2007

ALISON GASS

Dana Feitler Director, Smart Museum of Art

ELI AND EDYTHE BROAD ART MUSEUM

When I arrived in East Lansing in 2012 to help open the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, I was only the fifth person on staff. The MSU Broad, a mecca for global art in a world-class building designed by Zaha Hadid, was the only contemporary art museum for a hundred miles around. I was thrilled to be a part of it. In fact, working at MSU Broad changed the course of my career, as I came to believe deeply in the power of the university museum to transform not just its campus but its entire region.

Even before construction of the museum was complete, we offered programming offsite in places like a former Barnes and Noble store and a downtown bank. At first, the East Lansing community wasn’t sure what to expect. What is this crazy-looking building that’s going up on the campus of Michigan State? How does contemporary art relate to me?

We worked hard to answer these questions and bridge the gap through our public outreach, before and after the museum opened. Because Michigan State is a land-grant university and one of the leading agricultural schools in the world, we created programs that connected contemporary art to farming, botany, landscape, and sustainability. It was a natural fit, and it wouldn’t have happened in New York or even Chicago.

For one of our first exhibitions, The Gift: Lansing, Michigan, the German artist Jochen Gerz photographed over a thousand people in the community. Eli and Edye Broad sat for portraits, so their photos were up there on the wall, alongside those of my babysitter, the neighborhood bartender, and hundreds of other museum visitors. After the exhibition closed, the artist gave out the portraits—each subject received a portrait of someone else in a poignant gesture of exchange. It was the perfect project to show the connections between the art, the public, and the institution itself, and to honor the Broads’ vision in founding this space at Michigan State.