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people experience the world. We need these things in tough times.” It’s difficult not to feel hope, given the enormity and beauty of the museum’s renovation and expansion. To begin with, exhibition space was doubled, no small consideration for UMMA’s 18,000 collections. The original 41,000-squarefoot Alumni Memorial Hall now links with the 53,000-square-foot Maxine and Stuart Frankel and Frankel Family Wing, designed by renowned architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture in Portland, Oregon. For the first time, UMMA has separate galleries to display African, Chinese, Korean, Buddhist, Japanese, and South and Southeast Asian art. The Woon-Hyung Lee and Korean Foundation Gallery of Korean Art “is to our knowledge the first stand-alone Korean art gallery in an American university art museum,” says Stephanie Rieke Miller, UMMA’s External Relations Manager. The new wing is a thing of beauty. As Bloomberg.com architecture critic James Russell described it, the design “expertly choreographs daylight, liberating art in the new galleries from the tyranny of the antiseptic box.” By designing “just eight modestly proportioned galleries, architect Brad Cloepfil has made peace in the clash between curators and architect.” Wall-to-wall polished oak floors and white walls flooded with natural light give the space a fresh feel. Art is placed sparingly on main and free-standing walls that separate galleries without segregating them. Visitors flow from gallery to gallery seamlessly, neither rushed nor overwhelmed by too much art too closely placed in too many dark corners. Cloepfil called his design one that creates a “set of spaces that prepare you for looking at art.” Slavin witnesses the results. “You see people getting in reflective states in some areas of the building and in other areas, you see them chatting. Art experiences are intellectual and reflective, but also social experiences.” At least they are here. The three-story-high “Vertical Gallery” is designed as the “visual core” of the new wing. It offers a kind of bird’s-eye view of the other galleries below and helps visitors get their bearings. Another muchcelebrated feature is the placement of several windowed corners that visually connect the museum
to the campus it sits upon. Finally, an all-glass, ground-level Project Gallery faces South State Street — an overt invitation to passers-by. All of this feeds into UMMA’s revolutionary mission to be a “town square for the 21st century.” A portion of the museum is open from 8 A.M. to midnight, hours adept for student schedules and sleeping habits. UMMA has partnered with other U-M arts communities, such as the University Musical Society, which will use the new wing’s 225-seat Helmud Stern Auditorium. Other groups are using classrooms. All of this, says Miller, means that UMMA “is not just a staid museum of dead objects.” Says Slavin, “We used to joke that we could host a class, a concert, a symposium, and a tour, but we couldn’t do them all at the same time. Now, we can have all of these activities simultaneously.” n
The UMMA has doubled its exhibition space through a recent renovation and expansion. Eight new galleries in the Maxine and Stuart Frankel and Frankel Family Wing showcase a wealth of art, including contemporary and international pieces.
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