Universities are a public good, even more so when they run museums with free admission. Yale University runs the Yale Center for British Art, which houses the largest collection of British art anywhere in the world outside of the UK.
Visitors are greeted by friendly and helpful staff in a spacious lobby and directed through a compressed entryway before being released into a vast wooden atrium. It feels like the interior design philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright applied in the 21st century.
Unlike the Springfield Science Museum, which places Native American history adjacent to a gallery of taxidermies animals, Yale has an entire floor dedicated to one photograph of a V-shaped tree – the tree that the British lynched slaves from. There’s a reading room and staff on sit e to debrief visitors on what they just saw. It communicates respect for historical events, dignity to those that suffered, and care for the emotional well-being of visitors.
If you don’t see anything else, see the lynching tree, it’s a museum exhibit well done.
