Jackson Free Press

When museum director Betsy Bradley walked me through the new Mississippi Museum of Art building in February, the mostly finished museum felt like a chrysalis—placid and even ordinary on the outside, but host to a dramatic metamorphosis within. Formerly the home of the Commission for International Cultural Exchange, the interior had been gutted and redone in glass and steel. It was a sunny day, and the lobby was full of sparkling winter light, a striking contrast with the enclosed, artificially lit lobby of the Arts Center.

If the museum is a chrysalis, then Bradley is the force of change within it. Since its beginnings as the Mississippi Art Association, the MMA prospered under the leadership of visionary women. Now, with Bradley at the helm, the museum is in the midst of its most ambitious transition since its incorporation in 1979. Besides being larger and more technologically sophisticated, the new building represents a change in both the museum's mission and a reorienting of the museum's attitude toward art and the people who come to see it.

When the MMA opens its doors June 9, it will offer the public more than just extra square footage; this is the first time in the history of the MMA that the museum's permanent collection will be on permanent display. The museum's collection, now numbering well over 4,000 pieces that have been sitting in a single, over-crowded storage room at the Arts Center for decades, will finally be accessible to the public.

Charting a New Course
Working closely with Virginia-based architect Madge Bemiss and local architects Dale & Associates, Bradley has reinvigorated the typical museum experience. Rather than a place for passive visual absorption, the MMA will be an active, multi-sensory, multi-modal experience designed to draw the viewer out of silent, hands-behind-the-back museum behavior. There will be a garden and a fountain with outdoor seating surrounding the museum, along with a coffee shop, wireless Internet, a gift shop, movie screens, a bar, event space for receptions, sound-absorbing cork floors, light maple ceilings and a William Dunlap installation entitled "Panorama of American Landscape."

That's just the front lobby.

There will also be increased office, classroom, restoration, studio and storage space in the new building. Once you enter the gallery space, the museum breaks up into multiple viewing areas. While there is a main corridor connecting the galleries, the art will be grouped according to loose themes rather than in a linear chronological order. Bradley hopes that this will encourage museum-goers to chart their own course through the permanent exhibit rather than follow a prescribed route.

Patti Carr Black designed the permanent collection display, titled "The Mississippi Story." Working around chronological gaps in the collection, Carr Black constructed an exhibit that would vividly evoke Mississippi's relationship with art rather than dictate history lessons to the viewer. In her sonorous drawl, she explained her ideas to me at her beautiful home in Belhaven.

"I wanted to show that the place 'Mississippi' has so inspired its artists that the artwork literally evokes the place," she said. Accordingly, Carr Black arranged "The Mississippi Story" into a Venn diagram of four discrete, yet overlapping exhibits: The Influence of the Land, Mississippi People, Daily Life and Exporting Mississippi Culture Through the Arts.

The total gallery space is divided into five sections: a hallway of Pre-Columbian art, "Gems" of the collection by famous non-Mississippi artists, "The Mississippi Story," traveling exhibit space and the "closer look" gallery. Each gallery space features an unobtrusive educational installation that enables the viewer to research the artwork (through history, critical opinion and cultural contexts) and provides writing supplies to encourage viewers to share their insights.

Elise Smith, head of the Art History Department at Millsaps College, observed that ensuring an educational museum experience for a wide audience is a bit of a balancing act, one that has yet to be perfected. "How much does that involve telling them things via language? You know, provide a context, like text that you might have on the wall? Or how much do you make it related to educational programs, like tours and docents and lectures? Or do you let the work speak for itself and provide spaces that will allow the public to have these moments of meaningful aesthetic experience? I think that they've been considering a lot of these issues as they've been designing these spaces. … They're aware of wanting to create a free flow through the space without a lot of closed-off rooms. But they also want some spaces that are more intimate, less trafficked, more enabling the public to have in-depth experiences with two or three works of art."

The "closer look" gallery is an attempt to balance open, decentralized formal gallery space with an intimate aesthetic experience. It is also a rejection of the traditional hierarchy between "real" gallery space and mere educational space. Rather than isolating the "closer look" gallery to a separate educational wing of the museum, it is placed in the very center of the other galleries. The "closer look" gallery will have its own changing display of original artwork that can be viewed in an informal atmosphere, from the floor, for example, or a couch. This gallery will also include a library and educational videos. It is, in essence, a private study nestled within a public space.

Such steps are radical ones in the world of museum design, although they are becoming increasingly popular with smaller, regional museums. Bemiss, the lead architect who spoke to me from Australia, noted, "Mississippi is one of the few museums in the country that is making such a serious effort to integrate learning and people with different ways of learning into the actual exhibit of the art."

All of which suits Bradley just fine. She wants Mississippi to be a leader, not a follower. "You don't have to sacrifice anything to include more people in the artistic experience," Bradley explained. "We can be innovative but remain connected to our context." Rather than being a static status-marker, Bradley wants the museum to be an accessible civic resource. And many of the "radical" changes in museum design that Bradley has adopted fit perfectly with Mississippi because they make the museum more community-oriented and more sociable.

Carr Black observed: "From the very beginnings of the Mississippi Art Association, which is the predecessor to this museum, education in art has been one of the main objectives. They literally started the art programs in public schools in Mississippi. … So that's been a long tradition in this state."

The museum is also working with the city and Downtown Jackson Partners to convert the parking lot that connects the Arts Center and Thalia Mara Hall into a public green space. John Lawrence of DJP said that plans for the green space are in their infancy, but confirmed that the city, which owns the coveted parking lot, is committed to the idea. The idea for the green space originated with Bradley's architects and caught on with other groups, including the Community Foundation of Greater Jackson and DJP.

"We think it could be a great unifying space between Thalia Mara, the museum, the Arts Center and the new Convention Center," Lawrence said, "but there are a lot of moving parts that need to be addressed. Like where will the existing parking be re-assigned?" At this early stage, the project does not have a timeline or an official project chairperson, Lawrence added.

'Opening Up the Walls'
All these steps to make the new museum and its surroundings more inviting to a broad range of people are part of a larger movement in museum design. While the specific design of the new MMA be radical, museums have been slowly evolving toward being more approachable for decades.

Elaine Heumann Gurian is a museum consultant and author of "The Essential Museum" whose writing has strongly influenced the design and the mission of the new museum.

"In the last half century, curators, who are generally steeped in museum traditions, have seen their role criticized, and in response, they have generally changed their voice from that of benevolent but authoritarian leader into that of a benign and helpful teacher. … Overall, the traditional museum has generally become less 'stuffy' with added visitor amenities that encourage seating, eating, researching, shopping and socializing. These changes have helped most museums evolve from being formal 'temples' of contemplation into more inviting gathering places," Gurian wrote.

In "The Essential Museum" Gurian proposes creating a museum that all members of the community—not just the well educated and affluent—see as approachable and indispensable. She envisions a museum that follows the lead of other, more familiar public spaces.

"The shopping mall and the library have space elements worth emulating," she wrote. "Their designs intentionally allow patrons to enter anonymously, and to sit and stroll without committing to organized activity. These amenities allow 'lurkers'—unfamiliar users—to figure out the services and customs required without drawing attention to themselves."

Bradley agrees strongly with Gurian. "I want us to be as approachable as a Barnes & Noble!" she said, laughing.

Smith acknowledged that creating a welcoming museum has a lot to do with non-verbal, atmospheric cues. "(The museum staff) has been thinking about that issue of the museum space as a way to send a message to the public about opening up the walls and minimizing elitism. That has been a treasured part of museums, but it's also has been a real problem in terms of getting a large variety of people into museums. Lots of people think, 'Oh gosh, I don't belong in that space. I'm not gonna march up those stairs and through those Corinthian columns.'"

But even those who want more traditional use from the museum, like college students, will benefit from the new building. Smith teaches a museum studies class for art history students at Millsaps, and she is thrilled with the physical and conceptual transformation of the museum.

"It's been really terrific for us to have this class right at this moment during a very important transition for the museum," she said. "We've been able to observe a lot of the things that we were reading about related to museum spaces and the metaphorical significance of the space that artwork is in. The large space at the Mississippi Museum of Art and the reconceived ideas about the new museum … is going to affect very much the kind of internships that students can have and the meaningfulness of those internships, which I'm looking forward to a lot."

In addition, simply having more pieces on permanent display enhances the educational potential of the museum. "Having more of the permanent collection on display is going to be much more useful for studio and art history courses, in terms of having a significant variety of work on permanent display that we can count on," Smith remarked. Smith and many other art educators believe that students benefit more from the opportunity to respond to original artwork rather than looking at reproductions.

"In a slide or reproduction," Smith said, "everything gets flattened out, and the colors are not true, even in a really good reproduction … When you see an image in the original, you are much more able to ask the kind of meaningful questions that come out of process-oriented thinking."

Allowing educators to plan better, more enriching educational experiences for their students helps ensure future audiences for the museum. Hopefully, children and young people who enjoy themselves at the museum will grow up thinking of it as indispensable, thus making the museum an "essential" institution, as Gurian and Bradley would like it to be.

Come One, Come All
The new building can handle exhibits that would otherwise be impossible in Mississippi. Equipped with sophisticated climate-control, security, lighting and fire-safety systems, the museum is now able to borrow extremely valuable works of art and to care for them properly. Even the loading dock and the restoration and curatorial spaces are carefully designed, allowing artwork traveling from far away to "climatize" before being unpacked. The increased possibilities in the new space are too myriad to number, and the excitement among museum staff is palpable. In the old space, curatorial staff had virtually no climate control in the galleries, but that was the least of their problems. Consider that the museum's quarters in the Art Center sported a sewage water pipe running directly over the collection storage space. During our tour of the new building, Bradley shuddered as she recalled the mold and leaks that have plagued the museum at the Art Center, such as when water from the ceiling dripped onto 1920s Art Deco furniture from Paris.

But it won't simply be smooth sailing from here onward. Challenges loom in the years ahead, especially concerning the museum's decision to allow free admission to the permanent exhibit.

"They're going against the trend since the 1980s," Smith said. "Starting in England and then in the United States, because of the various budgetary problems that museums were facing, it became the only viable approach to charge entrance fees."

But an entrance fee is a serious access barrier, not only for the economically disadvantaged but also for young people. In "Free At Last," Gurian writes that "the first encounter with the ticket taker may be the single greatest impediment to making our museums fully accessible." So MMA chose to make the permanent exhibit free while charging admission to traveling exhibits, a move that Smith called "a real risk" for a small, non-profit museum that doesn't have millions of dollars in endowment money.

There is another hidden risk in only charging admission to the traveling exhibits, because it places pressure on the traveling exhibits to perform as cash cows. If the museum is forced to lean too heavily on the traveling exhibits for funding, will the museum be drawn to crowd-pleasing shows that are easy sells, at the expense of more consequential, provocative art?

Many of the people who are most excited about the new museum have high hopes for the caliber of the traveling exhibits. From the moment the museum announced its new and improved lodgings, expectations for its content and programming have been high.

"My hope for this museum is that it will show new things, and new ways of thinking of old things," Carr Black said.

Smith has similar hopes. "I would really love it if we got shows that were controversial, you know. Shows that generated some debate," she said. But Smith recognizes that such shows might not be crowd-pleasers, and it is harder to raise funds for such shows. "(The museum staff) are walking a very fine line between engaging the public in a very risky kind of way that we at Millsaps would love, but we're not their only audience."

Designing the traveling exhibition schedule is a complicated process. "Artistic quality and the proposed show's ability to have a meaningful impact on our particular community" are the main considerations, Bradley said, but there are others. For instance, the museum staff has to consider how much it should focus on art at the state, national and international levels. They also have to consider funding availability and public interest.

So the question remains: In addition to reaching out to families, children and first-time museum attendees, how will the museum continue to engage its loyal, art-savvy clientele while remaining financially stable?

Ever since Eudora Welty coined the expression "a sense of place," it has become ubiquitous in descriptions of Southern art, but that sense of place is often wedded to an essentially conservative artistic outlook, a reluctance to uproot or change the status quo. In its ambitious design and new mission, the new MMA holds onto its sense of place, but it does so while breaking new ground. That's exactly what all great Southern artists do.

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Previous Comments

ID

81246

Comment

I hope I can get my nephew and nieces over there this summer.

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2007-06-06T20:21:37-06:00

ID

81247

Comment

This looks fantastic! I hope I will be able to come down to Jackson this summer to se this!

Author

tombarnes

Date

2007-06-06T20:48:44-06:00

ID

81248

Comment

I'm planning on being there Saturday for the opening celebration - looks amazing!

Author

Izzy

Date

2007-06-08T08:58:45-06:00

ID

81249

Comment

The CL had a picture of the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Everyone was there, looks like: Governour Barbour, the City Council... Where was your Mayor?

Author

Lady Havoc

Date

2007-06-08T09:13:58-06:00

ID

81251

Comment

thanks for the brilliant article, which i read before i took the tour last night and helped me grasp what a signifigant achievement for our city this museum represents. it's the first time i have felt optimistic about my town in a long time. as discussed in the article getting the outside green space piece brought to fruition is of huge importance , and it remains up to us regular folks to push and prod downtown leaders and city hall to get it done.

Author

chimneyville

Date

2007-06-09T12:47:20-06:00

ID

81250

Comment

thanks for the brilliant article, which i read before i took the tour last night and helped me grasp what a signifigant achievement for our city this museum represents. it's the first time i have felt optimistic about my town in a long time. as discussed in the article getting the outside green space piece brought to fruition is of huge importance , and it remains up to us regular folks to push and prod downtown leaders and city hall to get it done.

Author

chimneyville

Date

2007-06-09T12:47:29-06:00

ID

81252

Comment

If anyone has pictures or comments about the opening, please post them. Thanks.

Author

tombarnes

Date

2007-06-09T14:03:32-06:00