & Exhibitions Manager. To note the exceptionally high productivity of this team would be a considerable understatement, since they are not only essential to all that we do but the acclaim we receive for our exhibitions, our collections care and research, and our handsome and well-appointed building and gallery interiors are assuredly a tribute to this museum department.

You will get a feel for this highly-valued Museum team member by a statement he provided at my request, which speaks volumes about why we so appreciate having Ricky as our colleague: “What I enjoy most about working at the museum is I have the opportunity to use my skills for the betterment of the community.” The next time you visit or attend a program feel free to introduce yourself to Ricky or catch me and I’ll ask him to come out from the shop to say hello—you will greatly appreciate meeting our Preparator in person.

As I often quote a mentor of my own career, museums are essentially about People, Place, and Program … in service to community. On the ‘People’ front we are honored to have Ricky with us, benefitting daily from his myriad skills and talents in construction, fabrication, carpentry, and facility care. Thank you, Ricky, for joining us and enriching the collegiality and collaborative spirit of our team.

Warmest regards of the season, everyone!

 

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director

To purchase a 2022 Keepsake from The University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses please visit the UM Museum Store. Hours are Tuesday-Friday 10am-4pm.  Each 2021 ornament is $25 and can be shipped within the contiguous United States for $10. To purchase a keepsake to be mailed, please call the front desk at 662-915-7073. Sales tax is required for all sales shipped within Mississippi. The deadline for shipping orders is December 15th. 

60 YEARS OF INTEGRATiON, 1962-2022

On October 1, 1962, The University of Mississippi was officially integrated with the enrollment of its first African American student Mr. James Meredith. Through his bravery and perseverance, Meredith became an inspirational leader of the American Civil rights Movement. A statue of James Meredith, erected adjacent to The Lyceum in 2006, now commemorates the integration of The University of Mississippi.

Limited Re-Release of the 2021 Keepsake: VAUGHT-HEMINGWAY STADIUM

This UM landmark is named after the late Judge William Hemingway, law professor and longtime chairman of the University Committee on Athletics, and former head coach John Howard Vaught. The stadium is the largest in Mississippi and holds the football game attendance record in the state.

Are you a member of the UM Museum? Members receive a 10% discount on all Museum Store purchases, including keepsakes! Please visit museum.olemiss.edu/join-the-museum for more information!

 
Warmest of greetings everyone, from your University of Mississippi Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak. With summer in the rear view mirror our thoughts turn to Fall, with all of its colorful and exciting manifestations. Among them is my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, and as a result I’m going to embrace the theme of gratitude in this month’s communication.

But where to start – the Museum and Rowan Oak are the beneficiaries of so much goodwill, warmth of spirit, participation, and sustaining support. Let the record show how much each of these mean to the professional staff and I in uplifting our spirits, and keeping us on the high-energy track that every museum and historic house requires to thrive and to serve their diverse audiences and stakeholder communities.

Thank you very fundamentally and throughout each year to our Friends of the Museum Board, eighteen in number and tireless in their dedication to us as our ambassadors and our fundraising champions. Yet again their many months of dedicated, detail-driven planning have resulted in a hugely successful 10th annual Harvest Supper evening gala on October 13th at Rowan Oak, and event that continues to combine friend-raising with fundraising in equally transformative degrees.

Thank you to the utterly exceptional Professional Staff and the student workers, grad assistants, and interns who are my daily companions in this endeavor we know as public service and University mission-aligned programming. I have said this often but it entirely bears repeating, that the thriving status of our Museum and Rowan Oak are due in full to this highly talented and deeply-skilled team who buttress each other with collegiality, collaborative spirits, and professionalism. It is nothing short of an honor to be their colleague.

Thank you to University leadership and our many amazing colleagues across the beautiful campus of this world-class research institution. From Chancellor Dr. Glenn Boyce and Provost Dr. Noel Wilkin, to every Dean, Director, and Department Chair, faculty member, and University staff member, our two museums exist in an ecosystem of support, thoughtfulness, and creative partnerships.

Thank you to the remarkable fundraisers of the University of Mississippi Development team and the UM Foundation staff, who serve so notably under the leadership of Vice Chancellor Charlotte Parks on the Development side, and Wendell Weakley in the Foundation’s Memory House. We extend this month a very heartfelt thanks and salute of recognition to our recent Major Gifts Officer and development colleague Rob Jolly, who has moved across campus to take a new position overseeing all modes of University Contracts and their associated processes. Rob excelled across many dimensions of support and effort on our behalf, working with a wide spectrum of donors and prospects. Thank you, Rob, always and ever!

Also and assuredly, thank you to all of you: Members, attendees, program participants, donors, parents and families, University faculty and students, townsfolk and fellow citizens, City and County leaders. Each of you has inspired us to strive to be our best, and to sustain the traditions of service of this 83-years-in-existence museum, and a literary heritage site owned by the University for five decades now.

And a closing, more than deeply-felt thank you to James Meredith, who sixty years ago brought boundless courage and dignity to the steps of the Lyceum, and to every day of his life as a student and a profoundly admired alumnus. Mr. Meredith, the Museum and Rowan Oak join the entire extended University of Mississippi community in expressing our depth of gratitude to you for the integration of the University and for your life of public service, wisdom, and leadership. You have been a beacon to Mississippi and the nation, and we honor you.

 

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director