Greetings everyone, from your University Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak! As Summer transitions to Fall and the University’s academic year has commenced, my thoughts are turning to the many University students whose volunteer work, internships, and employment with us make such a huge difference in our impacts on behalf of the campus and the community. You all know the expression ‘We couldn’t do it without you’, and in the case of the Museum and Rowan Oak this applies entirely when it comes to the University students who play such notably meaningful roles in multiple aspects of our functioning.

Students of the University come to us from a variety of origin points and pathways, and are variably employed as student workers receiving hourly wages; as Graduate Assistants receiving tuition stipends; as employed recent graduates standing on the cusp of their careers or their graduate educations; and as interns receiving course credit for projects supervised by the professional staff. There are two common elements in this matrix: the mentoring and learning experiences we are so happy to provide, and the sheer depth of our appreciation for their service to our initiatives and programming.

Each Academic Year the Museum hosts three Graduate Assistants, two from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture (‘Southern Studies’) and one from the School of Education. These assistantships are funded by a tripartite cost-share between the Museum, the Office of the Provost, and the host School/Center. In the current academic year, multi-year student worker and also Recent Grad Intern Greta Koshenina holds the Southern Studies GA position at the Museum, working under the supervision of Curator of Exhibitions and Collections Manager Melanie Antonelli. Serving as this year’s Graduate Assistant from the School of Education is Kassidy Franz, who previously served as an undergraduate worker in our Education programs. Kassidy is now a 1st year grad student being supervised by our Curator of Education, Rosa Salas. Both Greta and Kassidy have twenty-hour weekly assistantships, so their time on-site is the equivalent of a half-time position which permits a substantial range of project assignments and impactful outcomes of their dedicated work.

Working at Rowan Oak for the 2022-23 academic year is Southern Studies Grad Assistant Kallye Smith. Kallye works alongside Rowan Oak Curator Bill Griffith and Assistant Curator Rachel Hudson, and has a mix of visitor services (public tours), and Special Projects roles and functions. Adding to the student worker mix at Rowan Oak this Fall semester are two undergrads, Abby Dempsey and Lucas Thomas, both of who are undergraduate seniors.

Back to the Museum, we celebrate the service of additional student interns and part-time workers. Prominent among them is Reagan Stone who has just begun her part-time role as Assistant to Andrea Drummond, our Membership, Events, and Communications Coordinator. Reagan Is a 2022 graduate of the University with a major in Integrated Communications & Marketing, and dual Minors in Business and Museum Studies. Working with our Curator of Exhibitions and Collections Manager (Melanie) as a Museum Studies intern is undergraduate Sydni Davis, who also has an internship with the Black Students Union (BSU). Sydni got her start at the Museum as a Visitor Services student worker at the Admissions Desk, where student employees are supervised by the Museum’s Fiscal and Administrative Manager Michelle Perry.

Also employed in the Visitor Services admissions role is undergraduate Sara Emma Kahne who returns to us this fall to continue her Academic Year 2021–22 work in that role. The newest of our Student interns is Museum Studies undergraduate Samantha Case, whose project assignments and mentoring will be with our Curator of Education (Rosa). In a future issue of 5th & University I’ll provide updates on additional student workers who are about to be identified, commencing their work in the early semester at the Admissions Desk as assigned by Michelle, or with the Education programs under Rosa’s supervision.

My purpose in celebrating and presenting our many student workers is to help all of you as members and stakeholders to have the most complete understanding possible of how we are such a notably productive Museum and literary heritage site with a University professional staff of eight at the Museum and two at Rowan Oak. The answer is the myriad ways in which our students augment our team and strengthen our personnel needs across so many dimensions of our functioning.

And perhaps best of all, in the process we impact their lives by enriching their learning experiences, and very often also by inspiring graduate school or early-career directions in the arts, culture, and heritage fields.

Please come join us this Fall for a wide range of great exhibitions and programs, and help us by encouraging friends, family, and associates to opt in to our e-news for all of our latest developments and calendar hold-the-dates. Many thanks!

 

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director

 
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

 
Sincere greetings everyone, as I extend all best wishes for a wonderful start to summer for each of you! While the University campus has transitioned fully into the new season with Commencement now three weeks in the rear-view mirror, in almost all respects the Museum and Rowan Oak move annually in a steady state forward — being twelve-month full-time operations with no summer breaks.

We sustain our exhibitions, programming, and open-to-the-public hours as fully in the summer months as during the height of the academic year, so please share the word with your visiting friends and family that the Museum and our Faulkner historic site are fully available throughout each summer month. Possibly the single greatest harbinger of what we anticipate to be a high-visitation summer at both sites is the fact that April had such exceptionally high visitor and participant numbers here at the Museum, with over 1,100 people either touring the galleries, attending a public program, or participating in one of four high-attendance Facility Rental events that occurred that month. If we needed a barometer as a metric of the public returning to its museums and cultural heritage sites, the month of April served as such for us. If you were among the April attendees, thank you so very much for the great morale boost that your participation provided to the professional staff and I!

Another source of lifted spirits is the fact that we have successfully passed through the waves of staffing and labor force challenge that the U.S. museum field faced on a parallel track with the rest of the national economy — workers relocating, shifting employers, dropping out of the labor pool, and in many cases proving elusive to recruit and retain. Our staff team is now entirely filled in every position, with seven full-time staff at the Museum daily, and two full-time positions at Rowan Oak. As you have heard me describe in prior newsletters, these nine full-time University of Mississippi staff positions are augmented daily by Graduate Assistants, grad student employees, and undergrad workers, interns, and volunteers.

Our field is not alone in being made possible by our people, and as I enter the Museum each morning I reflect on the incontrovertible fact that the current professional staff of both the Museum and Rowan Oak are without doubt the most talented, diversely skilled, and professionally accomplished in our entire history. Any of you who manage and supervise people in your professional, volunteer, or board-service lives will know immediately what I refer to when I observe the sheer depth of meaningfulness in having a team so dedicated in their professionalism. With the right people in place, an organization’s mission, vision, and values shine forth while its impacts multiply, and its community of stakeholders and audiences are the great beneficiaries.

We greatly hope to see you at our sites or on our Bailey Woods Trail this summer, and when you visit take a moment to greet a staff member and introduce yourself if you are meeting for the first time. Small and mid-sized museums have such a distinct advantage in the myriad possibilities for personal connection with visitors. Tell us what has intrigued you or compelled your visit, ask any question you may have, and by all means share any ideas on your mind for what might make the University of Mississippi Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak even better and more valuable for you and your family.

We pride ourselves on being in an open, daily dialog with our visitors, and no observation you share will be other than entirely welcome and taken very much to heart. As you know, please feel free also to call me at 662-915-7202 or contact me at rsaarnio@olemiss.edu. Hearing your thoughts helps me help the team to meet your needs — and on our best days, to inspire and to enrich your lives.

As my Swedish ancestors would express it, ‘glad sommar’……happy summer, everyone!

 

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director

 
Warmest of greetings from your University of Mississippi Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak! — both museum sites are open daily and eagerly welcome your visits, and those of any friends, family, or associates you may wish to accompany or send our way. The Museum is open 10:00 a.m.– 4:00 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and Rowan Oak those hours also, with the addition of Sundays 1:00 – 4:00 p.m.

I have a degree of truncated writing opportunity this month as I share news of some emergent high-priority activity that is claiming my attention. Over the next six weeks we have two professional staff-position openings to fill, via the University’s framework for Posting/Search/Hire processes now underway.

The first up of these is for the Curator of Education position very recently vacated by our colleague Stacy Bell who has relocated with her husband and newborn son to Bethesda, Maryland to be closer to many family members. We deeply celebrate Stacy’s work with us, which was so notable for its high degree of performance, dedication to duty, warmth of spirit, and consistent professionalism. Stacy, we are missing you greatly, already – thank you so much for your service to the Museum!

The second position will post on or around the first week of March and holds the unique museum-field title of Preparator. This role in museums nationwide fulfills many essential duties which include light construction, fabrication, and build-outs of everything from exhibit casework to infrastructure needs in any part of the museum building, and also similarly for Rowan Oak. The site of most of this construction is a back-of-house carpentry workshop fully equipped with a wide range of power equipment and tools, many of them funded by the gracious support of the Friends of the Museum board. Our former colleague Travis Turner departed the Preparator position during the height of the pandemic to return home to his college town and hometown of Meadville, Pennsylvania.

We will keep you fully apprised of the outcomes of the two searches, and we remain highly confident that experienced and accomplished professionals will be attracted to roles at the University of Mississippi Museum, as has historically always been the case

In the interim, warmest of regards to all! For other Museum news and updates please follow this monthly e-newsletter, and watch our website and Rowan Oak’s website — where links to our social media platforms can also be found.

Sincerely,

 

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director

 
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

To purchase a 2021 Keepsake Ornament from The University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses please contact the front desk at 662-915-7073. Each 2021 ornament is $25 and can be shipped within the contiguous United States for $7. Sales tax is required for all sales shipped within Mississippi. 

VAUGHT-HEMINGWAY STADIUM

Construction on the Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, officially known as the Vaught-Hemingway Stadium at Hollingsworth Field, began in 1912 and was finished in 1915. Over the past 100 years, the stadium has had many remodels and can now seat an amazing 64,038 people. It is also the largest stadium in the state of Mississippi. The stadium is named for three influential University of Mississippi men. It was named for Judge William Hemingway, law professor and chairman of the committee on athletics, when the stadium first opened. In 1982, the legendary football coach Johnny Vaught’s name was added, and in 1998, the field within the stadium was named for longtime supporter of the university, Dr. Jerry Hollingsworth. In every season since the inaugural, the stadium has seen magnificent wins and emotional moments where player s, coaches, and fans gather together in celebration of Ole Miss athletics. Most recently , the university came together to retire the great Eli Manning’s number 10. Manning became the third player to have his number immortalized in the stadium, and it hangs alongside Chucky Mullins’ number 38 and Archie Manning’s Number 18.

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!

 
Greetings all, from your University Museum and William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak — where Fall has notably become the annual season of our remarkable Harvest Supper fundraiser evening gala. All tribute and credit to our beyond hard-working Friends of the Museum Board who organize for months around this evening, and to the Museum staff also who support this event annually. Harvest Supper 2021 was an exceptional joy, and a great success — if you were present, thank you so very much! If not possible for you this year, we’ll keep you fully apprised for October, 2022.

This month I’d like to take a moment to speak of the great meaningfulness to the University Museum and Rowan Oak of our student workers, and the multiple positive impacts they have on us and our audiences. It is unequivocally the case that we could not be the productive and dually campus/community-serving resources that we are, without them. Our students truly transform us in many ways, and much of this is of course not readily apparent on the ‘surface’ for visitors, friends, and members.

Students working at the Museum come in the door by many pathways. Some are interns learning skills under our professional staff mentoring, and many such are now appearing due to the University’s launch of its first-ever Museum Studies Minor in the past academic year. Interns are of course receiving academic credits, while some student workers are paid and earning hourly wages such as those in Visitor Service roles at our front desk — you may have noticed these hospitable undergrads sitting behind our Admission Desk on a daily basis.

For many years now we have had ‘traditions’ of Classics students undertaking project-based internships with the Greek & Roman Antiquities collections under Curator and Collections Managers’ supervision, and analogously School of Education undergrads have assumed roles with our Curator of Education for program support such as the after-school Art Zones and the summer Art Camps (plus many others). Relatedness to a student’s own academic and research interests is of course a best case mentoring and skills-building scenario, and another example of such is the Integrated Marketing & Communications (IMC) department sending an intern to work under the guidance of our Communications Coordinator.

Rowan Oak has commonly benefitted from a Graduate Student Assistantship that is co-funded by Southern Studies, Rowan Oak, and the Office of the Provost — often being assigned project-specific initiatives at the house by the Curator and Assistant Curator. The second of our Graduate Student Assistantships is analogously a funding partnership between the School of Education, Museum, and Provost, providing significant 20-hour per week experiences with our Curator of Education. It may go without saying that the annual funding support buy-in of the Provost, the Director of Southern Studies, and the Dean of the School of Education tells us all we may need to know about the academic teaching value of these staff-guided and overseen training experiences.

A closing thought about student employment and student internship outcomes. With a full-time professional staff of 8 at the Museum and 2 at Rowan Oak, the existence of student support labor and project support in such high annual volume permits our productivity to soar. As noted above and quite literally, we would not be the Museum and the national literary heritage site that we are without these talented and dedicated student adjuncts. For staff and I one of the very best experiences of all is when we are asked to provide Letters of Reference for graduate school applications, or employment opportunities in front of our students. We have quite the large number of very successful student ‘alumni’ as it were, off working in arts, culture, or heritage positions or acquiring graduate degree training in fields as diverse as business and law.

Like all museums nationally where daily work takes very publicly visible forms, an equal volume of what we do is the far less apparent. Being a collections-based museum at a Carnegie R1-rated research university, it is not a surprise that we embrace these mentoring and student-supervision roles. The celebration of this here is one of bringing forward for your attention the pride that we have in changing student lives, and opening windows of grad school choice or careers options that likely did not exist before our students came to Oxford to attend this great university.

With sincere regards,

 

Robert Saarnio 
Museum Director