The Denison Museum in Burke Hall houses the collections and exhibition spaces of Denison University. The collections comprise nearly 8,000 objects from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and Central America. The display spaces are not only used to showcase the permanent collection, but are also devoted to the presentation of a wide variety of exhibitions. The work of senior art majors is presented at the end of each season.

The Denison Museum is dedicated to providing students, faculty, and staff of the University, as well as the wider community, with a first-hand cultural experience. An on-going program of lectures, symposia, visiting artists, gallery tours, and other events is available to the Denison audience and the general public.

The Denison Museum has launched a partnership through the Granville Museum Consortium, consisting of the Denison Museum, Granville Historical Society Museum, and the Robbins Hunter Museum/Avery Downer House. The Consortium has been organized to pool resources with the collective mission of investigating and sharing culture and history from the local to the global. Museum Leadership at each of Granville's four small museums have come together to organize joint exhibitions (the "Art for War's Sake" poster exhibit, for example) as well as joint marketing of our programs and hours. In addition, recognizing a significant need for community support in the form of volunteers, the consortium is starting a combined docent/volunteer program.

The Granville Museum Consortium Docent/Volunteer Program is intended to give more to existing volunteers and encourage additional volunteerism--to "pay it forward." Members of the Docent/Volunteer Program will have access to special educational and social programs offered every other Monday in the year to come, taking breaks for holidays. Each museum will take turns hosting the morning programs which run from 9 AM to noon. Educational programs will be led by local and regional experts and university professors in such topics as Granville history, special touring exhibitions of contemporary Korean ceramics, Victorian culture, Greek revival architecture, Tupperware design and the 1950s kitchen, and even Central American Indian artifacts!

Docents and volunteers participating in this program will be asked to help the museum(s) of their choice with such activities as providing tours, guarding galleries during museum hours, assisting in object research and documentation efforts, helping host events, coordinating mailings, and distribution of community announcements, among other tasks. These programs will support in the Docent/Volunteer's development, background, and confidence in offering tours of the historical structures and exhibitions offered at Granville museums to school groups and other museum visitors who come to experience Granville's cultural destinations.

Interested individuals may join the Docent/Volunteer program at any time. For more information, please contact the Denison Museum at 740-587-6255 or send an email to bakerse@denison.edu to sign up. You may also fill out the Docent Contact Information form and mail it to Sarah Baker at the Denison Museum.

The Denison Museum is committed to creating valuable inclusive and interdisciplinary experiences in the deep exploration of visual culture in the context of liberal education. The Museum seeks to engage visitors through its high-quality exhibitions and thought-provoking public programs focused on the world's many forms of visuality, while preserving, developing and caring for the Museum's collections, donated and acquired over Denison University's history. In so doing, the Museum strives to serve diverse local, regional, national and international audiences as a cultural resource that furthers recognition of the interrelationship of multiple forms of knowledge.

The Denison University collection was established in 1943. The founder and chair of the Art Treasure Room, as it was then called, Edmund G. Burke requested alumni and friends of the University to donate a painting, a tapestry, a vase, an engraving, a watercolor, a choice piece of silver, or an article of antiquity to Denison. The collection was initially housed in the William Howard Doane Library, but as the collection expanded, additional space was required. The Burke Hall of Art and Music was constructed in 1973 to house a concert hall for the Music Department and a gallery and storage area for the permanent art collection. The building was designed by the architectural firm of Perkins and Will, and named after the main benefactor of the arts at Denison, Edmund G. Burke.

Despite Burke's initial calls for art objects to be donated to Denison in the 1940s, the collection was largely formed by gifts and purchases in the 1960s and 1970s. With the advent of the Vietnam War, Denison chose to collect the art of Burma because of the University's historical connection with the country through its Baptist missionary alumni, and also because no other US institution was doing so. The art department in particular envisioned Denison as a research resource center for Burmese studies, and a call was put out to alumni and missionaries to donate art and artifacts they had collected while in Burma. However, people donated objects from other cultures besides Burma - in particular, the material culture of the Kuna Indians of the San Blas Islands, Panama. Objects arrived in such large numbers that a volunteer curator, Jane Terry Bailey, was appointed to care for the material. Today, Denison's Burmese and Kuna Indian collections are acknowledged to be particularly impressive. The print and drawing collection, which includes European and North American works from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, forms the third extensive category of the Denison holdings. The collection also contains Chinese rubbings and textiles, Japanese netsuke, European oil paintings, Southeast Asian and Chinese ceramics, African sculpture, and examples of material culture from Native Americans. Currently, the collection consists of nearly 8,000 objects dating from circa 1500 B.C. to the present.