The Hood Museum of Art received a $1.25 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the further incorporation of the Hood's resources into the College's curriculum, according to Kathy Hart, associate director of the Hood and curator of academic programming. The grant will provide the funds necessary to hire two additional Hood staff members a coordinator of academic programming and a part-time art handler.
The Mellon Foundation which aims to integrate college and university museums into the "intellectual life" of their respective campuses selected the Hood because of its commitment to making resources available to students, Hart said.
"The Hood exists to serve the curriculum," Brian Kennedy, director of the Hood, said.
Kennedy announced earlier this month that he will leave the Hood to become the president and chief executive officer of the Toledo Museum of Art in September.
The Hood's Bernstein Study-Storage Center the facility where the Hood's classrooms are located and where the permanent collection is stored currently receives between 350 and 500 student visitors each term, according to Hart.
Although many students take advantage of the Center, there is still a significant portion of campus that is unaware of the Hood's offerings, according to Kennedy.
"It's more important that we teach with objects in Dartmouth classrooms than provide exhibitions to the greater public," Kennedy said, adding that the Hood staff is already doing a "good job" integrating art in the classroom, though it could be improved.
Professors from a wide variety of academic departments use objects from the Hood's collection in their classes, Hart said. Each term, approximately 20 to 25 classes study objects from the collection in the Bernstein Center, she said.
The positions funded by the Mellon Foundation grant will work to increase awareness among faculty and staff about the breadth of the Hood's collection, and will provide students with better opportunities to take advantage of the Hood's resources, Hart said.
Hart said she expects to begin the search for the coordinator of academic programming within the month, but is unsure when the search for a part-time art handler will commence.
"There's going to be a little bit of delay in that, I don't know exactly when it will happen for administrative reasons," Hart said.
The primary responsibilities of the coordinator of academic programming will be to increase faculty and student awareness of the collection's offerings and help integrate Hood objects into course syllabi, according to Hart.
"What I always think of people who work with faculty this way is that they will be the Virgil to Dante they're leading them through the collection and showing them what's available," Hart said.
The coordinator of academic programming will also incorporate his or her expertise into guest lectures for classes visiting the Bernstein Center, Hart said.
The hiring of the new part-time art handler will help increase the efficiency of teaching in the center since this responsibility is currently shared by other staff members, according to Hart.
"If we increase our volume of activity, we need more help in actually handling the art and getting it out of storage for students and faculty to look at," Hart said. "It's very time consuming to do this type of work handling art is not something you do quickly."
Each year, between 3,500 to 5,000 objects are pulled from the Hood's collection which contains over 65,000 objects for use by faculty and students, according to Hart.
The new art handler will be responsible for communicating with faculty about which objects professors would like to use, locating the objects and arranging their transportation to and from the classroom, Hart said.
Art history Professor Jane Carroll said she was "so excited" to learn about the grant because she uses objects from the Hood's collection in almost every course she teaches.
"When students do course reviews, it's always one of the things they cite," Carroll said. "They say that working with original objects makes it all seem so real."
Carroll said the Hood's resources have been key additions to her classes, particularly a First Year Seminar she taught last year on Albrecht Durer, the German Renaissance painter.
"The Hood has some of Durer's really fabulous engravings and wood cuts," Carroll said. "Everyone picked out one object, researched it and did a presentation in front of the original at the end of the course. There are so few colleges where you can do something like that."
While the grant will provide the College with $1.25 million, $1 million of the grant will create an endowment to support the new positions in future years.
The rest of the money received from the Mellon Foundation $250,000 will be available to the College "immediately" and will be used to hire the new staff members while the endowment matures, Hart said.
The Mellon Foundation also challenged the College and the Hood to match the $1 million portion of the grant in three years or less, according to Kennedy.
"We've already raised $300,000 of our match," Kennedy said. "We've got three years to raise it, so I have no doubt that we'll do it."
The Hood previously received similar grants from the Mellon Foundation in 1992, 1995 and 2000, according to a College press release.
