Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

The Case for the Campus Art Museum in an Age of Cuts

Daring exhibits, ongoing collecting and thoughtful deaccessioning are reassuring in an era of unsteady educational budgets and museum closures.

University campuses are about to fill with hopeful new students and cautious new faculty. Arriving more quietly, and usually with less fanfare, are the latest acquisitions of work by university art museums. In 2025, the Hammer Museum, affiliated with UCLA, accessioned 237 new items—including Nam June Paik’s 1990 work Antares and Paul Gauguin’s 1891 Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé. The University of Michigan Museum of Art, meanwhile, acquired mostly recent work, like Rachelle Baker’s Les Fleurs. One state away, the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Museum of Art picked up Grand Portage Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson’s Rolling Head. Back East, the Princeton Museum of Art gathered 333 works into its collection—from 19th-century Korean bottles and Southwest pottery to Nan Goldin prints.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Like more traditional cultural institutions, collecting at each of these museums is guided by the institution’s collection policy—a document highlighting areas of focus along with strategies for maintaining and loaning out objects. As DOGE cuts, D.E.I. rollbacks and new signage at the Smithsonian create rough waters for cultural institutions, collection policies help university museums hold steady. As Megan Barnard, deputy director and chief curator at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center put it, the school’s “policy has been in place for years, and it continues to be the consistent, guiding principle that informs our acquisitions and ensures that our collecting efforts support our institutional priorities and mission over time.”

Whatever instabilities the present political moment might bring to museum operations, university museum curators remain focused on their goals. Olivia Miller, executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the........

© Observer