Access is key for the Morgan Library & Museum

This year, the Morgan is celebrating its 100^th year as a public institution. This milestone is an opportunity to reflect on the founding of our institution, which has its home in New York and is dedicated to preserving a deep (and growing) collection of art, literature, history and music.

The Morgan’s holdings constitute a treasury of human creativity, and we are committed to sharing these works with the widest possible public. The centennial also allows us to look back and note the ways in which the Morgan has grown and adapted to contemporary needs and concerns.

The Morgan’s story is one of increasing access. Originally created by New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White as J Pierpont Morgan’s personal library, it was established in 1924 as a public institution by his son, Jack Morgan. Alongside Belle da Costa Greene, JP Morgan’s personal librarian and the Morgan’s first director, Jack Morgan fulfilled his father’s dream of making the Morgan’s collection available to the public.

Belle Greene understood the importance of access, opening up the Morgan’s collections through public lectures and exhibitions, reader services and scholarly publications. She believed that the treasures here should be made as widely available as possible, and her programmes still form the heart of the Morgan’s mission today.

In 1988 the library expanded its footprint, acquiring Jack Morgan’s previous residence at 231 Madison Avenue (on 37^th Street). The architect Renzo Piano’s transformative expansion, adding 75,000 square feet to the campus, was completed in 2006, when the institution was renamed the Morgan Library & Museum.

Later this month, we open Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy. This is a landmark survey and celebration of both the Morgan’s centennial and the 100^th anniversary of Greene’s appointment as its first director. We will document Belle Greene’s remarkable story, from her roots in a predominantly Black community in Washington, DC, to her leadership of one of the world’s great research libraries.

This exhibition presents discoveries made after years of research on Greene’s life, demonstrating her influence and the extent to which she defied the expectations of her time, shaping not only the Morgan but furthering the field of librarianship and curatorship at large.

For me, it is remarkable to see Greene’s ethos echoed at the Morgan today, even as times and technology have changed. For instance, she pioneered the use of Photostat to enable scholars to gain access to collection materials outside of our campus, which we continue today through digital cataloguing and our online offerings, expanding our footprint well beyond Madison Avenue.

Museums around the globe, and in the US in particular, contend with the question of access. As we open our campus to ever broader audiences, we bear the responsibility of meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse group of visitors with a wide range of social, political, religious, geographic and ethnic affiliations. We are committed to forging meaningful connections for them.

We are also a research library for art and the humanities at large, with a Drawings Institute established to fostering the next generation of scholars and curators of works on paper.

The Morgan’s relationship to issues of access is somewhat unusual for museums – less so for libraries and special collections – in that, outside of the works that are on view in the rooms of the historic library, we do not have a collection on permanent display.

As a collecting institution of primarily works on paper, we must limit the length of exposure time for every item. As a result, a visitor to the Morgan will have a different experience each time they come, thanks to the continuous rotation of works from the different curatorial departments and a robust programme of temporary exhibitions.

We have become more ambitious in creating a roster of exhibitions, large and small, that respond to the strengths of the collection and to the expertise of our curators and conservators – one that can meet the current moment while representing the wide range of our eight collecting departments, from medieval manuscripts to modern and contemporary drawings.

I am confident that we can show how our collections remain relevant to our visitors today, who are invited into a welcoming space to discover a range of displays that exemplify how creative figures responded to the issues of their time. The interdisciplinary nature of the collection is a great strength, and it allows us to show ways in which the past inspires reflection on the present.

We are committed to cultivating and safeguarding the arts for everyone, and making such encounters for our visitors as accessible and rewarding as possible. As we enter the last months of our centennial year, and embark upon our second century, we are proud of the egalitarian spirit of our founding, and look forward to sharing our treasures for generations to come.

Colin B Bailey is the director of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York