The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum on the College Avenue campus will enter a new chapter in its history, with a new leader at its helm.
Suzanne Delehanty, founding director of the Miami Art Museum, was recently appointed director of the Zimmerli. Her term will begin April 1, according to a press release.
Delehanty said she has a special place in her heart for university museums and when a director search committee invited her to the University, she immediately felt a connection to the community.
“I just really loved all the people I met and thought the museum had amazing collections, and so it was really quite a serendipitous kind of thing,” said Delehanty, who is head of an independent arts consultation service. “The museum is poised to go to the next level, and I thought it would be exciting to be the director to help it get to the next level.”
Delehanty said she plans to begin her directorship by collectively acquiring a strategic plan for the museum.
The process will begin by engaging the community in a series of discussion groups in order to determine what they envision for the museum, she said.
“We have great strengths in terms of the permanent collection of the museum and the fact that we have a really diverse community to serve both on campus and beyond,” she said.
Some students, like School of Arts and Sciences sophomore Michael Bausher, are optimistic about the museum’s future with a new director.
“By appealing to the students interests, and [with] a new, lively director, I think that in no time that could easily put the Zimmerli Art Museum back in the spotlight for students here at Rutgers,” he said.
Delehanty said she wants to focus on the museum’s collective strengths, including Russian art, French art and their print collection.
“In this moment, we need to focus on how we can maximize our strengths and how we can manage the intellectual capital that’s available to us within the museum and really engage the audience,” she said.
School of Arts and Sciences first-year student Rachel Klein said upon her visit to the museum she enjoyed the Communist-era art displayed downstairs.
“I think it’d be a good idea to bring in different kinds of art from around the world, [from] different time periods,” Klein said.
There will be an effort to look at new forms of communication, which will bring in a wider array of audiences, Delehanty said.
“We’ll be looking at how we do publications, not only in print but electronically, as to bring our scholarship available to people broadly and cheaply, and make sure we are getting our message to people in the most effective way,” she said.
Delehanty said the social networking Web site Facebook may serve a key component to reaching out to more audiences for the Zimmerli’s future.
“I’d like students to feel that this is one of the coolest places on campus to be,” she said.
Rutgers College senior Sara Maung said she thinks utilizing social networking sites is a great idea, and although she has not gotten a chance to visit the museum yet, she hopes to soon.
“It sounds like [Delehanty] really wants to have the students interact with the museum because Facebook is something that students are very much involved with,” Maung said.
Delehanty said she thinks artistic and cultural awareness is a critical component in a student’s education.
“It’s really important for anybody who graduates from a university — whether their major is art history or biology — to see museums as a place for lifelong pleasure in learning, contemplation or activity,” she said. “Students should see museums as much a resource in their life as a library, but a library of images that can open up new worlds to you and where people can go and get restored.”
Delehanty said she sees her new job as director as an opportunity to harvest the museum’s curatorial departments.
“My role is to be their champion and help to be their editor, if you will,” she said. “We have more art and more ideas than time and money and space to present them, so we need to be very focused on these shows and do exhibitions that make the most sense for our public and maximizing our resources.”
— Heather Brookhart
contributed to this article
New director aims for change at Zimmerli
Published: Monday, February 23, 2009
Updated: Monday, February 23, 2009
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