Yours, Mine, and Ours: Session 4

What is the future of the public?

Participants: Frances Morris, Richard Armstrong, and Manuel Borja-Villel (with Dominic Willsdon)

Since their early history, public museums have depended on private collectors and their donations. It is a relationship that has required generosity, compromise, and diligence on all sides. Yours, Mine, and Ours: Museum Models of Public-Private Partnership looks at the state of this relationship today. The recent partnership between SFMOMA and the Fisher Art Foundation placed Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher’s remarkable art collection on a renewable, hundred-year loan to the museum. Uniquely designed to respond to the museum’s context, this partnership sparked a discussion around the many existing and future models for private-public partnerships. Each model must respond to different needs and circumstances. Each has different implications for the essential values and functions of art museums: education, conservation, display, research, and, ultimately, the formation of cultural memory. This forum brings together leading national and international museum directors, curators, and collectors to share experiences and ambitions, to ask questions, and to discuss how public missions and private interests can work together successfully in different contexts around the world.

Part of the Phyllis Wattis Distinguished Lecture Series.