Focused on growing its diverse art collection, the Wichita falls museum of art at MSU Is trying to figure out how best to handle their ever expanding collection.
The vault is where a lot of what’s been collected in the museum’s 50 year history is stored.
It’s also where the museum hopes to be able to store more as they expand their works of art on paper by American artists, but at the same time make room by finding good homes for pieces that just don’t fit into their mission moving forward.
“The Wichita Falls Museum of Art of MSU is 50 years old and it began collecting art in 1967,” Francine Carraro, Director of Wichita Falls Museum of Art of MSU, said. “The mission of the museum changed slightly in 2005 when the university aquired the museum and we joined forces and before that the museum specialized in not only art, but history, it had a children’s museum and a science museum.”
The mission now is to exhibit, collect and interpret visual art, but Carraro said if a piece of art does not fit that mission, they will go through a long, rigorous process of deaccessioning the piece and make sure the object is placed in appropriate museums.
“We are going to go through the process of identifying other history museums that would be interested in taking our histroical objects that we have deaccessioned,” Carraro said.
“This would be an example of a deaccession of an object that would no longer fit the mission of the museum. It’s a mason jar aquired in 1968,” Danny Bills, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, said.
Along with deaccessioning pieces, they’re always looking to grow their collection, but the accession process is just as important.
“This is a piece by Katherine Lionas Warren,” Bills said. “It was a donation by the artist. She teaches in Lawton at Cameron University.”
Bills and Carraro hope to continue collecting more art pieces like Warren in order to preserve history and keep art alive one piece at a time.
The recent additions to the museum will be included in the new aquisition exhibition in 2019.
