Treasure Troves

Displays of European paintings, exhibitions of Native American art, libraries of rare documents, repositories of unique chairs, even a collection on the history of witchcraft—these are just a few samples of what you can find in the museums and galleries at colleges and universities around the United States.

These campus museums and collections house an incredibly wide and deep range of materials and artifacts across many disciplines. They play a crucial role in the student experience, and not just for art or history students. Curators of these collections often take bold risks and cultivate unique exhibitions that help all types of faculty members enrich their courses.

“Artists have a way of breaking through old tropes and helping us see things in new ways,” says Amy Werbel, a professor of art history and museum professions at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “The space of an art museum can really transform the conversations we’re able to have.”

A professor with a course on sustainability, for example, might want to bring students to an exhibition on Indigenous land use and food justice, which involves universal access to nutritious and culturally appropriate food. A nursing instructor might use a visit to a museum to help students improve their visual acuity by studying paintings and observing nuances in color and detail; this type of training with artwork has been shown to improve accuracy in patient exams. Business and marketing majors could use museum art to inspire AI-generated works through an iterative process that starts with the original work and gets refined by students into something new that communicates an effective message.

Museums provide a space for these experiences, which can expand students’ learning and deepen their thinking about course content and the broader world. “Often, museums and galleries are spaces that are intentionally designed to provide breathing room,” Werbel says. 

The process of standing in front of a physical work of art, and debating its meaning with fellow classmates, is much different from learning from behind a desk or in front of a computer screen. “The opportunity to learn from, handle, see, and experience an actual art object is still our primary goal,” even as technology plays an increasing role in student life, says Kristina L. Durocher, the president of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries.

But campus museums are also weathering a number of challenges in the post-Covid era. Chief among them is funding, an increasingly critical issue for institutions seeing a drop-off in enrollment. Some museums are also grappling with debates about repatriation of ill-gotten artifacts and controversies over exhibitions exploring political issues.

All these pressure points add up to a delicate moment for the academic museum. Yet, even in the face of such challenges, some campuses are expanding their collections. Indeed, what makes academic museums particularly vulnerable—their willingness to wrestle with thorny topics—may also be part of what makes them essential to the mission of higher education.

One of the greatest benefits of campus museums is that they allow universities and colleges to support hands-on, unique learning experiences. In the summer of 2024, Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) opened a new building for its Palmer Museum of Art, an $85 million project that relocated the museum and doubled its gallery space. The Palmer houses a huge range of artwork, from Asian and African artifacts to European painting and contemporary photography.

“For university art museums especially, you want to put as much of the collection on public view as you can,” says Erin Coe, the museum’s director at the time of this writing (she stepped down in November 2024 to take a position with the Rockwell Museum in New York).

Coe has worked in museums for the better part of thirty years but spent most of that time at traditional museums, including upstate New York’s Hyde Collection, a small art museum in a historic home. Her seven years directing the Palmer Museum, however, have shown her the unique power of an on-campus collection.

“[At] an academic museum, education is already the core of the mission,” she says. That foundation provides a clear focus for her and her staff and guides long-term plans for serving students and the community. The Palmer, Coe says, is committed to remaining accessible—admission is free—and creating space for teaching and research. 

“You don’t get off course. You’re not distracted. You can really have impact over time,” she says.
The new museum building also connects to this educational mission. The space is more accessible to visitors and provides studio classrooms and study centers for the first time at the museum. “It’s a bit like night and day at this point,” Coe says.

The Palmer was able to pull off the project to relocate and expand its collection without significant delays from the pandemic mostly because the plans and contractor bids were locked in beforehand, in 2019, according to Coe. And while most of the funding came from the university, the museum itself raised more than $20 million, Coe says, by courting donors and offering naming rights for galleries. “The new museum just attracted incredible support and philanthropy” from alumni and beyond, she says. “It’s a very tangible way of giving.”

The museum also enjoys support from academic leadership. B. Stephen Carpenter, the dean of Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture, sees the Palmer as an essential part of how the institution fulfills its mission. 

“A museum experience is an interdisciplinary learning opportunity that everyone has access to,” Carpenter says. “The museum is a learning space for every single student on this campus.”

Not only does it give all types of faculty the ability to enhance curricula but it also contributes to Penn State’s goals as a top-tier research institution, Carpenter says. Research “must include the arts,” he says. “It must include curating exhibitions that push boundaries and ask questions and create new knowledge.”

Not all academic museums are as expansive as the Palmer, but even smaller collections can enhance learning opportunities for the community, both on campus and off. 

That’s the aim of the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University. Named for a family of Italian immigrants that built a successful business empire in the region, the Castellani Museum has a unique collection. The museum houses paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by artists like French sculptor Auguste Rodin and American painter and graphic artist Robert Rauschenberg—all acquired by the Castellani family. But the museum has also been growing its collection of folk art, which includes a wide range of “art that is outlining or using some sort of cultural tradition,” says Ellen Owens, director of the Castellani Museum. Examples include beadwork of the Indigenous Tuscarora people, Puerto Rican “vejigante” masks worn during Carnival celebrations, and Turkish paper marbling, which involves painting on water to create a colorful design resembling a marble surface.

Henrik C. Borgstrom, associate provost at Niagara University, says the museum is a critical asset for the institution. “Really important artists are represented in the collection, and to have that at the fingertips of the faculty and students on the college campus is pretty remarkable,” he says.

The museum is a way of bolstering the Catholic university’s mission of supporting students not just intellectually but spiritually, mentally, and physically. “The idea that we have this space on campus that is really a kind of sacred space where students can go to have a different kind of intellectual and spiritual [experience] is very important,” Borgstrom says.

Chase Kunz, an art history with museum studies major at Niagara, has learned a lot about her future profession through an internship she completed at the Castellani Museum. “Seeing everything operate is different from learning about how these things operate,” she says. “It’s more real-life, there’s a lot more things that can go wrong. It’s really interesting to learn about the problem solving that goes into these types of events that happen at the museum.”

But beyond her own professional development, she shares Borgstrom’s sense that the museum is valuable to students of all majors. “It offers a quiet environment that encourages students to appreciate art,” she says. “It’s just a different way to approach learning, and I think it’s very important to have these kinds of resources on campus.”

In one example of a unique learning experience, the museum invited students to a solar eclipse party in April 2024—Niagara University was in the path of totality—at which attendees could make eclipse-inspired artwork and participate in a costume contest. 

Despite being a valued part of the Niagara experience and a popular public attraction in western New York, the museum, Owens says, sometimes struggles to attract the philanthropic money it needs to survive. This is due to a number of factors. Each academic museum has a unique funding relationship to its parent institution, but the general public often assumes it is fully funded by the university and doesn’t need additional help. This is often not the case. “It takes a lot of relationship building to get through that [misconception],” Owens says.

On top of that, university departments sometimes end up courting the same donors as the museum, creating potentially awkward conversations to avoid stepping on toes, according to Owens. “That’s really, really hard,” Owens says. As if that weren’t enough, academic museums have to compete with other cultural institutions—sometimes other local museums—for donor money. 

When academic museums do manage to attract donors, Owens says it can be a hard sell to have them support operational costs (like personnel and supplies) that are less glamorous than, say, naming rights for a gallery or exhibition.

Add it all up, and funding is a major challenge for some academic museums—one that can become more acute at higher education institutions facing budget cuts.

One recent example played out at the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). The museum shut down abruptly in January 2024, when museum staff returned from the holiday break and learned that all their positions were being eliminated. This came after the university postponed a long-planned HVAC upgrade, which would have allowed the museum to display a wider range of artwork.

“It was a complete shock,” says Durocher, who was the director of the museum at the time, a role she had occupied for a dozen years. She helped grow it from a small gallery for the art department to a university-wide collection. With the elimination of the staff, the collection has now been reverted to an art-department exhibition space. (Durocher now works as the visual arts director at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Fine Arts Center, in addition to serving in the role of president of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries.)

Michele Dillon, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at UNH, says the decision to close the museum was due to a “major budget reset” at the college in 2023 that required her to trim the college’s expenses by 3.6 percent, or around $1.5 million. “I sought to protect our 17 academic departments. . . . Unfortunately, as a result of the budget reset, the college was no longer able to support the Museum of Art,” she wrote in an email.

One potential way to overcome these funding challenges, according to Durocher, is to strengthen an academic museum’s relationships beyond the campus. “Many of them do phenomenal outreach in their communities” already, Durocher says, and that broader support can help people see value in an academic museum and convince them to support it financially.

This is a big focus for Owens at the Castellani Museum. The galleries there regularly showcase local and regional artists who aren’t necessarily connected to the university. Such efforts are an example of using the museum as a “convener” for the community, Owens says.

“Museums certainly have a place in the academic, deep-learning, project-based critical-thinking zone,” she says, “and then they have a place in this third-space, coming-together [zone].”

Funding is not the only issue facing academic museums right now. Museums of all stripes—not just academic ones—have been facing calls to return, or repatriate, artifacts that were unethically sourced from Native American communities or looted from other countries. Many major museums in the United States have already begun to ship such pieces back to the places they came from. 

This has long been a demand of Indigenous communities. Jack Potter Jr., tribal chairman of the Redding Rancheria Tribal Council, wrote in an op-ed in the Redding Record Searchlight that it is especially harmful for these institutions to hold on to human remains. “A universal right of all people dating to ancient times is burying their own according to the traditions of their culture and faith,” Potter wrote. “I try to understand why . . . remains are still stored in boxes on shelves or stuffed into closets like old forgotten souvenirs or keepsakes.”

The pressure is also coming from the federal government. Recent updates to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (originally passed in 1990) have sped up the timeline for, and increased enforcement of, the legal requirement to inventory and return Native American artifacts.

“You want to teach students from ethically sourced material,” says Durocher, noting that her organization, the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, recently updated its ethical collecting practices.

The Peabody Museum at Yale University, for example, recently underwent a renovation that included an effort to “better acknowledge its complicated history,” as the Yale Daily News put it. This involved returning “450 ancestral remains” and “460 cultural items” to Indigenous communities across the country, according to the Daily News. The repatriation efforts are ongoing and include conversations with Native communities to decide on the future of other artifacts in the collection. Peabody Museum director David Skelly told the Daily News, “A big part of my job as director is figuring out what we need to do; fixing this is not the right word, we have to address it, and we have to be listening more than we’re talking.”

A 2023 ProPublica investigation also brought more attention to the efforts of colleges and universities to assess and return these types of artifacts. Though some institutions highlighted by ProPublica had historically resisted repatriation, others were already deep into the work.

The University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, ProPublica noted as an example, had 4,500 Native American human remains in its collection. In 2019, the university hired Celise Chilcote-Fricker, an anthropology professor, to bring the museum into compliance with federal repatriation laws. She spent the better part of three years lining up the processes and funding to do that work, which resulted in an investment of nearly $1 million to support repatriation efforts. The money goes toward hiring new staff and creating an inventory of ancestral remains from Indigenous nations.

Chilcote-Fricker says the museum has so far returned 18 percent of the Indigenous remains in its collection and expects to be at 43 percent in another year’s time. “It can be a slow process,” she says, noting that the university and museum have had to build trust with Native communities.

ProPublica also reports that about a dozen academic institutions have since pledged to “redouble” their repatriation initiatives. This is due not only to federal regulations and public pressure, Chilcote-Fricker says, but also to a changing of the guard in academia in the past decade. “There’s a very different perspective coming into play,” she says, which is more interested in addressing the human rights violations of the past.

Artwork and exhibitions are often designed specifically to spark debate and conversation, but certain displays at academic museums have recently attracted unexpected controversy and censorship.

At Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho, a 2023 exhibition on big health issues was censored by the college itself. Just days before the display opened at the college’s Center for Arts and History, several artworks dealing with abortion were removed. The college cited an Idaho law that, according to Boise State Public Radio, “prohibits public funds be used to pay for or promote abortions.” Four pieces from artist Lydia Nobles were eliminated. The art included interviews with women discussing their abortion experiences.

In 2020 at Wilmington University, a piece of student artwork was removed from an online art exhibition after the administration decided the art’s violent nature “did not meet the university’s values,” according to Delaware Online. The artwork in question was a parody of a classic Italian painting of a beheading; the student’s version depicted Donald Trump’s head under the sword of an anthropomorphic Statue of Liberty.

These instances of censorship of controversial material often represent a clash between academic museum curators and university administrators. Werbel, the museum studies professor, says it’s normal for administrators and other interested parties to be consulted during the curatorial process, especially for controversial exhibitions. “All of those people should be at the table before the exhibition opens,” she says.

But Werbel notes it can become a problem when public relations managers or other officials step in at the last minute to circumvent careful decisions made by trained museum professionals. “That is what we really need to speak out against,” Werbel says. “Academic freedom is meant to recognize the professional expertise of people in academia.”

Owens of the Castellani Museum and Coe of the Palmer Museum both note the importance of exhibitions that tackle tough subjects. At the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, for example, the Castellani Museum took down a permanent installation of landscape paintings and hung prints of digitally created artwork from Ukrainian artist Bella Logachova. The artwork displayed a deeply personal perspective from inside the war. “We thought it was really important to share from her perspective what was happening,” Owens says.

The exhibition received strong support from the community and spurred collaborations with local Ukrainian groups, including a Ukrainian community day at the museum. QR codes directed visitors to a fundraiser for Ukrainian war victims. “Ultimately that experiment was incredibly powerful,” Owens says.

Coe has taken a similar approach at Penn State. The Palmer Museum has long expressed explicit support for the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, and also recently mounted an exhibition about displacement of Indigenous tribes in Pennsylvania. “We’ve received no backlash,” Coe says. “We have a very open-minded audience here.” 

With this wind at their back, the Palmer staff hopes to continue tackling important topics and conversations through art. This approach exemplifies the value of an academic museum, especially at a time when campus protests and strident student activism are on the rise.

“At university art museums, you can take more risks,” Coe says. She sees more space to be experimental and inventive—and indeed, sees that type of work as part of the mission of an academic museum to 
spark conversations.

Her colleague, Dean Carpenter, echoes this point: “Works of art, when positioned intentionally, require us to ask questions we might not ask otherwise.”

Unique Collections

The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection

In the 1880s, Cornell University’s first president, Andrew Dickson White, assembled early Latin texts on, as the university’s website describes it, the “theory of the heresy of witchcraft” and “church dogma on heresy,” beginning the Ivy League institution’s Witchcraft Collection.

Today, the collection has expanded to include more modern “manifestations of the belief in witchcraft,” according to the site. The materials are not what most people would assume when they hear the word “witchcraft,” says Laurent Ferri, curator of the pre-1800 collections in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell. The items are less about the modern Halloween interpretation of witches and more about the histories of theology, demonology, religious heresy, and the Inquisition. Transcripts of court trials of witches, including victim depositions, are a key part of the collection.

Some parts of the collection—such as modern pop culture items like posters for movies about sorcery and contemporary references like newsletters from Wiccan communities—are accessible to the public, Ferri explains. Most of the older materials—including fifteenth-century Latin editions of the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a legal and theological handbook on witchcraft—are likely impenetrable to a nonacademic audience, mostly due to steep language barriers. “People overestimate their ability to use some materials,” he says. But for scholars and visitors alike, Ferri says, the materials spark important conversations. “It’s a collection that makes us think about humans and societies and the right of individuals to have their own beliefs and lifestyle,” he says.

The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

From its location in downtown Sante Fe, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts reaches a large audience of tourists who come to see its expansive collection of work from Indigenous artists around the country.
The museum is part of the nearby Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), which was founded in 1962 as an arts boarding school serving Indigenous high school students. 

The school is now a tribal university with hundreds of students and a range of academic programs from creative writing to studio arts. The original collection of the art students’ work eventually grew into a full-fledged museum with a unique remit: showcasing contemporary stoneware, ceramics, sculpture, and beadwork made by Indigenous artists on campus and beyond. “What really sets us apart [from other Native American collections] is we’re only contemporary,” says Patsy Phillips, director of the museum.

The contemporary focus—most other museums of Indigenous arts feature traditional artwork as well—makes it one of the few galleries of its kind globally and attracts an international base of artists. 

But the museum is also crucial to the learning experience at IAIA, allowing students to gain the skills of curating and mounting exhibitions of their own work and that of others. “We can provide hands-on experience for our students,” says Manuela Well-Off-Man, the museum’s chief curator.

The Chair Library at Salem College

The space isn’t grand or ostentatious, but it is certainly unique: two rooms at Salem College that are home to forty-five different chairs. Everything from a classic Windsor to a modern Eames are on display on illuminated shelves lining the walls. Students can observe, study, and even take out and interact with the chairs for closer study or inspiration. “That’s why it’s called a chair ‘library’ and not a ‘museum,’ ” says curator Rosa Otero, an associate professor of design at the private women’s liberal arts college in North Carolina.

The Chair Library is the only of its kind in the United States and has value as a space for studying aspects of art and design history that are reflected in the chairs. The collection grew out of a collaboration between Otero and a local business executive with a “common interest and passion” for unique or iconic chairs, she recalls. It keeps a low profile, in the basement of the fine arts building. It’s mostly frequented by students, some of whom are required to visit for assignments for art history or drawing courses.

But Otero says it also attracts a large swath of the general public. “Little children will love it as much as older people,” she says. It’s also a common stop on the college’s admissions tours. “It has become a recruiting tool,” she adds.

The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago

The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) on the campus of the University of Chicago is small but mighty.

Housed in a building on campus is one of the United States’ most significant collections of artifacts from the ancient cultures of West Asia and North Africa. 

Though smaller than some of its mainstream peers, like the Field Museum or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the institute houses some show-stopping artifacts of its own (like a colossal statue of King Tut), but that’s not the main draw. “It’s that faculty connection that makes our members come back,” says Matthew Welton, associate director of programming, marketing, and communications for the institute. 

The institute was founded more than a hundred years ago as a teaching collection for the University of Chicago’s archaeology and history students. Today, it’s also frequented by grammar school field-trippers and church groups, Welton says, who are drawn by the faculty lectures and workshops that take visitors deeper. Its smaller scale and tight focus offer the benefit that after just one visit, someone can walk away with an understanding of what life was like in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, Welton says.

Lead photo: The Gallery of European Art at the Palmer Museum of Art (© Jeremy Bittermann/JSBA, Courtesy Allied Works)