Broad Museum plans to permanently display former Kresge works 

St. Anthony has risen from his crate. 

Broad Museum director Monica Ramírez-Montagut told City Pulse last week that she plans to create a permanent space for the “museum collection,” including the former Kresge Art Gallery collection, resolving a question that has hung over the museum like a sword of Damocles since its beginnings in 2012. 

By tearing out walls and moving some administrative offices, Ramírez-Montagut hopes to open up existing lower level gallery space at the Broad to an additional 1,800 square feet, creating more than 5,000 square feet of exhibit space in all, where some 5,000 items in the museum’s permanent collection, including works from the former Kresge Art Gallery, will be permanently housed. 

The art will be displayed in an “open storage” plan that maximizes the number of objects on view. 

“You’ll walk in and be surrounded by art,” Ramírez-Montagut said. 

Pieces will be closer to one another than they are in a traditional gallery show, and may not have explanatory labels, but visitors will be able look up the information by number in an online database. 

“It’s a way for folks to explore our permanent collection on their own,” she said. “You bring your narrative to it. What are you interested in? Egyptian pieces, the Greek vases we have, contemporary art? Visitors can focus on the works that speak to them.” 

“This is a really new concept many large institutions have engaged in,” Broad Museum advisory board Chairman Alan Ross said. “Instead of being behind the scenes and not seen, the public can come see things they haven’t seen in a long time.” 

With the blessing of the museum’s board of directors, Ramírez-Montagut is carrying out a multi-pronged effort to ground the Broad in the surrounding university and greater Lansing and topple the ivory-tower reputation that dogged the museum in its first decade.  

She said that bringing the former Kresge collection, along with works the Broad has purchased in its first decade, into public view is an “integral part of that plan.” 

The Broad Museum began as a plan to expand MSU’s Kresge Art Museum, home to about 7,500 works of art, from Greek and Roman artifacts to Islamic manuscripts, European portraits and landscapes and modernist canvases and sculptures. 

One of the most popular items in the former Kresge collection is a 17th-century oil portrait of St. Anthony of Padua, now on display in the Broad’s “History Told Slant” exhibit. 

The Kresge collection, now part of the Broad’s “museum collection,” includes a Roman floor mosaic, works by Salvador Dali, Alexander Calder, August Rodin, and unusual specialties like a set of 12th-century Chinese tiger pillows (finest in the West, according to museum literature), Buddhas from east Asia, Yoruba figures from West Africa, a vast collection of works on paper and much more. 

In 2003, the Friends of Kresge unveiled plans to quadruple Kresge’s space and renovate the building, using privately donated funds, with the goal of doing justice to collection, then housed in a small gallery inside an academic building on the Red Cedar river in mid-campus. 

“The quality of the collection has always far outclassed the facility that housed it,” former Kresge director Susan Bandes said in 2003. 

“If the exhibit can be faulted, it’s for an extra-artistic reason — the inadequacy of the exhibition galleries,” art critic Roger Green said in 2003. “The burgeoning art collection deserves a proper home.” 

Two Kresge docents, David and Ruth Greenbaum, spearheaded a support group for the Kresge, Better Art Museum, raising thousands of dollars with a plucky barrage of grass-roots fundraisers, from bake sales to art auctions.  

The $12 million expansion plan was dwarfed in 2007 by the bombshell announcement that contemporary art collector Eli Broad would give $26 million (later beefed up to $28 million) for a whole new museum. 

A source close to Kresge, who asked not to be named, said that early designs for the Broad Museum included gallery space set aside for the Kresge collection, but the space disappeared in later drafts. 

Hari Kern, now on the Broad Museum’s advisory board, was among the Kresge expansion supporters. 

“There was a bitter taste in some people’s mouths because of the history behind the Broad,” Kern said. “The Greenbaums had started the Better Art Museum campaign, and people were contributing, then Mr. Broad walked in with his millions, and the Kresge Art Museum went underground. That was a disappointment to many people.” 

The 2010 booklet tie-in for the “Friends” exhibit closed with a pointed look forward to the Broad Museum: “With this iconic building, the arts community and art museum friends look forward to realizing their long held ambitions for exhibitions and display space,” it reads. 

MSU officials never explained why the Kresge Museum and its collection had to die for the Broad to live, even in response to direct queries, and never confirmed the widespread notion that Eli Broad made the closing of Kresge a condition of his gift, but Michael Rush, the Broad’s founding director, came close in a 2012 interview with City Pulse. 

“The founders, Eli and Edythe Broad, gave their money to support a contemporary art museum on the campus of MSU,” Rush said. “That’s the basic reality. When you have philanthropists entering the situation at that level of giving, which is extraordinary, and it is the donor intent for the museum to be a contemporary one, then that is what we embrace.” 

Rush and his successor, Marc Olivier-Wahler, pleaded that they used Kresge objects to “contextualize” contemporary art at the Broad. 

“They said they would bring out the Kresge pieces and spotlight them. It was happening just a little, but not very much,” Kern said. 

Ross applauded the project and said the board is behind Ramírez-Montagut “100 percent.” 

“Coming from an established academic environment at Tulane, Mónica sees the need for bringing out the historic collections, and she has implemented that program,” Ross said.