The University of New Hampshire (UNH) has permanently closed its Museum of Art due to sweeping budget cuts across the institution. The university was forced to make drastic slashes to match a $14m budget reduction for the 2024 fiscal year, Higher Ed Dive reported. Reduced enrollment has led to 75 job eliminations and the consolidation of various programmes; the Museum of Art represents the latest casualty, according to Portsmouth Herald.
UNH tasked the dean of its College of Liberal Arts, Michele Dillon, with making permanent cuts totalling $1.5m across the college. As a result, the department lost 12 staff and the art museum shut down.
"As dean, I was very supportive of the museum, so it was very tough and agonising for me," Dillon told the Portsmouth Herald. "I made the difficult choice to prioritise my academic programmes [...] over the museum. This is not a reflection on the museum. It's the prioritising we all had to do over the last few months."
The university will continue to host exhibitions in other spaces around its campus and maintain visiting artist programming, alongside arts-minded community collaborations. As of this writing, the school has no plans to sell any of the museum’s collection—which includes hundreds of modern and contemporary works on paper, paintings, photographs and sculptures, plus significant holdings of Japanese prints and African sculpture—and future use of the space is still uncertain.
"To reopen at a future date, it would likely need to be restructured and funded by donors/external grants on a scale that would make it largely if not wholly self-sustaining," Dillon said. She added, "that would probably take a while".
The Museum of Art at UNH showed a wide variety of works from different eras and cultures, often granting curatorial and exhibition opportunities to students. In 2023, Scratching the Surface: Edith Loring Peirce Getchell and the American Etching Revival explored the career of Getchell, a leader of the early 1900s American Etching movement. The show was curated by matriculating seniors who earned a fellowship from the museum.
On 20 January, the Portsmouth Herald reported that the Museum of New Art, another New Hampshire cultural destination, which opened in 2021, was shuttering its doors, citing diminished contributions for its closure.
