University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art building on opening momentum

IOWA CITY — In an opening weekend last August filled with art and artistry in the halls and outside, more than 4,000 people marveled at the University of Iowa’s gleaming new Stanley Museum of Art. By the end of the year, that number had grown to nearly 30,000.

And now, six months since the $50 million state-of-the-art facility opened, between 35,000 and 36,000 visitors have strolled the galleries, taken classes, applauded world-class dance and relaxed in a space intended to be a gathering spot for all generations, all academic disciplines and all communities across the state and online across the globe. It’s also raised the museum’s profile with other institutions across the world wanting to borrow UI holdings or set up reciprocal exhibition loans.

Before the 63,000-square-foot structure opened, Director Lauren Lessing told The Gazette she hoped it would be more than a showcase for artwork on the walls. She said she was looking forward to having the lobby, dubbed Thresholds, be a welcoming place for music, theater and dance, that would carry upstairs into the galleries and classrooms and “spill out onto our front yard, which is Gibson Square Park.”

That is happening.

The lobby can hold about 150 people, and a Feb. 18 talk by Grant Wood Fellow Michael Dixon “was well attended,” Lessing said. The following day, an educational Drawing Salon in the galleries was at capacity with 15 participants.

All the chairs were filled Feb. 3 for the first dance event in Thresholds — a breathtaking pop-up performance by two members of the internationally known modern dance troupe Pilobolus, in town for a Hancher performance. And Cedar Rapids Opera entranced a standing-room-only audience on opening weekend with excerpts from “The Grant Wood Operas: Strokes of Genius.”

“We're hitting the edge of how many people we can accommodate, which is great,” Lessing said. “We're right where we want to be.”

At a glance

What: University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art

Where: 160 W. Burlington St., Iowa City

Hours: 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday; noon to 4:30 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday; stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/visit

Admission: Free

Parking, accessibility: stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/visit/plan-your-visit

Events: stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/programming-events/calendar

Education offerings: stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/education

Learning curve

It’s all part of the first-year learning curve of hits and misses. A curve that Lessing expects to continue through the second year, as the staff figures out what’s resonating with UI students and the public, as well as the building’s capacity for accommodating events and audiences.

One of the misses was discovering that the museum’s underground parking garage was hard to find, compounded by a change in the city’s parking payment app, both of which proved to be visitor barriers, Lessing noted. Enhanced signage has been installed, with arrows pointing toward the garage, and because two gallery hosts are on hand at any given time, Lessing said one can be deployed to the garage to help visitors.

They also learned that scheduling some auxiliary programming in other spaces — like at the UI library auditorium across the street or at the School of Art and Art History — confused audience members, causing them to go to the wrong place or just go home.

“So now we're really trying to do everything in the museum,” Lessing said.

The weather taught yet another lesson, in the exhibition space called Lightwell, which begins in the lobby and soars to the third floor, completely open to the elements.

“We learned that wooden pedestals don't work in our Lightwell, because we specifically chose a sculpture that would be fine in the ice and the snow, but the wooden pedestal, not so much,” she said. “Whenever things like this happen, we're just like, OK, now we know. We know that we will make an adjustment and move forward in a different way.”

Education aspects

Since the Stanley is a teaching museum, Lessing is pleased with the response to its educational offerings.

“We have a fair number of university courses using the museum (and) we've already signed up to see about 1,500 school children,” she said. “Both of those numbers are going to grow. We know people aren't used to having the Stanley as a resource, and so they're just dipping their toe in. But we're going to see both of those audiences grow exponentially in the next few years.”

The three-story building opens so many new doors, said Kimberly Datchuk, curator of learning and engagement.

“The new facility has allowed staff to ramp up,” she said. “We're able to welcome people into our spaces in a way that we haven't been able to for years, so we're finally able to really have K-12 groups come through.”

Educational offerings changed after the 2008 flood washed through the former museum on the other bank of the Iowa River, deeming it unsuitable for the collection.

Smaller groups still came to the temporary facilities.

“Boy Scouts would come and some after-school programs would come when we were in the (Iowa Memorial Union),” Datchuk said. “But it was such a small space that we could only have a small number of people in there at once. Now we're able to welcome a whole class, a whole grade level from an elementary school here, and really have people in the space and interact with the art in a way we couldn’t in the past.”

Educational outreach changed again during COVID-19 shutdowns. Programming moved online, with viewers logging in from across the state, country, Europe and beyond. Some of the success stories will continue.

“We have really remained committed to offering our lectures and larger public programs over Zoom,” Datchuk said. “It was something that we started just during the pandemic. We had never offered any kind of hybrid programming. We were in our temporary spaces, but we all got well acquainted with Zoom meetings and webinars for our events. And so that has remained constant.

“The setup has changed and has become more complex to offer those hybrid events, but it's really paid off. It's allowed people to continue to remain connected to the museum, even if they're not in Iowa City, or if they're not able to make it out to the museum,” Datchuk said.

Diversity and inclusion also are reflected in the accessible galleries and in the programming through various means:

“We're really just trying to experiment with a lot of different things right now to see what needs there are within the community and what we could do to help with that,” Datchuk said.

Staff members peer outside their walls for guidance, too.

“We're always looking at what other museums are doing,” Datchuk said, “so we’re looking at our neighbors like the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, or the Figge (in Davenport), and then also the institutions within the Big Ten. The other Big Ten universities have their own art museums, so we're looking to see what they're doing to engage their campus and their community.”

Amanda Lensing, the museum’s senior living communities program coordinator, had been doing outreach to senior housing communities before COVID-19 hit, Lessing noted. With the pandemic, a $250,000 federal Institute of Museum and Library Services grant brought funding to continuing engaging with seniors. It also allowed the museum to expand the team to include staff from the UI’s Pentacrest museums, libraries and State Archaeologist’s Office.

“We go to where seniors are, rather than expecting them to come to the museum,” Lessing said. “We still have COVID, people are still careful about going out, particularly if they're older, and so that program continues to operate. As the grant comes to an end, we're looking at restructuring how we do that a little bit and doing more of it.”

Exhibitions

While the initial “Homecoming” exhibition will be in the galleries for three years, some of the nearly 600 pieces on view will rotate in and out quarterly. Textiles, basketry and items on paper that can fade need to rest away from the light, so those are the first priority for conservation. The recent winter rotation changed out more than 100 works, including 40 in the African and Indigenous art galleries.

“It becomes a new exhibition in some ways every four months,” Lessing said. “And so on the one hand, ‘Homecoming’ is up for three years, but I've been saying from the beginning, oh, you won't be bored — not that you could be bored with the collection that we've got anyway. You need to keep coming back because treasures will keep coming out and appearing on our walls.”

Nearly all of the museum’s 18,000 artworks are back after the flood, with fewer than 100 pieces still in storage at the Figge. Supply chain issues caused a four-month delay in the museum’s finishing touches, so the focus turned to getting the inaugural exhibition moved into the galleries, Lessing said. But she anticipates the remaining pieces will be in Iowa City by summer.

With a vacancy in the curatorial staff, Lessing called on her former colleague in Maine, Diana Tuite (pronounced “tweet”), to step into the role of visiting senior curator of modern and contemporary art in November 2021. Much of the planning for “Homecoming” had been done, but Tuite still had to quickly learn the depth and breadth of the Stanley’s collection.

“Everyone was working remotely, the building was still being completed, all of the art was in storage, so it was really an exercise in beginning with an idea, and then working to sort of develop the framework for each gallery from there,” Tuite said.

“Luckily, there's an incredible collection to work with. It really became an exercise in editing myself more than anything else,” she said. ”There was more than enough extraordinary work to put on the walls.”

She realizes Jackson Pollock’s massive “Mural” is the superstar of the collection, drawing interest at home and abroad. But it also can serve as an introduction to so many other world-class pieces at the Stanley.

“What I hope people discover is that they've heard about the Pollock. The Pollock may be what gets them through the door, but it is just a revelation after revelation” in the galleries, Tuite said. “There really is something for everyone in terms of what is on view.”

She noted the changes in the current rotation won’t be “as dramatic” as in the future, “but we really want audiences to understand that there will be something dramatically different happening every four to six months.”

The rotation also includes a piece new to the museum.

“Right now we're hanging a work by Amy Sherald that's a new acquisition,” Lessing said. “Most people know Sherald’s work because she painted the portrait of Michelle Obama.”

The screen print, titled “Little Bird,” depicts a Black member of a British dance company, wearing what Lessing called a “stunning” dress with a bird print in the Finnish Marimekko style.

“With this much larger building (comes) many expectations with a strong desire to have as many familiar things as there are surprises,” Tuite said. “ … Part of what this show is intent on doing is really showing the spectrum of work that has not always in the past been put out on view. So I think there are just a lot of surprises.”

Among those surprises is discovering the variety of holdings in the African art collection, displayed in such groupings as “Fragments of the Canon” and “History Is Always Now.” The mix of contemporary and traditional historical objects — including textiles, facial and full-body masks and pottery from Africa — is designed to show the continuing conversation between the African continent and the contemporary global artwork in the galleries Tuite designed, said Cory Gundlach, curator of African Art.

“And with that in mind, I'm (also) offering visitors that are much more purists at heart, the experience of looking at African art alone in a secluded space,” he said. “I recognize, and in some ways identify with people that are very excited about being in a gallery surrounded by nothing but historical objects from Africa that are absolutely extraordinarily beautiful and powerful. …

“So what I'm offering in terms of this conversation is a spectrum that leads from one to the other, no matter how you enter the galleries. There is this opportunity to engage with art from Africa within these different rooms that invites this recognition of how it relates to the world around it.”

He's also in the process of scheduling a trip to Africa to return two pieces rightfully belonging to what is now Nigeria, taken when British forces attacked and pillaged the area in 1897. The Stanley, along with other museums across the country, researched the provenance of colonial-era African art and found that the pieces had come to the UI from collectors who did not know their origin.

Looking ahead

The UI issued $30.2 million in bonds to help finance the $50 million museum. And even though the museum met its goal of raising $25 million, building on a $10 million gift from the late Richard and Mary Jo Stanley of Muscatine, for whom the museum is named, Lessing said fundraising continues.

“We’re still raising money, of course, because we need endowments to support the work that we want to do in the museum, to help us build capacity and to achieve our mission of really transforming lives with works of art,” Lessing said.

Her goal is to triple the endowment over the next five years, bringing it up to $15 million.

“It sets up all of the future directors and the future staff members who come to work at this museum for decades to come,” she said. “It sets them up in a way that gives them the funds that they need to do really ambitious, risk-taking things.

“University art museums fill a niche in the ecosystem of museums in the United States,” she added. “We generate new ideas. We try things that are risky, we push boundaries — that's always been the role of university art museums. But to do that, you need to have funds available to very quickly pivot to take advantage of opportunities when they arise.”

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