Changes are coming to the Delaware Art Museum over the next several months.
The museum is significantly changing the way it presents its collections.
It's something chief curator Heather Campbell Coyle notes has not been done since a major building renovation 15 years ago.
“We haven’t reinstalled everything comprehensively since then," said Campbell Coyle. "We’ve been doing things gallery by gallery. And most of the downstairs galleries haven’t been done - depending on the gallery - between five and 10 years. And so, it’s time for a refresh.”
Campbell Coyle adds the museum is trying to be responsive to what museum visitors want to see.
“We started by having focus groups come in and have conversations with us about what they’re getting out of our current displays, what they’d like to see, what interests them and what doesn’t. And then we’ve been prototyping within our galleries - testing out ideas and allowing people to respond via post-it-notes, among other things - to what we’re trying,” said Campbell Coyle.
The Museum will remain open during reinstallation of the eight main-floor galleries. Galleries will close and reopen on a rolling basis between April and late August. And information on which galleries are closed will be available on the Museum's website.
In all, 8,000-square-feet of exhibition space will be reimagined.
Campbell Coyle says the cost of the project is being fully covered by an anonymous donor, the Starrett Foundation, the Richard C. Von Hess Foundation and the Sansom Foundation.
