About

Director’s Welcome

A museum is an articulation point for the circulation of ideas, perspectives and understanding. It’s a safe place to surrender certainty in order to know more, a place designed to allow us to learn what we don’t know and confirm what we know most deeply.

An art museum engages humanity’s most complex way of knowing and expressing as the raw material for this suspended moment of learning. And art pushes the limits of what we know and understand, challenges assumptions, questions what we are told and ultimately confirms that we are more similar than different as human beings.

And, finally, a university art museum, this one in particular, provides a location for the complex humanitarian conversation of the arts, and links this discussion to a broad range of research departments, academic experts, scientists, technologists. Situated on the campus of the largest research university in the United States, the ASU Art Museum initiates artist-led investigation into some of the most complex and pressing concerns of the time by engaging cutting-edge research, science, technology and human expression.

The New American University, with its emphasis on excellence and access, sets up this museum as an extraordinary incubator and accelerator of new thinking, innovation and compassion as the wisdom contained in the collection is reinterpreted and amplified by the next generation. So we take seriously the preservation and continuity of the collection and our responsibility to animate these ideas through current interpretation.

We also recognize that a museum must lead the way and explore the transforming nature of how ideas are shared and knowledge is produced. This is more than just technological advancements in the interactive wild Wiki world, but also the nature of constructing community and honoring and engaging diverse ways of knowing applied to our current circumstances.

So look beyond as well as within the walls of this polyglot structure, Antoine Predock’s first major museum and the result of influences from Egypt, Mesoamerica and our own local Anasazi. And look beyond the building to projects involving the ASU Art Museum in Italy, Kenya, Australia, Greenland, China, Boston and South Phoenix – and of course, come back to the web. There’s a lot happening here.

If you come to the museum, feel free to knock on my door. And if you are reading this from afar, please do join our mailing list, find us on Facebook and Twitter, and follow us on our blog.

Cheers,

Gordon Knox, Director, ASU Art Museum