Strategic Plan, Core Values, and Education Philosophy
The mission of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts is to inspire critical dialogue and illuminate the role of art in our lives. How do we do that? We start by identifying core values and creating a thoughtful strategic plan to power and guide our work—work that feels more necessary than ever right now.
Like any organization that is relevant to its public, the UMFA must be responsive to the ever-changing dynamics of local and global environments. As challenges emerge, we embrace opportunities to think more deeply about what we do and how we might best serve our community, effect positive change in our world, and help create a more just society. The strategic plan and core values, created with input from staff, board members, and campus and community stakeholders, establish our priorities and shape the kind of institution we’ll become:
Educational outreach is central to the UMFA’s mission.
UMFA educators engage thousands of K–12 students and teachers in urban and rural school districts across the state, support teaching and learning on the University of Utah campus, and provide families and adults across the community with a dynamic array of art-inspired programs.
UMFA Education Philosophy
The UMFA believes that we learn together by asking questions, experimenting, and collaborating through an open exchange of voices and ideas. In this, and in all our work, we aim to incorporate best practices, research, and evaluation. Beginning with works of art and their stories, we encourage discussions that extend across cultures to foster awareness and understanding. We believe it is essential to provide exhibitions, access to research and expertise, programs, and statewide outreach that include people of all abilities, ages, resources, and backgrounds.
Learning & Engagement Department Mission Statement
Central to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ mission is the learning & engagement department’s commitment to inspiring creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking in our growing and diverse community. By engaging visitors in dynamic programs, exhibitions, and experiences, we encourage active participation in dialogues that celebrate multiple perspectives and voices. We strive to serve as an intercultural space that creates opportunities for learners of all ages and styles to arrive at new understandings about art, each other, and the world.
Statement on Nudity in Art
The UMFA is committed to inspiring critical dialogue and illuminating the role of art in our lives, including exhibiting and teaching about the nude figure in art. Among the oldest subject matters in the history of art, nude figures can be found in art throughout the world in many different cultures and time periods. Created for many different reasons—spiritual, scientific, and expressive—nudity has been a fundamental mode of representing and communicating the human condition. For this reason, it is crucial that visitors and students are introduced to this very significant and diverse artistic tradition, one that is central to contemporary visual literacy. The beauty of art lies in the challenge and dialogue it inspires in all of us and its ability to connect to our contemporary lives, intellects, and bodies through time and across cultures.
Decolonizing the UMFA
What is decolonization?
To begin to answer this question, it is helpful to define colonization: a political, economic, social, and cultural process through which a country, government, or political or ethnic group exerts control over another country, government, or political or ethnic group. Throughout history, colonization has often created conditions in which groups of people are governed against their will by a foreign faction with greater political, economic, and military power.
Decolonization is a misnomer because it is not the opposite of colonization and undoing colonization is impossible. Instead, decolonization is a long, complicated process of assessing, analyzing, understanding, and reconciling the effects of colonization. We in the twenty-first century have all inherited many histories of colonization. We will be decolonizing for generations to come.
What does decolonization have to do with museums?
Museums are products of modern history, which includes numerous examples of colonization throughout the world. Many museums contain works of art that were obtained through situations of conflict, theft, coercion, and desperation. Some works may have been obtained under terms that were considered fair at the time but are no longer under today’s standards. These complex histories of objects become parts of the histories of the museums that hold them today.
What does it mean for a museum like the UMFA to work on decolonizing?
Decolonizing the UMFA means rethinking and redoing the ways we care for, study, and present works of art to viewers and visitors. Indeed, it involves much more than issuing statements, because truly committing to decolonization is answering a call to action.
Commitment
- Acknowledging that the histories of some museums and collections are complicated and may include ideas and events that are upsetting and could be considered unacceptable or inappropriate today.
- Taking responsibility for better understanding the histories of the works of art in the UMFA collection.
- Building and sustaining relationships with individuals and communities who have endured colonization.
Research
- Prioritizing research about origins, cultural contexts, and provenance (record of ownership) of works of art in the UMFA collection.
- Uncovering information from a variety of sources historians have traditionally relied on, as well as from the tremendous sources of knowledge in the shared histories of native and Indigenous communities.
- Consulting with individuals and communities who have endured colonization, recognizing that their stories and oral histories are invaluable sources of knowledge.
Interpretation
- Rewriting labels to provide more information about the origins and histories of works of art, including how they came to the UMFA.
- Using photographs, videos, interactives, and other media to provide more information about works of art.
- Revising labels to honor the cultural and ethnic origins of works of art, including formatting artists’ names as is customary to their cultures, showing artists’ names in their native characters or script, and privileging native and Indigenous cultural and ethnic identifiers before modern nationalities or nation-states.
- Presenting all labels in English and Spanish to reflect our inherited histories of colonization in the Americas and to be more inclusive for viewers and visitors to the UMFA.
- Avoiding the term “non-Western,” which dishonors cultures around the world by grouping them as “other,” and instead, identifying works of art by their geographical or cultural origin.
- Promoting inclusive language and terminology that is consistent with approaches to decolonization today.
Justice
- Centering the perspectives of individuals and communities who have endured colonization.
- Exhibiting and acquiring works of art that inform us about colonization, thereby supporting artists and artistic communities whose work increases our understanding of our shared histories.
- Returning works of art that are determined to have been obtained under unlawful circumstances to their lawful owners.