Netzer: “We aim to provide an arena for what is usually the private enterprise of faculty scholarship.” Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

Since its founding just over 10 years ago, Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art has faced certain handicaps. In an era when many museum buildings are themselves trophies, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architects, the McMullen’s entrance is across the hall from the admissions office in neo-Gothic Devlin Hall, a building that also houses the geology and geophysics department and the fine arts offices. Its exhibition space is relatively small—approximately 7,000 square feet. And unlike many other university and college museums—Harvard’s Fogg, Wellesley’s Davis, Brandeis’s Rose, to name some local ones—the McMullen has only sparse collections.

The strategy of the museum’s founding director, Nancy Netzer, has been to turn its deficits into advantages. “The lack of collections,” Netzer says, “meant we could treat the space as a blank screen to be filled with the highest-quality objects we could find for exhibitions.” With no need to build exhibitions around what it already owns, the shows at the McMullen are often unexpected—no rote lineup of Impressionist canvases here. In 2002, for instance, the museum hosted Reclaiming a Lost Generation: German Self-Portraits from the Feldberg Collection, 1923–1933, bringing the faces of artists who died in the Holocaust to its walls. While the Feldberg exhibition was put together by the University of Toronto, around 80 percent of the McMullen’s shows—a figure far higher than the museum world norm—are organized in-house.

John McMullen, 1918–2005. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

The McMullen’s trademark is programming that puts the museum at the heart of the University’s liberal arts curriculum. Education was the primary passion of the late John McMullen, the museum’s chief benefactor. A collector himself, he preferred to talk about the educational aspects of the museum’s shows rather than the aesthetic values of the art.

Netzer advances that educational mission. She was an assistant curator writing catalogues at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when she was recruited for the BC job, both to teach and to plan the museum. She had earned a doctorate in medieval art history at Harvard, which has both a peerless record in turning out museum directors and peerless collections among university museums worldwide. Yet Harvard’s Fogg has, until recently, had a reputation for being standoffish, not particularly interested in collaborations with other parts of Harvard—including the university’s art history department.

Netzer’s mandate at BC was to create the opposite situation. With the McMullen, she says, “We aim to provide an arena for what is usually the private enterprise of faculty scholarship.” At the opening of the 2000 show Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde, for example, BC historian Roberta Manning spoke on Soviet society after Stalin. There were tours of the show in Russian led by BC professor Maxim Shrayer, to lure the large Boston-area Russian community, and a performance called “Icons and Sacred Song,” by the Rublev Choir of BC’s department of Slavic and Eastern languages.

Involving BC students—many of whom first glimpsed the museum’s big glass doors as applicants visiting the admissions office—is an equally high priority. While planning Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen, a show that will open at the McMullen next September, Netzer and BC art historian Sheila Blair co-taught a spring 2005 course on the making of the exhibition.

The interdepartmental nature of many McMullen shows has shaped the institution’s philosophy on labels, a controversial subject in museum circles. Many curators dislike them on grounds that they’re visual distractions from the art; most museumgoers, on the other hand, can’t get enough of them. Netzer comes down on the side of the latter, providing informative “chat” labels, longer than the usual and blessedly free of artspeak. Adding to the McMullen’s public appeal, admission is free, something that can’t be said for all university museums.

Netzer says she isn’t under pressure to bump up attendance by mounting dumbed-down shows of motorcycles or yachts, as big urban museums are. Where university museum directors do feel pressure is from alumni who seek the prestige of exhibiting their collections, and from art department faculty who want to see their own works on the walls. The McMullen has capitulated in a couple of cases that resulted in atypically mediocre shows.

Attendance at the McMullen varies wildly, from 20,000 to 80,000 a year, modest by the standards of big league, big city museums. For a university museum, though, the numbers are healthy. The 80,000 figure was from 1999, the year the McMullen played host to Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image. According to Art Newspaper’s annual tallies, that was the highest attendance enjoyed by any university art exhibition, worldwide, for that year.

Netzer—smart, funny, and full of ideas—is a consummate cultivator of people she wants to be involved in the museum. A case in point is Per Arneberg, a Norwegian-American shipping magnate and collector of Edvard Munch. Arneberg not only loaned his own works to BC’s Munch show in 2001, but accompanied Netzer to Oslo to add his considerable clout to her requests for loans from Norwegian museums.

Netzer has also capitalized on Boston College’s connections with Ireland and its Jesuit ties. The museum’s inaugural exhibition was Watercolors and Drawings from the National Gallery of Ireland. Later came more adventurous Irish fare. The 1997 Re/Dressing Cathleen was the first U.S. show to examine the impact of contemporary Irish women artists. And this past spring, the museum focused on a single Irish artist, Dorothy Cross, in a show of video, photographs, and sculpture documenting her temporary site-specific installations in such unlikely settings as a cave off Ireland’s western coast and a cell in Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol, now a museum. Cross had placed a fetal pig in the latter cramped space, by way of questioning stereotypes about Anglo-Irish relations: Which side did the animal represent? was the query hanging in the air.

While Cross’s forays into taxidermy as art struck some viewers as creepy, they didn’t arouse anything like the fuss over the 1999 Irish Art Now show that featured a life-sized full-frontal photograph of a man wearing nothing but a condom. Conservatives in the Boston area objected strenuously, demanding the work be removed. The University backed Netzer, and the piece stayed, although the battle got so nasty that she was forced to change her office phone to an unlisted number.

The McMullen’s greatest coup to date was the Caravaggio show, made possible by BC’s Jesuit affiliation. In 1990, members of the order in Dublin sent a painting in their possession out for cleaning. When the grime came off, the canvas turned out to be Caravaggio’s 1602 The Taking of Christ, missing for some two centuries. The tale of the rediscovery is dramatic, but the painting itself proved even more so. The masterpiece is now in Ireland’s National Gallery, but before it was ensconced there permanently it made the trip across the Atlantic to the little museum at BC.

The museum’s next major exhibition has been planned together with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Library. Secular, Sacred will explore the sometimes tenuous divide between religious and secular objects of the Middle Ages. The show will run from February 19 through June 4, and its cocurators include faculty from the University’s departments of history, art history, Romance languages and literatures, and Slavic and Eastern languages.

Fall 2007 will bring an exhibition that may top the Caravaggio show’s draw. Claude Cernuschi, of BC’s art history department, and Andrzej Herczynski, of the physics department, are working on a show of a newly discovered cache of paintings by an artist as flamboyant in the 20th century as Caravaggio was in the 17th: Jackson Pollock.

Christine Temin is a writer based in the Boston area. She covered art and dance for the Boston Globe for 27 years.