Artistic relevance questioned by Art Museum, students

When you take college students overwhelmed by a Vanity Fair of electronics, pile on some unusual architecture, followed by an awkward location, you begin to ask yourself the question IU Art Museum Director Heidi Gealt asks herself: how do you get IU students to visit the museum?\nWith three decades of experience working at the museum and a Ph.D. in art history, she still can't answer that question.\nGealt oversees a collection rivaling universities like Harvard, Princeton and Yale, but in general, the only IU students who walk through the museum's front doors do so because it is part of a class assignment. The current solution to getting students to visit the museuma is making sure art becomes part of the curriculum with guided tours designed by a museum educator who works with class instructors.\nOne such course is called "Traditions and Culture of IU," and it routinely brings more than 900 IU freshmen into the museum. Students take a guided tour and do a computer-based interactive assignment. Gealt said planned visits, as these tours are called, are integrated into enough departments that she's trying to find money to hire a second educator to help handle the more than 14,000 IU students who visit the museum every year, a partial result of these planned visits.\n"We're all about seeing ... if you're a University student you should expect to understand your basic nature better when you leave than when you came," Gealt said. "Well, you won't understand that unless you've taken the time to look at some of these things and understand what the phenomenon of seeing leads to. And Monet is one of the transforming voices in that. Yes, absolutely, and how the phenomenon of seeing ... led to a whole new way of looking."\nAmericans attend more art shows featuring Impressionists than they do anything else, and Gealt said IU students can use Impressionists like Monet to help them see the world through a new perspective.\nBut if the museum's collection helps students see this, why don't they come without being forced to by a class assignment? It's all about the stimulation.\n"You are swamped, or could be almost over-stimulated on any given day with the amount of stimulation that comes through the iPods, the televisions, all these things that are constantly streaming into your world -- plus classroom, plus recreation, plus dating, plus family, plus all the things that happen," Gealt said.\nShe said another way of trying to expose students to the museum collection's value is by using a Web site to reach students on their own terms. Gealt said the museum's Web site is a way to let students see what the museum has to offer on their own terms, in hopes the virtual collections will draw students into the real ones.\nSome students, like freshman Corbin Elliott, don't have much of a chance to soak up the rays of art and culture shining across Bloomington's limestone campus. His work load forbids him the chance at more than a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, let alone a leisurely stroll through the art museum. But thanks to the museum's Web site, Elliott can plod through the WebWork he has to finish for his math class in one tab and browse through one of the museum's online collections in another.\n"I like art, especially the kind that makes me feel something," said Elliott, who walks past the art museum at least three times a week on his way to class. "But I just don't have time to do a lot of extra stuff around town, or on campus."\nElliott could look at a number of special exhibits online, including "Swing Landscape," an oil-on-canvas by the American painter Stuart Davis. The Davis piece was completed in 1938 with funding by the Works Progress Administration. It is mural size and part of the "Top 120" category on the museum's Web site.\nBut if you make the museum's collection available online, doesn't that make it easier for students to not go to the museum? \nNot according to Gealt, who said students today see so many images reproduced on a computer screen, the chance to see something tangible makes the museum all the more relevant. "The one thing I've heard is authenticity," she said. "The idea that this is not just something duplicated on the screen, not just something that's an off-print from a computer, but that this actually was made in 1869. That is the hook -- the authenticity, the truth, the honesty. It's tangible."\nThat tangibility is all thanks to one man -- Herman B Wells.\nWhen Wells was in the third year of his presidency in 1941, he used private donors to provide the amenities he thought IU students deserved.\n"He wanted any student coming to IU to have the same experiences, and the same amenities they had in the big city, and he found the people to make it happen because he knew it wouldn't happen through state funds - even then," Gealt said. "So everything -- the building, the art -- it all came from private philanthropy."\nThe museum's present edifice was designed and paid for the same way. Private donors and architect I.M. Pei designed the building, located between the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation and the School of Fine Arts. The museum was built from poured concrete and colored to match the surrounding limestone, and has no right angles. \nFreshman Chris Burgess said he has been to the museum at least five times, a high number in comparison to other students. Burgess said the design isn't what you'd expect.\n"When you think of an art museum you think of great Corinthian columns on the front, and very bland on the inside and you're there for the art," he said. "But for the IU Art Museum it's like the art museum is like art itself, so it's very interesting how they have art inside art"