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
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