It seems that Wallace Loh, president of the University of Maryland (UMD), never got over his desire to form a far-reaching partnership with a Washington, D.C., art museum.
Change the partner from the (now dismantled) Corcoran Gallery to the thriving Phillips Collection, and you’ve got wedded bliss:
Photo by John Consoli
The Phillips and UMD today jointly announced a new agreement for sharing resources and expertise. Their press release describes the plan as “ambitious, entrepreneurial, and risk‐supportive, …essential qualities in today’s competitive arts and academic environments.”
As described, the deal sounds like a win-win and could serve as a model for other university-museum collaborations. It will help the university to enhance its course offerings and programs in art, art history and the humanities, while giving the Phillips’ art holdings a new, jointly created gallery and open storage facility in Prince George’s County, MD, which is meant to “serve as a cutting-edge, modern and contemporary art center, hub for experimentation and innovation, and an artistic laboratory for a global community.”
In his open letter to the UMD community, Wallace Loh, its president, revealed that the initial term of the agreement was six years (renewable), and that the name of the new art storage/display facility would be “The Phillips Collection at the University of Maryland,” to be supported by joint fundraising.
UMD’s aborted Corcoran partnership, which involved shoring up that museum’s crumbling financial foundation, was to have been “a 99-year marriage,” involving a collection of 17,000 objects (compared to the Phillips’ 4,000).
Under the terms of its realized tripartite arrangement with the Corcoran and George Washington University, the National Gallery recently revealed (as reported by Peggy McGlone in the Washington Post) that it is adding nearly 1,000 works to the 6,430 Corcoran objects that it had acquired earlier this year. It will attempt to parcel out whatever it doesn’t want to other local cultural institutions (possibly including the Phillips).
Interestingly, in comments quoted by McGlone in today’s Washington Post, Loh confirmed my own skeptical take in 2013 on the proposed Corcoran relationship:
“The case with the Corcoran was not quite a partnership. It was more a friendly takeover,” Loh said [emphasis added]. “This [the deal with the Phillips] is a partnership between two equals . . . who have their own interests and have found commonalities.”
The new agreement would expand and rename the Phillips’ current Center for the Study of Modern Art, which would develop a new arts curriculum and digitize the museum’s archive of 9,500 scholarly books, exhibition catalogues and correspondence. The redefined center will be called “the University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at the Phillips Collection.”
The first beneficiaries of the new partnership will be UMD students, who will now get free admission to the Phillips and its Gauguin to Picasso show, which opens this Saturday.
In comments quoted in today’s joint statement, Dorothy Kosinski, the Phillips’ director, suggested that the UMD partnership will help her institution “redefine its role within the cultural community locally and globally,” as it “look[s] toward the museum’s 100th anniversary in 2021.”
The six-year term means that the relationship could end that year. But I assume this trial marriage will endure much longer, if it meets the couple’s expectations.
If not, they’ve given themselves an easy out, but they’ll have to figure out how to disentangle themselves and divvy up the shared facilities.