Board of Trustees Records

These records consist primarily of meeting minutes of the museum's Board of Trustees and Executive Committee, from the time of the institution's incorporation to the 1990s. There are also minutes pertaining to a few of the earliest Standing Committees; namely, the Committee on Museum, which later operated as the Board of Governors (1885-1964); the Committee on Instruction (1888-1943); the Finance and Administration Committee (1968-1974); and the Committee on the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial (1945-1964). Resolutions formally adopted over a 40-year period by the Trustees and Executive Committee members are also included as are many of the reports presented at Trustee meetings. Gifts, loans, membership and finances are the most frequently discussed topics. Other material pertains to two of the museum's earliest and most significant initiatives that the Trustees approved and oversaw. These are the exhibitions of 1888 and 1889, held to promote American industrial arts, and the Museum Fund, the professionally-directed campaign introduced in the late 1920s to raise public awareness of the institution and to raise funds primarily for the purchase of objects, including the Edmund Foulc collection of Medieval and Renaissance art. Indexed correspondence from exhibitors documents the first initiative. The latter consists primarily of correspondence, proposal and summary reports, and ephemera. The final "unprocessed material" series is temporary and consists of approximately 4 linear feet of material.