Modern museums, places where objects of art and culture are collected and displayed, emerged in the late-19th century. Yet over a hundred years later, many of the conventions of collecting, display, internal organization, external engagement, and museum governance have remained intact. In our rapidly changing world, especially here in the future-facing Silicon Valley, what does it mean to be a museum in 2019? What should our priorities be? How should we organize ourselves internally and present ourselves to our audiences? Using as a case study the Cantor Arts Center, the museum founded by the Stanford family in 1894, my talk will explore the opportunities and challenges of operating a 19th-century institution in the 21st century.

Susan Dackerman is the John and Jill Freidenrich Director of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Stanford, Dackerman was a Getty scholar and consortium professor at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where she was working on a book about the materiality of the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer’s prints. In addition to organizing exhibitions and writing about art and its histories from the Renaissance to the present, she also is committed to refining the role of the university museum. In her various museum positions, she has been a liaison between academia and the museum and developed programs for integrating academic work into the galleries, museum publications and public events. Prior to her work on the West Coast, Dackerman was the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums from 2005 to 2015 where she participated in the planning for the renovation of the building and galleries, as well as the reconceptualization of the role of the art museum on a university campus.