Art museum receives $500K grant

The IU Art Museum recently received a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create two new staff positions to enhance the museum’s presence on
campus.

According to IU Art Museum Director Adelheid Gealt, the grant will be used over a three-and-a-half-year period to add a full-time senior academics officer and a projects coordinator to the museum’s staff. These new positions will increase curricular involvement with the museum by reaching out to different departments.

“It’s an extraordinary honor to have this grant, and it reflects well on Indiana University,” Gealt said.

But due to heavy flooding in Monroe County this past June, it almost didn’t happen. As Gealt tried to make her way to the airport for a meeting with the Mellon Foundation in New York, roads were almost nonexistent and bridges became impossible to cross.

“I had to be very creative about getting out of my house in Owen County,” she said.
Gealt eventually made it to the meeting by riding a tractor through a cornfield to the
airport.

Her persistence paid off. Working with the Mellon
Foundation, Gealt refined her proposal to better integrate the museum with classes and programs within the University, a dream Gealt said the art museum has held for more than 10 years.

The Mellon Foundation originally approached the art museum about the grant, but Gealt said that there was never a guarantee that the museum would receive it.

“The hardest part was hope against hope that we were going to win this,” she said.

The museum’s Curator of Education Ed Maxedon said that having these positions is relatively unique for a university art museum. The grant will help the museum work with people on campus to find classes that would benefit from working with the art
museum.

“This is an unprecedented, extraordinary grant,” he said.

The art museum already planned to work with the IU Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts and faculty in the sciences to offer a course on materials used by artists, using the museum’s collections. The museum also plans on creating a capstone course for graduate students in the Kelley School of Business on the benefits of museums in society.

Associate Director for Curatorial Services Diane Pelrine said that the grant would connect the museums with classes that may not seem to have any association with art. For example, if a geology class were studying a certain rock, they might visit the museum to observe the rock in a painting or how it was crafted in a sculpture.

“We’re going a long way to making the museum an integral part of the campus,” she said.

Because the museum will have an academic coordinator focusing exclusively on University courses, more resources will be available to work on education for children in kindergarten through high school.

Maxedon said that before the position was created, only one person worked on education projects and had to work with all ages.

Gealt said she hopes to make these positions permanent and eventually fund them through endowment. The museum hopes that the grant will help change its role in students’ academic lives at IU.

“Our goal at the museum is to have every undergraduate visit before they graduate,” Pelrine said. “This was a goal that was not possible before the art museum received this grant.”