The Daily Campus

Issue date: 3/26/09 Section: Focus

Media Credit: Jim Anderson Lizzy Dargie, a 6th-semester illustration major, shows her support for the Benton Museum by covering the sidewalk outside with drawings and slogans on Wednesday afternoon.

"Draw anything you want," Caitlin Yates encouraged the group of students clustered on the sidewalk outside the Benton Museum. It's perhaps not an unusual exhortation for such an artistic gathering. Art and art history majors­ ­ - and art appreciators of all stripes - rapidly congregated around the buckets of colored chalk and paint set out in the sun, and began to put their creativity to good use.

Although the gathering might at first glance appear to be nothing more than an impromptu art party, there was a more urgent purpose behind the chalky sketches than simply having fun. Inside the Benton, the somber galleries full of pieces ranging from Japanese woodcuts to abstract expressionist collages to contorted anatomical illustrations were empty of visitors-outside, the students chalking determinedly put their feelings down on the pavement, demanding, through their colorful drawings, that the museum stay open at all costs.

The university's budget crisis has been well publicized in recent weeks, with tuition increases and program downsizing moving out of the realm of possibility and into that of unfortunate certainty. Among the campus institutions to have come under fiscal scrutiny from President Michael Hogan, the Benton Museum appears dangerously vulnerable - something the art students just won't stand for.

Yates, a 6th semester studio art major, was busy painting a freehand version of Rodin's "Thinker" just outside the museum's main entrance. "We as the student body have elected to be the museum's voice," she said. "Keeping the museum open is very pertinent to the art community."

After reading a Hartford Courant article last month, in which Hogan described the museum as inessential to the university's academic mission, and suggested that closing both the Benton and Natural History museums would save the university around $1.25 million, Yates and other students set out to prove him wrong. Setting up a Facebook group dedicated to raising awareness of the museum's financial plight, they aimed to replicate the success of Brandeis University students' outcry over the proposed shuttering of that college museum.

Continued...

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