Newest exhibit at Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum is on deaccessioning artwork
The Brauer Museum of Art recently opened an exhibit close to museum director Jonathan Canning’s heart and one that inevitably will strike a chord with many people in the Valparaiso University community.
The Education Gallery is featuring a display curated by Canning on deaccessioning art, with an explanation of what the process is and examples from the Brauer’s collection of pieces that the museum can and cannot divest from.
The exhibit opened March 29.
“I actually haven’t decided on an end date because I haven’t anything to follow it,” said Canning, who started in his role in late August, a couple days before students arrived on campus.
The museum closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and Canning’s hiring marked the start of its refresh and reopening, months before VU President Jose Padilla announced plans to deaccession the museum’s three cornerstone pieces to raise funds for renovations of dorms for first-year students.
When Canning arrived, he found most of the museum’s galleries had been installed but the main works were on paper, which had been up “well over a year” and shouldn’t be displayed for more than a few months at a time.
By November, the museum’s main three galleries had been rehung with student assistance. The first temporary exhibit, which closed last week, was timed with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s birthday and celebrated Black artists.
The temporary exhibits also included pop-ups on request from various professors, including one on works of Hispanic origin and another focusing on the graphic novel.
Then it was time for Canning to turn his attention to the Education Gallery, which also featured works on paper that had been up longer than they should have been, “by which time the deaccession controversy was aflame on campus,” he said.
That started Feb. 8, when Padilla announced in a letter to the campus that university officials would consider “assets and resources that are not core or critical to our educational mission and strategic plan,” and reallocate them to support the university’s new strategic plan.
“In this instance, we intend to pay for the much-needed dorm renovations by using the proceeds from the sale of select paintings from the campus art museum,” Padilla said, going on to note that the university’s board “granted me the authority to sell the paintings at its October 2022 meeting.” The board reaffirmed that decision during a January meeting.
The paintings, which Padilla did not name in the letter, include O’Keeffe’s “Rust Red Hills,” Frederic E. Church’s “Mountain Landscape” and “The Silver Vale and the Golden Gate” by Childe Hassam.
Collectively, the paintings are worth several million dollars; a university spokesman has said in an email that the projected cost of renovating Brandt Hall and Wehrenberg Hall is approximately $8 million.
Two of the three paintings were purchased through a restrictive trust agreement that states that the proceeds from the sale of those pieces is to be reinvested back into the museum’s collection.
“I decided to do a show on the museum field’s best practices for deaccessioning,” Canning said while going through the new exhibit.
It includes a printout of Padilla’s letter to the campus community, as well as a statement from the four major museum associations condemning the possible sale as a breach of museum ethics and best practices because the funds would not be reinvested into the museum’s collection and because of the tenets of the restrictive trust that provided two of the works.
There’s also a statement on the controversy surrounding the sale of the artwork, including whether it’s acceptable for the university to use the museum’s collection as capital reserve to meet budgetary needs.
“The university believes it is,” the statement notes. “Among museums, however, such an act is an anathema. Donors either gave works of art or the funds to acquire them specifically to enrich the cultural life of the community. It was not their intention to support operating costs, programmatic expenses, or other needs.”
Works may be deaccessioned, Canning said, for an assortment of reasons, including their condition or quality; whether the museum acquired them ethically; because they are duplicates of work already in the collection; and because they don’t fit within the museum’s mission, among other reasons. The museum’s mission focuses on Midwest artists and world Christian art.
“I then went through the collections to see if we had examples,” he said, and selected works at the museum that could be taken through the deaccession process.
“One of the first questions you have to ask is, can you deaccession? Do you have permission?” he said.
The O’Keeffe and the Hassam paintings were purchased through the 1953 Sloan Trust Agreement, a restricted endowment.
“In the original trust agreement, Percy (Sloan) talked about thinning out his father’s paintings and deaccessioning the less useful ones,” Canning said.
That did not include the O’Keeffe and Hassam works, though the exhibit includes examples of works by Junius Sloan, Percy Sloan’s father, that are eligible for deaccession and others that are not.
“It’s autobiographical and it’s one of a prairie scene so it’s fairly rare,” Canning said, going over a work on the “keep” list. “We wouldn’t want to get rid of that.”
The museum’s collections committee voted in the 1980s to deaccession a print by Hassam of Fifth Avenue in New York City because it’s damaged. Someone tried to steal the print while it was housed in the university’s budding art collection, in the basement of Moellering Library, long before construction of the Brauer Museum.
“Though it’s been conserved, it got torn,” Canning said, pointing to a barely visible tear in the repaired work.
The print has been kept because as an example of the process of printmaking, he said, “but because of its tear, it had lost its value.”
Another work was both damaged and didn’t fit with the museum’s mission. Two pieces purportedly by surrealist Salvador Dalí also could be deaccessioned, Canning said, because Dalí lost control of the plate for a print and almost 1,000 of them were made. The second, a casted metal work, was meant to be a limited edition but again, Dalí lost control of the mold.
“They actually stamped these out like car hubs,” Canning said, adding he keeps them for their educational value but would not display them in another exhibit.
There’s a duplicate work on another wall and an 18th Century print with a convoluted background that doesn’t fit with the museum’s mission.
“An Italian artist makes a print in London in the 18th Century of a German artist’s 16th Century drawing of an English king,” Canning said.
Deaccessioning is a slow and deliberate process, with research to support removing a piece from a collection, “and then there’s the disposal process, because where does it go and what are the acceptable ways of disposing of it?” Canning said.
If a work is to be sold, best practice calls for a public sale by an auction house, with funds going back to purchase additional artwork or to care and conserve the pieces already in a collection, Canning said, adding the funds can’t go for museum salaries.
“There should be public transparency. That way you know it’s not being sold to the curator under the table for peanuts,” he said.
When Canning was curator at Loyola University in Chicago around 15 years ago, he and the director of the museum there determined that some Civil War documents were not part of the museum’s mission.
He researched the documents and went through the museum’s advisory committee to present his case. The committee agreed and passed along its recommendation to the university’s president, who signed off on deaccessioning the documents.
The material was then sold by public auction.
“The whole idea came from the director and me and went all the way to the top,” Canning said, adding the funds from the sale went back into the museum’s collection fund.
The Brauer Museum isn’t the first to curate an exhibit on deaccessioning artwork. DePaul University in Chicago put together an exhibit of works under consideration for the process in January 2010, according to information provided by Kristina Durocher, president of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, of which Canning is a member.
“This exhibition spotlights the deaccessioning of objects from DePaul’s collection, inviting scholars from art history, philosophy, and anthropology — and visitors — to weigh in on the works of art and their fate,” notes a synopsis of the exhibit on the university’s website.
DePaul University has an explicit policy for deaccessioning artwork, drafted in 2002 and amended in 2016, when Padilla was the university’s general counsel, that calls for any proceeds from jettisoned works “to be placed in the Art Endowment Fund and used for future purchases.”
Deaccessioning is an established and accepted practice for all collecting institutions following professional policies and procedures set by AAM and the museum field, Durocher said in an email.
“Deaccessioning is conducted transparently, and for academic museums, often involves an advisory committee composed of campus and/or community stakeholders,” she said. “The process requires a rigorous re-evaluation of an organization’s collection with the goal of improving it by removing works of art or cultural objects that fall outside of the collecting scope and mission of the institution.”
The Brauer Museum of Art is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and is located in the Valparaiso University Center for the Arts, 1709 Chapel Drive. For more information, go to www.valpo.edu/brauer-museum-of-art/.
