ORCID ID
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2137-3415
Date Awarded
2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
American Studies
Advisor
Charles McGovern
Committee Member
Alan C Braddock
Committee Member
Grey Gundaker
Committee Member
Jeffrey Trask
Abstract
This dissertation examines art outreach exhibitions active in the United States between 1900 and 1960. I define outreach exhibitions as shows organized by museums, galleries, and other arts-focused organizations for schools, libraries, and other non-gallery spaces, to expand audiences. Despite their longevity as a community engagement method, outreach exhibitions have received limited critical attention from scholars or museum personnel, with museums historically relying on quantitative measures such as total visitor attendance or number of sites visited to ascertain effectiveness. By assessing outreach exhibitions as a historical form of collections engagement, my research examines how museums, galleries, and art centers have historically attempted to cultivate community relationships through collections access. I begin by examination of outreach exhibitions by tracing their origins to Progressive Era activism in public education, with art museums physically dispatching their collections to demonstrate the commitment to public service. I then analyze three case studies active from the Great Depression through the Cold War: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Neighborhood Circulating Exhibitions, active from 1933 to 1942; the federal community art center (CAC) initiative, one of the most ambitious arts access initiatives associated with the New Deal; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Artmobile, active from 1953 to 1994 and revived in 2018. To analyze these case studies, I use an interdisciplinary method intersecting history, mobility studies, and archival theory. For each outreach program, I analyze their content, retrace their transit routes, identify which kinds of community organizations or host sites they engaged, and examine the tensions that arose between the organizers of outreach exhibitions and their hosting sites and community members. I also consider audience reactions to outreach exhibitions to complicate quantitative assessments of success and demonstrate that viewers were not monolithic regarding their familiarity with art or their expectations of the programs that visited them. I argue that outreach exhibitions active during the first half of the twentieth century, though intended to expand access to collections, reproduced the boundaries of their host institutions by replicating operations and expectations that first developed out of Progressive Era reforms. They did so by privileging collections preservation, focusing on schools and other public education sites to demonstrate educational relevance, envisioning their audiences as people who already supported or would support the conventions of museums, and privileging whiteness in their exhibition contents, institutional partners, visitation sites, and imagined audiences. Outreach exhibitions demonstrate how a lack of institutional self-awareness results in the uncritical replication of established museum practices and expectations.
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-rzme-6s76
Rights
© The Author
Recommended Citation
Woodbury, Sara, "Moving Pictures: Reassessing Art Outreach Exhibitions In The United States, 1900-1960" (2024). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1727787934.
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-rzme-6s76
