Northwestern’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art has joined a relatively selective group of museums across the US with official accreditation.
“This allows us to be associated with a very small number of institutions in the country that have this distinction,” said David Alan Robertson, the museum’s director. “It’s something that has been part of my career that I wanted to see happen here as well.”
Fewer than 800 of the United States’ estimated 20,000 museums are accredited by the American Association of Museums, and only 14 percent of those museums are associated with a college or university.
Accreditation has been a topic of great discussion for at least ten years, said senior curator Debora Wood. But the goal didn’t seem obtainable until Robertson started working at the Block Museum in 2002, she said.
“He’s the one that really helped make the possibility of being accredited a reality,” Wood said. “In part, because he could see as an institution we already had so many things in place that would lead us toward accreditation.”
To become accredited, museums must conduct a year of self-study and then undergo a site visit. Then a national committee in Washington D.C. reviews the reports before making its final decision.
Wood said Robertson set higher standards when he became the museum’s third director. Since taking the job, the museum has grown to include about 15 employees, and staff has worked to improve storage of the museum’s artifacts.
“It’s really been great to see the museum grow so quickly in a short period of time,” Wood said.
Robertson was involved with accrediting the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago before coming to NU and serves as a peer reviewer for the American Association of Museums. Once or twice a year, he is asked to look into the accreditation and re-accreditation of institutions around the country.
Robertson, who received a doctorate in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania has worked at university museums for most of his career. He said university museums allow “open possibilities” that he fears public museums cannot, because they are driven more by marketing strategies.
“We can really tackle sometimes difficult subjects, controversial subjects. We’re also very much interested in advancing research and knowledge in the field,” Robertson said. “At every university campus everyone expects controversy. Everyone expects new ideas. One expects challenging concepts, and so forth.”