Language Selection

Get healthy now with MedBeds!
Click here to book your session

Protect your whole family with Orgo-Life® Quantum MedBed Energy Technology® devices.

Advertising by Adpathway

The Case for the Campus Art Museum in an Age of Cuts

7 hours ago 3

PROTECT YOURSELF with Orgo-Life® QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY

Orgo-Life the new way to the future

Advertising by Adpathway

Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota

University campuses are about to fill with hopeful new students and cautious new faculty. Arriving more quietly, and usually with less fanfare, are the latest acquisitions of work by university art museums. In 2025, the Hammer Museum, affiliated with UCLA, accessioned 237 new items—including Nam June Paik’s 1990 work Antares and Paul Gauguin’s 1891 Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé. The University of Michigan Museum of Art, meanwhile, acquired mostly recent work, like Rachelle Baker’s Les Fleurs. One state away, the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Museum of Art picked up Grand Portage Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson’s Rolling Head. Back East, the Princeton Museum of Art gathered 333 works into its collection—from 19th-century Korean bottles and Southwest pottery to Nan Goldin prints.

Like more traditional cultural institutions, collecting at each of these museums is guided by the institution’s collection policy—a document highlighting areas of focus along with strategies for maintaining and loaning out objects. As DOGE cuts, D.E.I. rollbacks and new signage at the Smithsonian create rough waters for cultural institutions, collection policies help university museums hold steady. As Megan Barnard, deputy director and chief curator at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center put it, the school’s “policy has been in place for years, and it continues to be the consistent, guiding principle that informs our acquisitions and ensures that our collecting efforts support our institutional priorities and mission over time.”

Whatever instabilities the present political moment might bring to museum operations, university museum curators remain focused on their goals. Olivia Miller, executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, told Observer that, in addition to acquiring work by well-known talents, “curators are continuing to acquire works by traditionally underrepresented artists, emerging contemporary artists and artworks that have obvious interdisciplinary connections.”

Accession is only one half of smart collection management. Deaccessioning, or the removal of works from a museum’s collection by sale or transfer, is of equal importance. In a 2021 statement, the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) affirmed the deaccessioning of works that are redundant within or irrelevant to a collection. They also encouraged the use of deaccession proceeds to collect works by underrepresented artists, or to repatriate materials. These recommendations align with the Association’s overall position that works of art should never be sold to cover operational costs like building maintenance or employee salaries, but that sensible reinvestment into the collection is desirable.

AAMG president Craig Hadley is concerned, however, that some museums are deaccessioning works in ways that violate these professional standards. “We have seen a number of institutions in recent years fund unrelated operations or capital projects by deaccessioning works of art from university museum collections,” Hadley told Observer. Those sales are in “direct violation of the code of ethics” put forward by AAMG, the American Alliance of Museums and other professional organizations.

Careful rules for deaccessioning distinguish university art museums, and museums more generally, from much of the art world—where works are sold at market-driven prices, by and to collectors who are primarily interested in art as an asset. The University of California’s 2024-2025 financial report demonstrated this difference, describing museum collections as “inexhaustible capital assets,” distinct from (non-rare) books, computers and buildings—all of which depreciate with time, and whose sale or disposal can be justified in terms of financial health.

Miller echoed this, asserting that university art museums prefer to “share the ways we are integral to the university’s academic mission” rather than discussing the collection’s monetary worth. “For example, we talk about the students and departments we serve, student employment and career development opportunities, and ways that donors are engaged with the museum.”

Some museums, like the Schnitzer, rely on another non-monetized asset: relationships with collectors. In September, the Schnitzer will open a major exhibition of work by Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson, drawn largely from Jordan Schnitzer‘s personal collection. “To create an exhibition of this scale, and borrowing works from various lenders, would be nearly impossible from a financial and staffing standpoint for most university art museums,” Miller explained.

With a $4.5 million budget, the Schnitzer is an outlier among university art museums. AAMG’s 2022 Operational Data Collection Report showed that most university museums and galleries have an annual budget of about $600k, roughly 55 percent of which comes from the university’s overall budget. These funds have to stretch to pay staff, mount exhibitions, manage loans and maintain the school’s public artworks—a task 55 percent of museums additionally perform, according to the report. Even more well-funded museums are feeling some financial pressure. The $2 million budget for Penn State University’s Palmer Museum is projected to stagnate through the 2028 financial year.

Most university art museums, according to the AAMG report, are in smaller cities or towns, where they may be one of very few cultural institutions. Amy Wilson, director of the Merwin and Wakely Galleries at Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU), knows this situation well. She relocated from New York City to join the IWU art faculty in 2020, and said that keeping galleries and programming open for the community is “key to creating a good relationship between the folks who live in an area and the schools that are in them.” The IWU galleries do not house permanent collections; area residents rely on the museum as a venue for seeing contemporary art by local and visiting artists. Notably, the IWU galleries do not charge admission, and Wilson said they serve as a bridge between the university and the wider community. “Tensions between the community-at-large and universities often erupt because of pressures on housing and parking and other related issues. Having a gallery that is open and inviting helps diffuse some of that, and gives the university value within the community beyond just educating people who are often perceived as ‘outsiders’ and temporary guests.” Wilson cautioned, however, that galleries “have to be accountable to the communities they serve, including artists, their board and donors, and also their community.”

The question of community accountability was raised in Chicago earlier this year, when DePaul University announced it would be shuttering its art museum. Students, faculty and members of the local community rallied to keep the space open, and pointed out that the museum only accounted for 0.0006 percent of the total university budget. DePaul administrators maintain that closing the museum is a necessary cost-saving measure and, while the university will retain its collection, and artworks will be available to researchers upon request, the public-facing mission is no more.

Daring exhibits, continuing collection and thoughtful deaccessions are reassuring in an era of unsteady educational budgets and museum closures. The Weisman in Minneapolis will soon open “Merciless: Indigenous Lands Since 1776″—”a commemoration and celebration of Indigenous resistance” featuring works by Natchez Beaulieu, Marlena Myles and Missy Whiteman. Against a backdrop of bland semiquincentennial celebrations, and the NEA’s Freedom 250 push, projects like “Merciless” show that university art museums continue to pursue the ideals of intellectual progress and creative freedom which initially inspired them.