Art History Symposium Lecture with Rachel Teagle and Laurence Rinder

Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, California

Thanks to the wonderful Festival of the Arts, Rachel Teagle, the director for the Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, California and Lawrence Rinder, the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California, held a symposium where they discussed some of the how's and why's behind their successful museums. I found the talks very informative and inspiring. Something that really stuck out to me from Rachel Teagle's portion of the talk was the idea that you need to make your resources work for you instead of trying to copy from another source which likely had very different resources and circumstances. An example in Teagle's talk of how she made her resources work for her was her using the rich legacy left behind by the first generation of faculty in the art program at University of California, Davis. She talked about the unique environment that these first generation of faculty created that really put UCD on the map. Famous faculty includes Ruth Horsting, Robert Arneson, and Wayne Thiebaud. One of the struggles she noted was the difficulty of piecing together an accurate timeline due to the lack of records kept by the department. The Manetti Shrem museum strives to cultivate an inviting interdisciplinary student art and community.

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California

One of the really interesting facts that I learned during Lawrence Rinder's portion of the presentation is that BAMFA is the oldest operating museum on the west coast. I also found out that the BAMFA is an encyclopedic museum which means it has a wide variety of types of art as a opposed to the Manetti Shrem museum which focuses regional and contemporary art. Rinder also told the audience that the museum moved to UC Berkeley's old printing plant and focused on being more welcoming while formatting the new museum. A way that Lawrence Rinder and the BAMFA made the museum more welcoming was utilizing a very large screen on the exterior of the building that is used to screen films. This was a great way to involve more people in the wonderful films kept in the archive. I was able to ask a question at the end of the presentation. My question was:

What were the challenges of making interdisciplinary spaces in the museums and what plans to do the museums have to further that? 

I was surprised to find out that the interdisciplinary museums came quite naturally for the two of the guests. I was very grateful to have been able to attend this event! I learned a lot about the goals and difficulties that these two regional museums are working with. Although museum studies is not where i plan on heading in my art history career, i really enjoy learning about the ins-and-outs of museum success.