The art of outreach and scholarship

Doreen Bolger, AS ’73M, has spent her career working in some of the nation’s most visited art museums, but her passion lies in reaching beyond the museum itself.

When Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art for the past decade, talks about her work, the first thing she mentions is public outreach. Interacting with others who share her love of art and history is one of her chief goals, she says, and turning an enthusiastic art lover into an enthusiastic art patron plays a large role in her job satisfaction.
In fact, such outreach—creating and maintaining a vibrant arts community beyond the museum walls—has been a priority for her for a long time, and it’s one of the skills she credits, in part, to her training at UD.

“The University of Delaware always has been a leader in training professionals to work in museums and in really encouraging people to find a way to make the focus of their scholarship actual objects, whether as a conservator or an expert on decorative arts or an art historian,” she says. “They were very far ahead of the curve in that interest, not only in art history but in history as well, and there are graduates scattered across the country in various museums that show the caliber of the training they received at UD.

“Besides the scholarship, however, an especially important part of the training the University offers is its focus on public outreach, in making the humanities accessible to a public audience. As a curator, and now as a director of an art museum,
I can say that’s an enormous contribution.”

Spending the first half of her career as a curator—first at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and then at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas—gave Bolger the opportunity to immerse herself in the research and cataloging side of museum work. This she also attributes to the training she received at UD.

“When I was at Delaware, the art history department focused on American art, which was my principal interest,” she says. “I was trained to do serious, in-depth, primary research and discovery of artists, and by my studying artists of this country, I had an opportunity to interview people who knew those artists and to talk with the families of artists and to be a part of the discovery of great figures of history who had been forgotten. That kind of enthusiasm for the past and for real, in-depth research is an asset I’ve carried with me for my whole career.”

Bolger says the courses she took through the UD Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, focusing on the history of decorative arts, also stood her in good stead, particularly when she worked in the American wing at the Met doing research on late-19th-century decorative arts, and during her five years at the Carter Museum, which has a reputation for scholarship and collaborative exhibitions.

“When I was a curator, I spent my days doing pretty deep research in libraries and archives, studying the actual physical works of art, visiting with conservators who were restoring them and frame-makers who were framing them, writing wall text, organizing educational programs about individual artists or works of art and working with teams of scholars on exhibitions,” Bolger says.

Another area that Bolger puts stock in is reaching out to living artists. A vital component to keeping any art museum healthy, she says, it was a strength she honed while directing the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the position she held before coming to Baltimore.

The Baltimore Museum of Art, which has 90,000 objects in its collection, is best-known for its French holdings, particularly the world’s most comprehensive collection of works by Henri Matisse.

“But we work to establish close relationships with living artists and arts organizations in the community,” Bolger says. “And there’s an ongoing attempt to build a strong arts community throughout the city and to attract artists from all over the country to come to Baltimore, because it’s a city that gives a lot of attention to contemporary art.”

The effort, she says, has paid off in shaping a vibrant arts network, garnering community support and raising significant funds for the museum. A major reinstallation project of works in the permanent galleries was recently completed, and in the past year the museum received a $10 million gift to endow its American wing and a $5 million gift to endow the director’s position.

“Both the job of curator and the job of director are ones that demand incredible commitment and continuous performance,” says Bolger, who in February marked her 10-year anniversary as the museum’s director.

—Becca Hutchinson