Art Is For Everyone

The Doris Ulmann Galleries is a museum of 16,000 artifacts, spanning 5,000 years of human history, starting with ancient Mesopotamian objects. It is the largest university permanent art collection in the region and has six rotating art galleries curated by Berea’s Art History faculty.

Dr. Kelsey Malone, the museum’s director, wants people from all walks of life to access and appreciate what the gallery has to offer, not just students of art history. Dr. Malone and her team work to bring all Berea students to the galleries and use them as a resource like the library or the labs. People from outside of the College can make appointments with her to explore their artistic passions for free.

“The way that we do campus outreach with the art collection is through class visits,” Malone says “We’ll host classes in all disciplines. This week, we have a GSTR 110 class visiting, and we have a Peace and Social Justice class visiting. Next week, we have an Appalachian Studies/Health class visiting, and those aren’t art classes. They’re not art history classes. We seek to be really interdisciplinary in the way that we’re reaching our students because the art collection is for everyone.”

The museum also brings talent from around the country and the world to Berea. It receives around 100 proposal from artists during the biennial call for visiting exhibitions, and about 10 of them are invited to display their work at Berea.

Most of the gallery’s vast collection came directly from Berea’s donors. There is also the Friends of the Doris Ullman Galleries Fund that invites donations to help the galleries acquire works of artists who are underrepresented in their collections. Malone recognizes that preserving the artifacts are important, but it is also key that people are able to interact and enjoy the artifacts in the collection. The Doris Ulmann galleries strive to reach as many art enjoyers as possible.