$1.2 million grant to support Tang's programs, mission

Skidmore has received a $1.2 million grant from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund in support of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery's museum-based learning program.

The Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund grant will virtually fulfill a three-to-one matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, guaranteeing that the college will achieve the $4.8 million endowment needed to ensure the continuance of key components already in process at the Tang. These include supporting two new positions (an associate curator and an assistant registrar devoted to faculty and student collaborations) and providing funds to help the Skidmore faculty use the museum in their courses and create exhibitions of their own. The new endowment will also enhance the museum's capacity to invite nationally and internationally distinguished visiting artists, speakers, and scholars to campus. Finally, it will sustain a faculty seminar about museums and museum-based teaching, and help maintain the museum's newly re-launched state-of the-art website.

It will also support and dramatically expand the unique teaching program begun when the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery opened on campus in 2000. Besides stimulating academic learning in transformative new ways, the museum's programs are designed to deepen students' intercultural and global understanding, to preserve the long-term teaching value of museum exhibitions after they have closed, and to build new audiences for the arts both on campus and beyond. Building on work accomplished in the museum's first decade, the grant will provide for visiting lectures and visiting artists, faculty-curated exhibits, and outreach to other faculty members at Skidmore to enable them to incorporate the museum into their teachings.

This expansion positions the Tang Museum to continue to play a leading and visionary role in both higher education and the museum world. By strengthening the Tang and the quality of its educational programming, the grant also increases access to and enhances the museum's outreach programs that serve roughly 5,000 children per year from Albany and the greater Capital District.

"The Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund grant represents a significant moment in the development of a signature program at Skidmore College by enabling us to expand access to one of our core assets. The Tang Teaching Museum presents opportunities for learning that stimulate, provoke, and engage - not only in the fields of visual art and art history but across the full spectrum of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities," said Skidmore President Philip A. Glotzbach. "This grant ensures that even more Skidmore students and faculty members - as well as visitors from beyond the campus?will be able to benefit from the visionary and generative power of art as a creative catalyst helping to deepen their learning experience."

Laurie M. Tisch, founder and president of the Tisch Illumination Fund, said, "The Fund seeks out ways in which it can partner with dynamic organizations that pioneer new ways of illuminating their communities, and the Tang Museum embodies this objective in everything it does. We like to be early supporters of new efforts to help get an initiative off the ground so it can start affecting lives. But in some cases the need is just as great to enable an organization doing great work to have an even broader reach?and I know the Tang Museum will do just that."

According to John Weber, Dayton Director of the Tang Museum, "This exciting grant supports the parts of the Tang's program that are the most innovative and distinctive, namely our collaborations with faculty to create exhibitions and object-oriented learning that engages Skidmore students in the museum as part of their education here. This grant allows us to support faculty and student work at the museum in a truly breathtaking range of ways and degrees."

Conceived as a catalyst for engaged and transformative learning, the Tang Museum was designed to be both a showcase for the finest contemporary art and a center for exploring interdisciplinary ideas. From its earliest planning stages, the new museum was imagined as a teaching and learning resource to equal the library, the science laboratory, and the art studio.

The College's trailblazing program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge was strengthened during the three-year residency of internationally prominent artist and museum critic Fred Wilson, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Wilson helped Skidmore faculty members to build teaching expertise in museum-based pedagogy - a way of teaching that draws on the inherent power of objects, artworks, and artifacts to engage the intellect as well as the eye.

To date, with more than 90 exhibitions presented since the museum opened, nearly 20 percent of Skidmore faculty take advantage annually of the museum's presence, creating and adapting courses using its exhibitions, and integrating museum content into their existing courses. In the words of one faculty member, "The special excitement of teaching in the Tang comes from the opportunity to explore works of art in a sustained, focused, collaborative way. The objects we encounter there make cultural preoccupations visible and palpable, challenging us to look more closely, think more deeply, and ask questions about both the past and the present."

About the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund

The mission of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund is to increase access and opportunity for all New Yorkers by supporting initiatives and programs that illuminate minds, spark imagination and build community. Established in 2007, the foundation plays an engaged and active role in supporting organizations and leaders that have a positive impact and lasting effect on well-being and community life.