Where in the World Was Lee?

Yesterday, my husband, son and I were appropriately observing the holiday by driving home on the Christopher Columbus Highway (aka Route 80), after visiting daughter Joyce at Penn State. She is the only woman among 15 newly initiated graduate students in that university's highly regarded acoustics engineering department. (Calling Lawrence Summers!)

CultureGrrl being CultureGrrl, she fled the family golf outing after 11 holes to hightail it to the Palmer Museum of Art for a quick look-see before closing time. The director there (whom I did not meet on this rushed visit) is Jan Muhlert (below), about whom I knew I had previously written. But at first I couldn't quite place her.

Then, it came back to me: I had seen her younger self in a photo illustrating one of my own articles---an in-depth piece on museum deaccessioning, published in the May 1990 issue of ARTnews. At that time she was director of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. Her current position, like her former one, is consistent with her specialty in early 20th-century American art: The Palmer's collection is particularly strong in American modernism.

She rated a headshot in my article, because she was at that time chairman of the Professional Practices Revision Committee of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which had drafted a statement to significantly strengthen and clarify the vague deaccessioning guidelines of the AAMD. As a result of the committee's work, AAMD stipulated that deaccession proceeds should be used only for acquisitions.

But Muhlert's committee had intended the guidelines to go even further. In our 1990 phone interview, she had told me that the draft made it clear that deaccessions should "not be made because the market is healthy. They should be made based on a policy decision that the museum no longer projects any need for that object."

But the actual guidelines, while prohibiting disposal decisions based on "fashion or taste," fell short of requiring that a museum sell only objects that it would never need. More and more, decisions are predicated on so-called "redundancy." It's not: What objects will we never need? It's: What objects can we manage to do without, so that we can further our collecting goals of the moment?