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.


Season 4 ep 2: Jim Leija


Mark Clague: 0:05
 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 Clague.

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: 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 (UMMA), where he leads strategic efforts to make the museum more welcoming, accessible, and engaged with our community.

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 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 UMMA has cooking for the Michigan Arts Festival. Great to see you, Jim.

Jim Leija: 1:25
 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?

Mark Clague: 1:31
 I never knew that you had a history of art degree.

Jim Leija: 1:32
 I did. I know. Exactly. I'm a secret art fan.

Mark Clague: 1:37
 Well, I was a dual degree student here at Michigan where I studied musical theater in the—

Jim Leija: 1:48
 That's rare.

Mark Clague: 1:48
 Yes. A rare double. Yeah.

Jim Leija: 2:18
 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.

Mark Clague: 2:25
 That was a great joy of the liberal arts education. Right.

Jim Leija: 2:29
 Well, and in those days you could sort of afford to take more electives and just try out a lot of different things.

Mark Clague: 2:34
 That's right. I remember one of my favorite classes being statistics. So the third degree though—you got a grad degree, right?

Jim Leija: 2:40
 Yes. I came back because Ann Arbor is a magnetic place. And I was a grad student in the Stamps School of Art & Design, where I took an MFA and made work that was live art, performance art, video art. At the time, I started making video art because 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.

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. Trying to understand how to be “viral” in those environments or what would attract viewers. So quite a bit of my performance work transformed into video work, and I did a lot of experiments online.

From that work, I parlayed myself into being the first public relations and social media manager for UMS.

Mark Clague: 3:48
 Oh, my gosh. That's amazing.

Jim Leija: 3:49
 And then I went on from there.

Mark Clague: 3:52
 So in that sense, your move from UMS to the museum—sort of combining all these different multidisciplinary ways of looking at art and connecting with people—is a pretty natural development.

Jim Leija: 4:03
 That's absolutely right. In both of my roles at UMS and at UMMA, 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 it. 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 you can tell, for what we do.

So really, what comes naturally to me is bringing people together with each other around the arts, in the arts. And I've had a great opportunity to do that in two really amazing institutions that are affiliated with the university.

Mark Clague: 5:05
 Yeah, absolutely. And in some ways, you serve as kind of the ideal person we'd like to create out of this Michigan Arts Festival—to have everybody be omnivorous in the way they approach the arts, right?

Jim Leija: 5:29
 Agreed.

Mark Clague: 5:29
 If they're into visual arts, they should check out the performing arts. If they're into film, they should check out poetry. If they're into theater, they should really check out what's happening at the Stamps Gallery or at UMMA.

Jim Leija: 5:32
 I couldn’t agree more.

Mark Clague: 5:32
 So what’s going to be happening during the festival at UMMA?

Jim Leija: 5:41
 Well, a little bit before the festival, right? We're going to kick off the year as we always do with Artscapade, which is a welcome week event.

Mark Clague: 5:43
 It actually happens right before classes even start.

Jim Leija: 5:49
 That's right. August 22nd. So I hope that folks will come out for that.

Mark Clague: 5:49
 I should give a shout-out to our student engagement team here at the Arts Initiative because they have partnered, I think, with UMMA for many, many years.

Jim Leija: 5:56
 For many, many years—long before I was here.

Mark Clague: 5:59
 And even before the Arts Initiative existed, actually.

Jim Leija: 6:00
 That's right, yeah. And many of our fall exhibitions are starting to open in the next few weeks. I think of the fall season at UMMA as a kind of welcome back to campus—a homecoming for the arts. We always have a number of large exhibitions that open in the fall as people are returning to campus.

I'm excited about a couple—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, Leon Polk Smith and Carmen Herrera, who are modernist geometric abstraction painters.

Mark Clague: 6:46
 Yeah, and this is actually my sweet spot. So this is the stuff I love.

Jim Leija: 6:48
 The exhibition is called 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 both personal and artistic.

Carmen Herrera's work really didn’t receive a whole lot of recognition in her lifetime—only toward the end of her life, when she was in her 90s, did it start to gain recognition. And then it really exploded after her death. Their work has such incredible aesthetic kinship: color, language, space.

Their work has really not been seen together at this scale ever before. So we're doing it at UMMA with guest curator Dana Miller, who is a nationally renowned curator and had a long tenure at the Whitney Museum in New York. The show will eventually tour after it debuts at UMMA.

It comes with a beautiful publication, which is already out there—you can probably buy a copy right now at our gift shop.

Mark Clague: 7:46
 And I think it's a sweet spot. I don’t know if folks have gotten out to Cranbrook this summer to see the mid-century modern design exhibition. Cranbrook really is one of the great cradles of mid-century modern design.

Jim Leija: 8:06
 That's right.

Mark Clague: 8:06
 I mean, Southeast Michigan, and just our communities here—architecture and all sorts of stuff.

Jim Leija: 8:09
 Exactly. And I think the geometric abstraction movement has a lot of connection to that era of design. So I think if that's an area of passion for you as a visitor, you’re really going to enjoy this show.

Mark Clague: 8:27
 Well, I love how there are just really basic shapes and colors, yet they combine in all these novel and interesting ways.

Jim Leija: 8:34
 That's absolutely 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.

Mark Clague: 8:47
 Let’s talk about that a little bit. So if you're a cultural omnivore and you're trying out new things all the time, maybe some of our listeners haven't 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 students today who are using the museum? Do you guys offer classes or partner with other schools and colleges?

Jim Leija: 9:10
 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.”

They come from across a wide array of disciplines. These courses emphasize their 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 study the history of collecting at the museum. They'll learn about the art market, how people collect privately, how institutions collect.

It will be co-taught with a professor in Ross, Tom Buchmueller, and Jenny Carty, who’s the curator for art in public spaces at the university. 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).

Alongside this is an exhibition at the museum that lives under our Curriculum Collection header. These exhibitions are created in collaboration with faculty members and tied to specific courses. So this year, the Curriculum Collection 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. Much later, in 1946, I believe, UMMA was incorporated as its own unit, its own museum, with an administrative staff.

Mark Clague: 10:56
 So how has that changed over time? I mean, how does the collection today—or what you do today—differ from how it was at the beginning?

Jim Leija: 11:02
 In the beginning, acquisitions were made primarily by faculty members, often in direct service to their teaching in art history specifically.

There are some wonderful photos online of early installations of plaster cast replicas of famous sculptures. That was so typical, right? You couldn’t travel, so you had all these copies.

Mark Clague: 11:27
 At museums all over the United States.

Jim Leija: 11:28
 Right, exactly. The original internet. You can’t see Michelangelo’s David, but you can go to the local museum and see a copy.

Mark Clague: 11:36
 A copy of it.

Jim Leija: 11:36
 This was a very popular, very widespread practice throughout the world. You can still go to the Court of Casts, it’s called, and see what those look like.

Mark Clague: 11:43
 You don’t have a David hiding in the basement?

Jim Leija: 11:45
 Unfortunately, no. Most of the plaster casts were destroyed, and then the trends changed to collecting original artworks. Early on, UMMA collected a lot of works on paper because they were cheaper. That was the case with a lot of campus-based art museums.

Now our collecting has evolved to artworks from practically every corner of the world, every culture. We have a really strong emphasis on Asian art and African art. There are reasons for that, which are explored in this new exhibition and curriculum collection about the history of collecting.

At the very end of the exhibition is an empty frame—a kind of metaphor for what the students will collect or acquire for the museum at the end.

Mark Clague: 12:36
 Will they have anything to do with actually filling that frame?

Jim Leija: 12:38
 They sure will. They’re going to decide and 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 UMMA.

So in December—at some point, I don’t have the date off the top of my head—we’re going to do a pitch session that’s open to the public.

Mark Clague: 13:03
 Oh, that is so cool.

Jim Leija: 13:03
 At the museum. And you can find details about that on the website.

Mark Clague: 13:07
 I love that kind of experiential learning where students are involved in projects and 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.

Jim Leija: 13:14
 That’s right. Thanks to the support of some donors at Ross and at UMMA, we’re 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. We’re hoping it will become an annual—or maybe semi-annual—tradition going forward. It’s a great driver of how we think about interest in the arts beyond the School of Art & Design, beyond the arts units on campus.

It’s a way 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 units to say to each other.

Mark Clague: 13:55
 One of the things I love about the art museum is you do so many partnerships with different schools and community groups. One of those, I know, is with Jenny Card and our public art effort. The Arts Initiative has been involved, too—actually Félix Zamora-Gómez 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.

I hear we have an event with that program this fall too, right?

Jim Leija: 14:26
 That’s right. Art at Home is the beginning of a lending collection for campus. Students can select a work of art to bring to their dorm room or apartment. This is the first iteration, created in collaboration with the Bridge Scholars Program at South Quad.

The hope is that it will grow far beyond this prototype and become an opportunity for all students on campus.

A group of student curators has chosen about 75–80 initial works of art—typically small prints, things that can be put up in a dorm room. They’ll be framed and displayed at UMMA from November until mid-January, so students can come and see what they might want to pick. Then there will be a matching process, and students will walk away with a work of art for the rest of the year to hang in their room.

Mark Clague: 15:18
 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.

Jim Leija: 15:27
 That’s right. And a lot of the works are by Michigan-based or Detroit-based artists. We worked with a number of regional and local galleries to collect works that resonate with students.

I’ve seen a few of them—they’re terrific. They’re works on paper, prints. Many of them are beautiful, colorful works of art you’d want to live with.

Mark Clague: 15:53
 Yeah, that is so cool. One of the hopes for the Michigan Arts Festival is that people from our community—students, faculty, staff—will catch the art bug. Not just spend the month of September and October going to check out the amazing arts resources on campus, but really sample the arts all year round.

And UMMA is one of those things that’s open year-round. You’ve always got something new happening. So what else do we have to look forward to? I hear there’s a partnership with the library you’re working on?

Jim Leija: 16:23
 Yeah, we’re working on a multi-year partnership with the U-M Library around the Labadie Collection, which is U-M’s historic collection of ephemera and archival material. It started as an archive of anarchy—

Mark Clague: 16:38
 Sort of radical culture.

Jim Leija: 16:40
 Right, radical culture. It expanded to include many of the social movements in the United States and globally.

There’s a visiting artist and curator named Julie Ault, who is making a major installation in UMMA’s Vertical Gallery in the Frankel Family Wing called American Sampler. That exhibition is really a kind of history or archive of what Julie once described as “American technologies of dissent.”

The more time I spend with the material in this exhibition, the more I realize it’s a mirror to our contemporary moment and the ways in which previous generations have pushed back against social and governmental oppression. There’s a lot to learn in the show.

It’s a very densely packed exhibition. It will open in January, run for about a year and a half, and have several rotations. It includes works of art alongside archival material like posters, brochures, pamphlets, and photographs from the Labadie Collection.

What it seeks to do is emphasize the role of visual culture in social change—the impact of which is immeasurable and important. How we respond to design, how artists are making sense of social moments—it’s such an important facet of how we move our culture forward.

Mark Clague: 18:17
 I love that. In part because one of the things we’re constantly discovering is how art is part of our day-to-day life.

Jim Leija: 18:23
 That’s right.

Mark Clague: 18:23
 Design, and all these things—we want to see art not as this special, rarefied thing that only a few people get access to. For the Arts Initiative and in education, we want to see every student, every faculty member, every staff member engaged with art and creativity—to 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! Thank you very much.

And one of the things I can pitch—you mentioned earlier the gift shop. The gift shop is pretty great. I often go there to find holiday presents for my daughters because there’s always some cool jewelry. And of course, the café is another highlight. But what’s the membership program? Is it open to students, and what kind of benefits do you get?

Jim Leija: 19:11
 Yeah, we just relaunched our membership program. For as little as $5 a month, you can become a member. It goes up to $525 at the highest level. Each level comes with a different perk.

In some cases, you might get a little parking access—so you have a place to park when you come to the museum. There’s often a discount for the gift shop, which is very popular. Depending on the level, there’s also an offer of a free cup of coffee at the café or another beverage of your choosing.

Mark Clague: 19:47
 Do you get access to other museums too?

Jim Leija: 19:49
 You sure do. You also get reciprocal membership at hundreds of museums in the U.S.

Mark Clague: 19:55
 So it doesn’t cost anything to get into UMMA, but a membership will get you into some other places.

Jim Leija: 19:58
 Yeah, places where you otherwise would have to pay. And really, it’s a great way to express your citizenship and participation in the museum. I think it’s a point of pride to be a member.

Mark Clague: 20:08
 Yeah, you feel like you’re part of the team.

Jim Leija: 20:09
 Right—and you’re making an important contribution to keeping the place going. We really appreciate that.

Mark Clague: 20:16
 Well, I hope everyone will become a member. I hope everyone will check out the Museum of Art. And Jim, thank you so much for all you do on campus and for being the kind of front door to the arts at the University of Michigan.

So I hope everybody checks out the University of Michigan Museum of Art as part of the Michigan Arts Festival. And Jim, thanks so much for being a guest on Creative Currents.

Jim Leija: 20:34
 Thanks a lot, Mark. It was great to be here.

Mark Clague: 20:44
 Creative Currents is a project of 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.