In Stanley Museum of Art’s first year, thousands discover ‘gem’

The first year for the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art has been “a whirlwind,” Director Lauren Lessing said, drawing far more visitors than expected.

“It's been great, exciting and really gratifying that all of the work that we put into the plan paid off with such a robust response from the public,” she said.

By checking databases from professionals in the field, including other Big Ten art museums, Lessing had expected to welcome maybe 45,000 people — but more likely 30,000 — in the inaugural year, which began with opening festivities Aug. 26 to 28, 2022.

Never did she imagine 65,000 people would walk through the doors.

“We just blew up all of our neighbors, even in places like Los Angeles, where you would think that the numbers would be much, much higher because they're in an urban area,” she said.

  Buy Photo

“So I think that really speaks volumes about the way that this community has missed the museum, and the desire to see the collection back in a museum again. And then also the recognition of our collection around the country and around the world — that it drew people from far away to our doorstep to see works of art that loom large in the history of art and have been inaccessible for the last 15 years.”

The floods of 2008 slammed shut the doors on the previous UI Museum of Art, and in the ensuing years, the bulk of the collection was stored in Chicago, then at the Figge Museum in Davenport, until this spring.

The star attraction, Jackson Pollock’s “Mural,” underwent two years of technical study, restoration, cleaning and conservation at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, then on a world tour. It’s now back home, in a dedicated second-floor gallery, sharing space with other works that complement this massive, groundbreaking work of abstract expressionism. Commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim in 1943 and gifted to the UI in 1951, it’s the centerpiece of the “Homecoming” exhibition.

  Buy Photo

Other works are being rotated in and out of the second-floor galleries, as well. Lessing is especially excited about the new exhibition, “Drawn Over: Reclaiming Our Histories,” which opened Aug. 23 and will be on view through Jan. 2. This grouping, from the museum’s permanent collection, shows the art and history the Indigenous Plains men who continued to draw on pages ripped from government ledger books and given to them after they no longer had enough buffalo hides on which to draw.

  Buy Photo

Lessing said she “learned a lot” from working with a team of guest curators, noting the project was supported by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The goal of the grant “was really to stretch the way that museums thought about what they had, the way they curated exhibitions, and it did all that,” she said.

Lessing, 54, of Iowa City, spoke with The Gazette recently about the museum’s first year, and what lies ahead. The interview has been edited for brevity.

Q: How has the facility (and the staff) evolved in the first year?

A: We've learned a lot. We knew the building as an idea. We saw it on paper. I traveled around the country with a little model and a suitcase that I would pop open for people who might be interested in helping us build it. So I knew it as an idea.

Obviously, we could plan out the inaugural installation and the collection move, working with paper maps of the museum, basically. We moved in March of 2022, so we did have a little time in the building — a few months before we opened to the public.

But even so, we didn't really understand the museum until the public started moving through it. I could see it right when we opened — it was like a body that the blood was flowing through. …

We’ve had a chance to understand it better over the last year — what about the building works really, really well, and then we had to make some fine-tuning adjustments to it to keep it working at the level that we want them to be working.

(Lessing pointed to the immersive opera Nathan Felix composed about the flood and efforts to move the collection out of harm’s way. The mobile piece moved through the museum’s various spaces on April 27.)

The crowd of several hundred people just moved around with him and with the performers, and it worked beautifully. It was a great example of how this building just absorbs crowds. The public flows through it very easily, it never felt cramped. Everyone could see and hear what was happening. … The whole thing went so smoothly, and that really is a testament to the design of the building. The building can just hold an awful lot of people and hold them very generously.

Q: Who's coming to the museum, and from how far?

A: We've had visitors from Europe, we've had visitors from Africa, we've had visitors from Asia.

Q: Are they lured by the building or “Mural”? What's bringing them here?

A: We got a lot of really great publicity, which helped us. We were written up in dozens of newspapers and magazines that have excellent internet circulation. The building itself is a draw. It’s won several awards and was featured in Architectural Digest, so people have come to see it. And our inaugural exhibition has gotten a lot of national attention, as well, from magazines and newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, and we’ve been on people’s blogs. We’ve been featured on big Instagram pages by people who are influencers. I think that people have been aware of us across a broad swath of geography. And then, of course, we have these treasures that people have not been able to see.

Q: What are they saying?

A: One thing I've heard over and over again, has been surprise that a museum so polished and relevant and cutting-edge is here. People outside of Iowa don't necessarily know who we are. If you're not familiar with the University of Iowa, and you don't know what a gem we are, and if you're not familiar with how cosmopolitan many parts of the state of Iowa are and how progressive the state has been historically, then you come to a place like this, and it really knocks your socks off because you're not expecting something like this here. Those of us who live here, we know. We know that the first MFA program in the world was at the University of Iowa, and that the state of Iowa has been a pioneer in fields like education for well over 100 years.

  Buy Photo

Q: How are people interacting with the museum?

A: It depends on what audience we're talking about. We've seen 3,000 happy school children come on field trips, with 500 teachers and other adults, and it's really great. Lots of them step out of their school buses and walk into the lobby and say, “Wow.” … I love the energy that children bring to a museum.

I have really enjoyed seeing families here, as well. Our scavenger hunt has been a big, big hit. … (It) forces them to really look carefully at a lot of works in the museum collection.

University students we see in two capacities. We see them when they come with their professors in classes, and we’re working with 200 university courses this year. And then we see them when they come here just to hang out. We have a student advisory board, the Stanley Campus Council. We've done exercises like screen printing tote bags that we gave away, and we had a free pizza study night during the final exam period in the fall semester. It's really great to see the museum packed with students who are just here to have fun also, or if you're not having fun while you're studying, at least you're enjoying the pizza.

And then we see people who just come on their lunch hour because they want to have a moment to relax and maybe they're having a stressful day and they just want to have a moment sitting in front of a work of art, where they can be meditative and calm.

And we see people who come here with big groups of their friends, because maybe their friends have come in from out of town and they want to impress them with all the wonderful things to enjoy about living in Iowa City.

We've had a number of people who have come here scoping out places to retire. They have read about Iowa City being one of the best places to live in the United States, and they are checking off all the boxes of the things that make a good life — and having an accessible museum with a world-class art collection is part of that.

And then we've got audiences for performances. We've had lots of music in the museum. We've had various film screenings, and people sometimes just come to be a part of an event or to listen to some beautiful music. And if they stay to look at some of the visual art that's on view, that's great.

Q: What about the two pieces from Africa that you deemed needed to be returned?

A: The works have been fully and completely deaccessioned, so they're no longer part of the museum collection. They have been returned legally to the (Nigerian) royal family. But they have not been returned physically to the royal family, in part because (the prince) wants to come here and get them. He's a very busy man, as you might imagine, so we've been coordinating to find a good window for him to come and collect the art.

Q: What lies ahead any big things in the works?

A: So many big things. We're hiring to do this deep dive into our African collection. We are gearing up into another school year. We have lots of really wonderful programs on the docket for this coming year that are being listed out on our website, even as we speak. We have new people in place.

We’re growing, and I think that's very exciting. We have a sense of what we're capable of now. And so now we can really lean in.

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.co

  Buy Photo