August 24, 2023
The Philadelphia Inquirer published an detailing the donation of temporary exhibit display cases from the Mütter Museum to a non-profit organization, the Resource Exchange. The Museum issued the below statement in response to the article, which was then included in part after the outlet also changed the headline of its story to more accurately reflect the true nature of the donation.
The suggestion that these temporary exhibition cases were ever ‘accessioned’ into the Mütter Museum collection is incorrect and yet another attempt by our critics to create controversy and sow distrust with Museum and College leadership. The facts are as follows: the cases in question were built as part of a temporary exhibit in 2011. They were never intended to be part of the Museum’s permanent display, nor were they ever accessioned by the Museum. In fact, had they been formally accessioned into the collection, the Museum could not have allowed them to be altered in any way – in other words, they could not have been used as part of display cases.
The cases were intended to be used for temporary exhibitions, and they served that purpose for over a decade. In 2018, Museum staff put them in and off-site UHaul storage and largely forgot about them until Ms. Quinn questioned the cost of storing exhibition cases off-site. While the woodworking is quality, the cases were not “museum-quality,” lacking internal climate control, security, and stability.
Several weeks ago, Ms. Quinn and her staff chose to donate many unused cases and other materials instead of disposing of them in a landfill. She decided to donate them to the Resource Exchange – not sell them – because the Exchange is a non-profit organization committed to creative reuse of cultural materials as part of its mission to promote sustainable practices in the arts and cultural community in Philadelphia.
Any suggestion to the contrary is unfair, deliberately hurtful, and completely unsupported by the facts.