AMAM Art Rental: A Timeless Oberlin Tradition
by Sarah Hull

Beginning last Thursday, The Allen Memorial Art Museum kicked off its yearly art rental by once again lending out 400 pieces of original art to students and members of the Oberlin community. Devoted Oberlin students held their annual sleepover in the courtyard of the Art building, losing sleep and drinking wine while pining away for their chosen work of art.
According to the Allen’s curator, Stephan Jost, the goal of art rental has remained the same since its inception in the 1940s. However, while the principles behind the art rental collection have been retained throughout the years, the actual collection has undergone a number of shifts and experienced a handful of dramatic mishaps, forging what is now a seemingly indestructible collection of art.
The art rental collection is rooted in the memory of a legendary woman — Ellen Johnson. Johnson founded art rental at Oberlin in 1940, and it was her passion and charisma that brought the concept of art rental to fruition.
“Ellen was first an art librarian here, with a passionate interest in modern art,” Jost said. “She convinced the College president to give some money to start an art rental program. Originally they bought some prints, and then also some posters and over the years we’ve gotten rid of the posters and now it’s 98% original art.”
As for Johnson, she went on to become a memorable professor of art history. “She was so popular she had about 500 people in her classes. They had to hold them in Hall auditorium! That’s how charismatic and amazing she was about popular art,” Jost said.
Johnson based the need for an art rental program in her philosophy that “in part you can only really appreciate original works of art if you live with it,” a philosophy that Jost still uses as the premise for art rental.
“I hope that people think of themselves as collectors,” said Jost. “Many of the people who camp out overnight are not camping out to rent a Monet or Picasso, but they’re camping out to rent the same work they rented last year. They fall in love with a work of art, and they want their work of art. So there’s certain works that have been rented for four years by the same person. Sometimes, what the market finds valuable and what somebody finds personally valuable are different. And that’s what makes me really happy because then they’re doing what Ellen Johnson wanted them to do — to live with a work of art, and to exercise taste.”

Over the years, there have been a number of mishaps with the collection. Jost related a story of a piece that was rented to one of Johnson’s friends in the 1970s.
“It was never returned,” Jost said, “And I never even knew it was missing. This woman passed away, and her son called up and said, ‘Hey, I want to donate a piece to the museum.’ And I said, ‘What kind is it, we’re interested.’ And he was telling me about it…and I was like, ‘Well, you know, it’s not yours to give us. It’s already ours.’ That’s the only piece that was kind of missing, and then it popped back up. It was missing for about 15 years — so long that we didn’t have records for it. It was one of those things that made me think that God was on our side with this.”
Perhaps the most amazing story is that of the piece that fell out of a three-story dorm window.
“The most amazing thing about it is that [all the pieces] are all covered in plexi-glass. At one point we switched from glass to plexi-glass for safety reasons so that it doesn’t shatter,” Jost said, “This one piece we missed… So it shattered. Even more amazing was that it’s made out of hand-stitched tissue paper. I mean, this is the kind of piece that you sneeze on and you ruin…It’s literally a dress made out of hand-stitched tissue paper. And nothing happened to it…It’s perfect, it’s back being rented again. But again, those are things that really make me think that God is on our side. [Art rental] is one of the few things that makes me religious.”
Though Jost is continually shaping the collection, including commissioning artists to create pieces for the rental, he insists the real hero of art rental is Lucille Stiger.
“She’s the one who keeps all the condition reports and does all the checkouts and is essentially what we call the librarian for the museum,” Jost said. “[Lucille] goes out of her way to make this fun.”