U-M Creative Currents

UMMA: Jim Leija

• Arts Initiative • Season 4 • Episode 2

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In this episode of U-M Creative Currents, host Mark Clague interviews Jim Leija, Deputy Director for Public Experience, Learning, & Operations at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). This episode is part of a U-M Creative Currents' podcast series building excitement for the inaugural Michigan Arts Festival (September 25 - October 26, 2025).

Jim is a nationally recognized arts leader and educator who leads strategic efforts to make UMMA more welcoming, accessible, and community engaged. Before joining UMMA, Jim spent nearly a decade at the University Musical Society (UMS), where he built programs connecting the performing arts with students, the campus, and the community. A proud three-time Michigan alum, Jim's work sits at the intersection of art, education, and social impact.

Featured Exhibitions & Memberships include:

Jim highlights UMMA's commitment to accessibility—the museum is completely free and offers everything from quick visits to extended exploration, plus collaborations with the Arts Initiative, Public Art, and the University Libraries that extend the museum's impact beyond its walls.

*Production Note: This episode is part of U-M Creative Currents' special Michigan Arts Festival podcast series which kicks off on September 25, 2025 and is produced by Jessica Jenks and edited by Sly Pup Productions.


SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to Creative Currents, the Michigan Arts podcast where we explore the power of collaborative creativity and the ways the arts inspire dialogue and connection. I'm your host, Mark Clegg. Today, we're continuing our special series spotlighting the people and projects behind the upcoming 2025 Michigan Arts Festival happening this September 25th through October 26th. We have a truly special guest and close friend today. Joining us, Jim Leija. Jim is a nationally recognized arts leader and educator. He serves as deputy director for public experience learning and operations at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, where he leads strategic efforts to make the museum more welcoming, accessible, and engaged with our community. Before joining UMA, Jim spent nearly a decade at the University Musical Society, where he built programs connecting the performing arts with students, the campus, and our community. A proud three-time Michigan alumnus, Jim's work sits at the intersection of art, education, and social impact. And I'm thrilled to welcome Jim here to talk to us today about what Uma has cooking for the Michigan Arts Festival. Great to see you, Jim. Great to see you too, Mark. Thanks for having me. So three degrees at Michigan. I only have two. I have one in music performance and one in history of art, actually. How did you get three? Wait, I

SPEAKER_00:

never knew that you had a history of art degree. I

SPEAKER_02:

did. I know. Exactly. I'm a secret art fan.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I was a dual degree student here at Michigan where I studied musical theater in the That's

SPEAKER_02:

rare.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. A rare double. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And I'd say that of mine too. I mean, it's a degree in the history of art, but I just took a lot of different things. I actually took a lot of chemistry and a lot of history. And so

SPEAKER_00:

that was, that was a great joy of the liberal arts education. Right.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, and in those days you could sort of afford to take more electives and just like try out a lot of different things.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right. I remember one of my favorite classes being statistics. So the third degree though, you got a grad degree, right? Yes. I came back because Ann Arbor is a magnetic place. And, um, I was a grad student in the stamp school of art and design, um, where I took an MFA and made work that was live art, performance art, video art. Kind of at the time, I started making video art because at that time, it was sort of the beginning of social media, video, YouTube. I mean, if we can imagine a time before YouTube, there was that time. And so YouTube was really becoming a thing while I was in graduate school. So we were all kind of experimenting with how to distribute our work on YouTube and other platforms like Facebook And that really, you know, like trying to understand how to, you know, be viral in those environments or what would attract viewers or visitors. So quite a bit of my performance work transformed into video work and I did a lot of experiments online. And it was like from that work that I kind of parlayed myself into being a public relations and social media manager for UMS, for University Musical Society, where I was the first social media manager of UMS. UMS.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, my gosh. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00:

And then went on from there.

SPEAKER_02:

So in that sense, your move from UMS to the University Museum, sort of combining all these different multidisciplinary ways of looking at art and connecting with people is a pretty natural development, actually.

SPEAKER_00:

That's absolutely right. I mean, I think in both of my roles at UMS, at UMA, the core of my work is taking care of people and giving a great platform for people to engage in the arts, whether that's visual art or performing arts. I often describe myself as an arts omnivore. You've probably heard me use that before. I can't remember who said that to me the first time, but I just love that. I like to gobble up all the art forms, which I guess makes me a great avatar for a broad general audience and communities that engage with our work because I have a lot of enthusiasm, as it's my middle name, as you can tell, for what we do at the So really, it's been, you know, what comes naturally to me is bringing people together with each other around the arts, in the arts. And I've had, you know, a great opportunity to do that in two really amazing institutions that are affiliated with the university.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, absolutely. And in some ways, you serve as a kind of like the ideal person we'd like to create out of this Michigan Arts Festival, like to have everybody be omnivorous in the way they approach the arts, right? Agreed. If they're into visual arts, they're into visual arts, they're into visual arts, they're into visual arts, they should check out the performing arts. And if they're into film, they should check out poetry. And if they're into, you know, theater, they should really, you know, check out what's happening at the Stamps Gallery or the University of Michigan Museum of Art. So

SPEAKER_00:

I couldn't agree more.

SPEAKER_02:

What's going to be happening during the festival at

SPEAKER_00:

UMA? Well, a little bit before the festival, right? We're going to kick off the year as we always do with Arts Capade, which is a welcome week event. Welcome back to campus. It actually

SPEAKER_02:

happens right before classes even start.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right. August 22nd. So I hope that folks will come out for that.

SPEAKER_02:

I should give a shout out to our student engagement team here at the Arts Initiative because they have partnered, I think, with UMA for many,

SPEAKER_00:

many years. For many, many years, long before I was here.

SPEAKER_02:

And even before the Arts Initiative existed,

SPEAKER_00:

actually. That's actually right, yeah. And many of our fall exhibitions are starting to open in the next few weeks. I mean, I think of the fall season at UMA as a kind of welcome back, welcome back to campus, a homecoming for the arts. So we always have have a number of large exhibitions that open in the fall as people are returning to campus. I'm excited about a couple of, well, I'm excited about all of our projects, but a few that I want to name. We have a landmark exhibition by two artists, Liam Pokesmith and Karma Herrera, who are modernist geometric abstraction painters. Yeah, and this is actually my sweet spot. So this is the

SPEAKER_02:

stuff I love. So this

SPEAKER_00:

is called Both sides

SPEAKER_02:

of

SPEAKER_00:

the line. That's right. Yeah. Both sides of the line. Leon Polk Smith and Carmen Herrera were neighbors and friends for many, many years and had a long friendship that was personal and artistic. And Carmen Herrera's work really didn't receive a whole lot of recognition in her lifetime, sort of towards the end of her life when she was in her 90s, but really exploded after her death. And their work has such incredible aesthetic kinship, color, language. space. And their work has really not been seen together at this scale ever before. So we're doing it at UMA with guest curator Dana Miller, who is a nationally renowned curator, had a long tenure at the Whitney Museum in New York. And the show will tour eventually after it debuts at UMA. It comes along with a beautiful publication, which is already out there. You can probably buy a copy of it right now at our gift shop. And I think it's a, you know, as you're saying, sweet spot. I don't know if folks have gotten out to Cranbrook this summer to see the mid-century modern design exhibition. And Cranbrook really is, you know, really one of the great cradles of mid-century modern design. Right, I mean, Southeast Michigan and

SPEAKER_02:

just our communities here and architecture and all sorts of

SPEAKER_00:

stuff. That's right. And I think the sort of geometric abstraction movement has a lot of connection to that era of design and design And so I think if that's an area of passion for you as a viewer, as a visitor, you're really going to enjoy the show.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I love how there's just really basic shapes and colors, yet they combine in all these novel and interesting ways. That's absolutely

SPEAKER_00:

right. And, you know, I love the challenge of looking at abstract work and trying to sort of decipher what it means. And it may not mean anything or it may mean everything. Well, let's... Let me

SPEAKER_02:

talk about that a little bit. So one of the things I was thinking about, if you're a cultural omnivore and you're trying out new things all the time, and maybe some of our listeners have not gone to an art museum too often. When I was a student, I actually took a class at the Museum of Art. It was a history of photography class. Amazing. So are there other students today who are using the museum? Do you guys offer classes or partner with other schools and colleges?

SPEAKER_00:

We sure do. We see 300 to 400 courses– come to the museum every year, the majority of which are actually courses in LSA, which I like to call our top client. And from across a wide array of disciplines. And those courses are emphasizing course content through experiences in the galleries or in our study rooms. We have a really amazing project this fall, specifically with the Ross School of Business It's a course in which students will actually study the history of collecting at the museum. And they will learn about the art market and how people collect privately, how institutions collect. And it will be co-taught with a professor in Ross whose name is Tom Buckmuller and Jenny Cardy, who's the curator for art in public spaces at the university. And the goal of the course is for students to research and pitch to the museum the acquisition of a new artwork or more than one artwork. So alongside this is an exhibition at the museum that lives under our curriculum collection header and curriculum collection exhibitions are created in collaboration with faculty members and they have four specific courses. So curriculum collection this year is devoted exclusively to the Ross course and it covers a history of collecting at the museum from the very beginning. The university has been collecting art for its entire existence. And much later, in 1946, I believe, UMA was incorporated as its own unit, its own museum, with an administrative staff.

SPEAKER_02:

So how has that changed over time? I mean, like, how does a collection today or what you do today differ from how it was at the beginning?

SPEAKER_00:

There were, in the beginning, primarily the collection was, acquisitions were made by faculty members, often really in service, direct service to their teaching in art history, specifically. There are some wonderful photos photos online actually of early installations of plaster cast replicas of famous sculptures. That was so typical, right? You couldn't travel and so you had all these copies basically

SPEAKER_02:

at

SPEAKER_00:

museums

SPEAKER_02:

all over the United States. Right, exactly. The original internet. You can't see Michelangelo's David, but you can go to the local museum and see a copy. A copy

SPEAKER_00:

of it. And this was a very popular, very widespread practice throughout the world. I mean, you can still go to the court of casts, it's called, and see what those look like. We don't have any of those anymore. You don't have a David hiding in the basement? Unfortunately, no. Most of the plaster casts were destroyed and then the trends changed to collecting original artworks. And early on, Uma collected a lot of works on paper because they were cheaper. And that was the case with a lot of campus-based art museums. And now our collecting has evolved to collecting artworks from practically every corner of the world. Every corner culture. And we have a really strong emphasis on Asian art and African art. And there are some reasons for that, which are explored in this new exhibition and curriculum collection about the history of collecting. And so at the very end of the exhibition is an empty frame as a kind of metaphor for what the students will collect or acquire for the museum at the end. Will they have anything

SPEAKER_02:

to do with like filling that frame?

SPEAKER_00:

They sure will. I mean, they are going to decide and they are going to pitch a series of artworks to their class. to the museum staff, to the faculty. And there will be a decision on what to purchase and acquire for UMA. So in December, at some point, I don't have the date off the top of my head. We're actually going to do a pitch session that's open to the public. Oh, that is so cool. At the museum. And you can find details about that on the

SPEAKER_02:

website. I love that kind of experiential learning where students are involved with projects and they're like, it's real. Like you're really going to buy something and it's really going to be in the museum and hopefully on display at some point.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right. And I mean, thanks to the support of some donors both at Ross and UMA were able to use donor funds for these acquisitions to directly support student intent in our collecting. It's a really interesting prototype. It's an experiment. I think it will be something that we're hoping will become an annual or maybe semi-annual tradition and go on in the future. And it's a great, you know, I think it's a great driver of how we think about, you know, interest in the arts beyond, you know, the School of Art and Design, beyond, you know, the arts units on campus. campus is to reach into the business school and say you know there is a business that is alongside art collecting and there's something for each of our you know units to say to each other

SPEAKER_02:

well I love one of the things I love about the art museum is you guys do so many partnerships with different schools and community groups and one of those I know is with the with Jenny Cardy and our public art you know effort and the arts initiative has been involved actually Felix Zamora Gomez on our staff has been working with you guys to get a group of student curators to pick works of art that are going to be part of a lending library for other students. That's right. And I hear that we have an event with that program this fall too, right?

SPEAKER_00:

That's right. Art at Home, which is the beginning of a lending collection for campus, which means that students can come and select a work of art that they can bring to their dorm room or their apartment. This is the first iteration. It's been created in collaboration with the Bridge Scholars Program at South Quad. And the hope is that it will grow far beyond this prototype again and become an opportunity for all students on campus. So a group of student curators has chosen and selected, I think, something like 75 or 80 initial works of art, typically small prints, things that you can put up in a dorm room that will be framed and then displayed at UMA in the apps from November until mid-January so that students will have a chance to come and see what they might want to pick. And then there will be a matching process and students will walk away with a work of art. for the rest of the year that they can hang in their room.

SPEAKER_02:

That's so cool, because I remember when I was a student going to the Michigan Union, they had these big poster sales, and everybody would buy posters. But this is legit, real pieces of art.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right. And a lot of the works of art are by artists who are Michigan-based or Detroit-based. They worked with a number of galleries regionally, locally, to collect works that were also resonant for the students. I've seen a few of them. They're terrific. They're works on paper. They're prints. Many of them beautiful, colorful, you know, works of art that you'd want to actually

SPEAKER_02:

live

SPEAKER_00:

with.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that is so cool. So one of the hopes for the Michigan Arts Festival is that people from our community, students, faculty, staff will catch the art bug and not just spend the month of September and October, you know, going and checking out the amazing arts resources on campus, but really sample the arts all year round. And UMA is one of those things that you're open all year round. You We've always got something new happening. That's right. So what other stuff do we have to look forward to? I hear there's a partnership with the library you're also working on?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we're working on a multi-year partnership with the U of M library around the Labadee collection, which is U of M's historic collection of ephemera and archival material around, well, it started as an archive of anarchy.

SPEAKER_02:

Sort of radical

SPEAKER_00:

culture. Right, radical culture and expanded to be inclusive of many of the social movements in the United States and globally. And there's a visiting artist and curator named Julie Ault, who is making a major installation in UMA's Vertical Gallery in the Frankel family wing called American Sampler. And that exhibition is really a kind of history or archive of what Julie once described as American technologies of descent. And the more time I spend with the material that is in this exhibition, the more I realize it is a mirror to our contemporary moment and the ways in which previous generations have pushed back against social oppression, governmental oppression, and there's a lot to learn in the show. And it is a very, very densely packed exhibition. It will open in January and it will run for about a year and a half and it will have several rotations and it includes works of art alongside archival material like posters and brochures and pamphlets and photographs from the Labadee collection. And what it seeks to do is really just... emphasize the role of visual culture in social change, which I think, you know, the impact of which is sort of immeasurable and important. How we respond to design or sort of artist response, how artists are making sense of social moments is such an important facet of how I think we move our culture forward.

SPEAKER_02:

I love that. I mean, in part because one of the things that I think we're constantly discovering is how art is part of our day-to-day life.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right.

SPEAKER_02:

The design and all these things are, you know, we want to see art as not this special, rarefied thing that only a few people get access to. And, you know, for the Arts Initiative and education, we want to see every single student and every faculty member and staff member engaged with art and creativity and really sort of realize their own human potential to invent new things. Before we go, I just want to make sure we have a chance to talk about the membership program at the museum, because I just joined, in fact. Thank you very much. And one of the things I can pitch, you mentioned earlier the gift shop. So the gift shop is pretty And I, I often go there to find a holiday presents for my daughters. Cause there's always some cool jewelry there. And I, and of course the cafe is another real highlight, but, um, what, what's the membership program? Is it open to students and what, what kind of benefits do you get?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we just relaunched our membership program in it. And for as little as like$5 a month, you can become a member. And, uh, right now up to$525, uh, membership level. Um, and at each level comes a little bit of a different perk. Um, and, uh, In certain cases, you might get a little bit of parking access, so you have some place to park when you come visit the museum. There is often a discount for the gift shop, which is very important and highly sought after. There are, depending on the level, too, there's also an offer of a free cup of coffee at the cafe or beverage of your choosing.

SPEAKER_02:

Do you get access to other museums, too?

SPEAKER_00:

You sure do. You also get reciprocal membership at hundreds of museums, actually, in the U.S. So it doesn't cost

SPEAKER_02:

you anything to get into UMA, but you can actually, a membership will get you in some other places.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, where you otherwise would have to pay. And it's a great way really just to express your own citizenship and participation in the museum. I think it's a point of pride to be a member.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah,

SPEAKER_00:

you feel

SPEAKER_02:

like

SPEAKER_00:

you're part of the team, right? Yeah, and you're making an important contribution to keeping the place going. And we really appreciate that.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I hope everyone will become a member. I hope everyone will come check out the Museum of Art and really thank you so much for all you do on campus and just being the kind of front door to the arts at the University of Michigan. So I hope everybody checks out the University Museum of Art as part of the Michigan Arts Festival. And Jim, thanks so much for being a guest on Creative Currents.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks a lot, Mark. It was great to be here.

SPEAKER_02:

Creative Currents is a project of the University of Michigan's Arts Initiative. the University of Michigan's Arts Initiative, please visit our website at arts.umich.edu. Thanks for listening and for being part of the Michigan arts community that makes our campus so fabulous. So until next time, stay curious, stay inspired, and keep your creative currents flowing.