Vibrant compositions of Latin America art will be brought together in Lawrence, Kansas this coming year. The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas (KU) awaits the arrival of an excellent selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American works of art from museums as far away as Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Denver, and Austin. These loaned pieces will significantly augment the Spencer’s permanent collection and enhance the University’s Latin American Studies program. One might be surprised to discover that MIT had its hand in bringing these works, which include a painting by famous Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco, to America’s heartland.

Based at the Institute since 1995, the Museum Loan Network (MLN) is the first comprehensive national collection-sharing program in the country. Through the Network’s facilitation, "treasures" hidden in one museum’s basement come to light in another. These underutilized objects are exposed to communities that might not otherwise have the opportunity to experience them. "Since its inception," states MLN Director Lori Gross, "the MLN has dedicated its energies to helping institutions share the great wealth of art and objects of cultural heritage with audiences nationwide." The MLN indeed serves as a network, connecting museums to museums, and museums to communities.

Works borrowed from one museum fill gaps in another’s collection. The Spencer, for instance, had no previous tradition of collecting Latin American art despite a strong Latin American Studies program at KU. With the loaned sculpture and painting, Spencer’s director, Andrea Norris, related that "not only will students in Latin American art have original material for research, all KU students and the Spencer’s general audience will be able to experience the history of art with this added Latin American dimension."

To help realize collaborations among institutions, the MLN has established a series of grant programs that support every step of the lending process, including planning, research, programming, publications, shipping, and installation. In addition to funding the actual lending of art and historical objects, the MLN awards grants to museums who wish to survey their own collections and add them to the MLN’s online directory of objects. This searchable database serves, in effect, as a shared permanent collection for museums nationwide.

Over the years, the MLN has awarded numerous grants to university museums and galleries. These loans provide significant didactic opportunities for academic communities. Professors and students alike often take active roles in these projects. In 1998, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art of Cornell University was awarded a travel grant to investigate works of art at the Yale University Art Gallery, which holds a world-renowned collection of Italian Renaissance painting. Cornell art history professor Claudia Lazzaro accompanied the assistant curator on this research trip. Their successful excursion resulted in an MLN implementation grant, and four fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian paintings were loaned to the Johnson for long-term exhibition. These works, integrated into the museum’s permanent collection, are utilized in Cornell’s art history curriculum. Lazarro said that having these four pieces "will create an interaction with the works in the existing collection" and enable students to make important comparisons.

So how did the Museum Loan Network find its home at MIT? Launched in 1995, the MLN is administered by MIT’s Office of the Arts and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts. Because of its strong commitment to the arts and excellence in science and technology, MIT was chosen as the MLN’s administrative site. "This innovative national project fits naturally and well in our environment, which nurtures and draws strength from both technology and the arts," said President Vest at the program’s inception.

Because of the Institute's exceptional computer consulting resources at the Educational Media Creation Center (EMCC), the online components of the MLN program have developed swiftly and with much sophistication. The MLN Directory currently lists over 6,000 objects available for loan and continues to grow each day. Any U.S. museum may access this illustrated database, located on the MLN Website, free of charge. On the publicly-accessible part of the MLN site, time and space put no restraints on viewers who wish to experience an exhibition from a distance or after it has been dismantled. To date, the MLN has presented nine online virtual 3-D exhibitions based on collaborations and installations funded by the MLN, ranging from tours of Buddhist sculpture to explorations of African art.

Tremendous encouragement and support have been given to the MLN from members of MIT's thriving arts community. Alan Brody, associate provost for the Arts, remarks, "the Network has pioneered and nurtured new methods of collaboration among museums across the country, widening the public’s access to rarely-seen works of art and facilitating exchanges not only of objects but of ideas. It is the embodiment of an idea about what great museums, large and small, can be; of mutual respect; and of service to all communities. In this way, the arts can once again serve as a model for enterprises in science and technology."

In 1999, The Chronicle of Higher Education deemed the MLN "matchmaker to the art world." But as Brody notes the MLN "is more than simply a vehicle of exchange of collections." Indeed the Network’s interest in cooperation is wide-ranging. "We believe interdisciplinary collaboration can yield new ideas and make them accessible to many more people, promoting community dialogue," Lori Gross explains. "Both museums and the objects they hold can be catalysts for this collaborative process."

To explore and expand upon this idea, the MLN organized a series of three "think tanks" entitled Museum as Catalyst for Interdisciplinary Collaboration, two of which convened at MIT over the past year. Participants included educators, visual and performance artists, scientists, actors, dancers, museum professionals, librarians, philanthropists, historians, and composers. This extraordinary assemblage of leaders honing in on such a pertinent topic was bound to yield dynamic results. "In these think tanks we’ve been able to push the edges a bit and hopefully go back into the real world and create models that work," says Gross.

MIT was the ideal host environment for such a gathering. At the second session last October, participants attended MIT’s 50^th Anniversary Celebration of the School of Humanities and Social Science. The colloquium Asking the Right Questions served as a thought-provoking springboard for dialogue at that meeting. The ground-breaking conversations begun at these three convenings will be published in a document later this fall.

But the outcomes of these sessions weren’t just talk. One very concrete result was a pilot collaboration forged between the MLN and the American Composers Forum, called Museums, Composers, and Communities. This project looks to composers to help change the ways in which museums interact with their communities and the ways in which patrons relate to exhibits. On MLN travel grants, composers lend their unique perspective as they journey alongside museum staff visiting potential lending institutions. MLN implementation grantees can apply for funds to support a composer-in-residence who creates an original piece of music reflecting the spirit of the exhibition and the museum’s local community.

So sounds, not only sights, of Latin America will be coming to the Spencer Museum of Art this year. The museum has selected composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank to collaborate with the KU music, history, and art departments to create educational programming for the exhibit and prepare new musical works for presentation to the university and surrounding community. Director Andrea Norris says, "We are still envisioning and exploring possibilities and wondering about the complexities of writing an original work and then getting it performed. As the composer project thrusts us into new territory, we find the stretch invigorating."

To date, the MLN has awarded $3.3 million to 168 museums in 48 states and territories across the country. It is indeed a comprehensive resource, which on MIT’s behalf is making a significant impact on the museum world and communities well beyond.

If you would like to find out more about the MLN, see a complete list of MLN-funded projects, or take a virtual tour of an exhibition, please visit their Website at http://loanet.mit.edu. If you would like to request a copy of their yearly newsletter, MLN News, which highlights grantee projects, or the forthcoming Museum as Catalyst for Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Beginning a Conversation, please call 252-1888 or e-mail loanet@mit.edu.

SIDEBAR 1

Graduate students played an integral role in the Williams College Museum of Art’s (WMCA) exhibition of African art in 1998. With works borrowed from the outstanding collection of African art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Tradition and Transition showcased pieces from both museums’ holdings. The exhibition explored the notion of another culture’s fixed "tradition," which has often failed to acknowledge the fluid nature of an object’s meaning. From the research and advice of students in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and their professors, the WMCA generated labels and gallery guides that addressed these issues and significantly, as Associate Curator Vivian Patterson reported, "provoked thought relevant to the display and interpretation of objects from a non-Western culture."

SIDEBAR 2

Loans facilitated through the MLN provide new opportunities for research and study. In one particularly innovative match, the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) of the University of Rochester borrowed 31 objects from five New England museums for an exhibition focused on a singular painting from its own collection – John Singleton Copley’s unfinished portrait of Colonial silversmith John Hurd. Using artifacts from Hurd’s life and times, the MAG created an interdisciplinary exhibition that presents a historical and cultural context for the painting. With the MLN funds, the museum published a scholarly catalogue and organized a corresponding symposium that explored the genius of both men, as well as the impact of the American Revolution on daily life in Colonial America.

SIDEBAR 3

Know of a museum looking to borrow a 1950s power lawnmower? Or how about a computer joy stick controller from 1984? Museums across the country need search no further than the MLN Directory to find excellent examples of twentieth-century industrial design. In 1999, the California State Polytechnic University Pomona was awarded a survey grant to identify objects available for loan from the university’s Channing Gilson Collection of industrial design. The selected works cover a wide-range of appliances, furniture, and other objects created by many of the twentieth century’s foremost designers. These include, among others, a Harry Bertoia lounge chair, a 1942 Henry Dreyfuss Hoover vacuum cleaner, and a 1950s Toastmaster toaster by Jean Reinecke. Ben Davis, former instructor at MIT’s Media Lab and research associate at CECI, points out that the MLN directory functions as a digital broker – making a myriad of things, like the accessibility of these excellently-designed utensils, possible. He says, "The MLN from its inception has been a digital brokerage that triples as a digital thinking tool and a digital collaborative tool."

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