Message from the Director

Dear Friends,

The museum has been a very busy place. Last semester, with Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, we saw record crowds in our galleries. Rodin’s sculpture, such an important and well-known celebration of artistic accomplishment, provided a springboard to discussion about creativity, authenticity, authority, ambition, and fame. The response of public school groups, university classes and members of our surrounding communities was heartwarming indeed.

The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946 deepens our program of Human Rights themed exhibitions. Guest curator Delphine Hirasuna begins with a personal story. This story, however, grows to national proportions and, utimately, becomes universal. While informing us about a difficult and troubling passage in our own history, our own times, the exhibition speaks eloquent volumes of the triumph of the human spirit through creativity. On the one hand, trained artists applied their skills to bear witness to the forced evacuation of all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast in 1942. On the other, individuals with no previous artistic training honed tremendous skills with improvised tools using found objects, scrap and indigenous materials. The creation of art was an important way to gaman, to endure the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.

This exhibition has brought together people. People who study the internment; those who survived it; and those whose families were forever changed by it. Here on campus, the exhibition has special historical meaning: One way for young people to be furloughed from the camps, aside from volunteering for frontline military duty, was if their colleges or universities would allow them to continue their studies. The University of Connecticut was one of the few that did.

And now, some membership news. Since we implemented new membership benefits several months ago, feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Not surprisingly, the most popular offering is NARM, the North American Reciprocal Museum program. By becoming a NARM partner, our members at the Contributing level and higher receive benefits such as free admission and store and event discounts at more than 250 museums throughout North America.

And that number is growing. Recently the Springfield Museums at the Quadrangle and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth were added to this list of New England Museums, which includes the Peabody Essex Museum, the RISD Museum of Art, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and the Worcester Art Museum, to name a few. To make this information more readily available to our members, Looking Around will now include and highlight the exhibition schedules of all NARM partners in our area. The listing of non-NARM museums will remain virtually unchanged in future issues.

I hope your new year has begun well. Enjoy the winter—or at least endure it—with many visits to the museum. I look forward to seeing you in the galleries.

All the best,
Steven Kern
Director, The William Benton Museum of Art