Mobilized Art Access: The Virginia Fine Arts Museum Artmobile, 1953-1994

My dissertation focuses on art outreach exhibitions, which I define as shows designed by museums and related cultural organizations for non-gallery spaces such as schools, or autonomous, mobile galleries like artmobiles. Focusing on projects active in the United States during the twentieth century, I assess how outreach exhibitions function as a didactic form by examining their content, site destinations, and relationships with hosting organizations such as schools, libraries, and social clubs. Intersecting museum studies, mobility studies, and the archival turn, my research asks whether outreach exhibitions most immediately benefit the communities they visit or the museums that organize them as a means of demonstrating their commitment to public service.

Drawing on Chapter 5 of my dissertation, this paper will explore the VMFA artmobile within the changing contexts of travel infrastructure, namely the predominance of automobile travel, and art access as rendered through public television, correspondence schools, and activism in terms of mobile cultural resources. Despite the increasing availability of art access in different media, I will posit that a persisting belief in the power of original works of art to transform lives influenced the development of the initial Artmobile. Following this contextualization, I will then explore the Artmobile’s institutional relationships, namely the Virginia Federation of Women’s Clubs (VFWC) and the museum field at large. As I will argue, these relationships were crucial to the program’s implementation by shaping both the kind of art that traveled in the Artmobile shows and which communities they visited.