This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
At a time when higher education leaders are facing relentless criticism over their handling of free speech and political protests, 10 university museums have planned nonpartisan shows focused on democracy, with the goal of getting students more engaged.
Exhibitions involving racial justice, the climate crisis and other timely issues are nothing new, but a collaboration like this is unusual.
The universities, all large and public, began discussing how to join forces several years ago, said Christina Olsen, director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor and one of the drivers of the alliance.
The effort was in reaction to a variety of factors, including the country’s increasing polarization, low student voter turnout and, in Michigan, the attempted kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 by men who officials said belonged to an anti-government militia.
“All that was background to an urgency, in my mind, to help students literally vote, but also to take the temperature down on the vitriol and provide places and ways for people to think and talk across profound differences,” Olsen said.
Access to all of the participating museums, all on college campuses, is free. The organizers are hoping that the open nature of the institutions will encourage students to see them as they do libraries or other community spaces: available for their use and usefulness.
“Museums are vital places where that engagement can take place,” Olsen said. “And art has the extraordinary ability to explore differences and disagree in ways that are sustainable and civil.”
Museums at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, U.C.L.A. and University of Wisconsin-Madison, all part of the coalition, are involved in voter registeration or will serve as polling places for the 2024 presidential election. The University of Michigan installed its polling place in collaboration with the Creative Campus Voting Project in the university’s Stamps School of Art & Design.
The goal of the museum voting gallery, which will open Sept. 24, is to make a space for voting that is aesthetically pleasing and relaxing, Olsen said. Often when people vote for the first time, she said, they can feel confused or anxious and possibly leave without voting.
“They don’t know if they can use their phone, they don’t know if they vote if from out of state,” she said. “People are rushed, they get in the wrong line.
“We’ve thought very carefully about how you make a space that welcomes people,” she continued, noting that the museum’s design offers clear and understandable signage and plenty of people to assist those who need help.
“We’re setting people off on their voting careers and we want that first early experience to be good,” Olsen said, adding that the museum’s voting site was the most used in its county, Washtenaw, for early voting for the 2024 Michigan primary.
At the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an exhibition, “(In)credible: Exploring Trust and Misperceptions,” running until July 6, demonstrates how people need to look beneath the surface when presented with information.
The show uses well-known artworks to investigate what’s behind the obvious. For example, a painting by Norman Rockwell, “The County Agricultural Agent,” appears to be an idyllic scene painted on the spot. On a closer look, it is a composition made from photographs, which Rockwell altered. One tipoff is that the figures in the paintings don’t cast shadows.
“We see one thing, then when we look again and more deeply, we find things are perhaps not as we perceived them to be initially,” said Ann Gradwohl, communication manager for the museum.
The main exhibition for the year at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon in Eugene focuses on political violence throughout Latin America. “Necroarchivos de las Americas: An Unrelenting Search for Justice,” running June 15 to Dec. 8, the show “offers a cautionary warning about what could happen when the rule of law breaks down,” said John Weber, the museum’s executive director.
A centerpiece of the exhibition is “Plegaria Muda (Silent Prayer),” an installation by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. It shows pairs of tables, which look somewhat coffin-like and symbolize burials, incorporated with mud, seeds and grass. Because of its fragility, it will be shown only from Aug. 31 to Dec. 8.
“It’s a very quiet piece created in response to her research on gang violence in Los Angeles and economically deprived parts of the city, as well as to a series of murders by the Colombian Army of some 2,500 youth from rural areas,” Weber said.
While some of the art is indirect, some is very pointed, such as “Leftovers” by Luis Camnitzer, a German-born artist: 80 cardboard boxes wrapped in surgical bandages, leaking fake blood and inscribed with Roman numerals and the word “leftover,” a reflection on political repression and torture in Latin America, particularly in his adopted country, Uruguay.
“It’s a challenging show because the subject matter is not easy,” Weber said. “How do you talk about things too horrible to talk about? But if you don’t talk about it, it will keep happening.”
The point is for visitors — especially students — to discuss and relate the exhibition to what is happening in the United States right now and to understand “that the question of memory in this country and what actually happened is really important,” he added.
Other museums participating include Michigan State University’s Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Pennsylvania State University’s Palmer Museum of Art, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Krannert Art Museum and the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art.