Skidmore Receives Getty Foundation Grant for Tang Museum

Getty grant will extend Tang's educational outreach

A $200,000 grant from the Getty Foundation will allow Skidmore’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery to dramatically expand its online presence, creating innovative learning resources based on its gallery exhibitions.

The Getty Foundation grant will provide funds to support a new Tang position of digital resources producer, an appointment that will help the museum “bring our online offerings to a wholly new level,” said John Weber, Dayton Director of the Tang Museum. “It will allow us to document, interpret, and comment on exhibitions in ways uniquely suited for long-term academic use.”

The digital resources producer will collaborate with Tang staff, faculty curators, and Skidmore technology staff to spearhead development of online resources about Tang exhibitions and collections in ways tailor-made for college faculty and students. Responsibilities of the position will include overseeing the production of web features that incorporate video and audio of curatorial, scholarly, and artist commentaries; contextual information; video walk-throughs; and 360-degree photography and online image sequences of the Tang’s original exhibitions.

“The Getty Foundation award will enable us to use digital technology to document the living exhibition, and provide curricular and pedagogical enrichment long after the exhibition has closed,” said Susan Kress, Skidmore’s vice president for academic affairs.

The goals of the grant include conveying more fully and vividly the experience of “living exhibitions” and also recording the ideas and insights they provoke. “As much as we plan and anticipate,” says Weber, “we can never predict everything we will learn from the objects when they are finally brought together in the gallery.” Reflecting this, the Tang will generate a significant proportion of its online resources after exhibitions open, rather than preparing web-based educational materials exclusively in advance based on texts, photographs, and pre-opening interviews, as museums have traditionally done. This approach will allow the museum to capture the surprises and unexpected intellectual connections that are triggered by art objects within the gallery’s architectural space.

When the museum’s Getty-funded activities are completed in three years, Weber expects that the Tang program will serve as a national model for college and university museums interested in ways to combine online and real-world learning opportunities.