KU football player Tanner Gibas talks about a painting to other athletes in the Spencer Museum of Art. It's part of a program for the athletes to learn more about art.

Tony Pierson, a student athlete at KU, gave a tour recently in the Spencer Museum of Art. It's part of a program for the athletes to learn more about art.

Dan Coester, part of the Spencer Museum Exhibit staff, assembles a new display in the museum's shop, where they build everything for the museum.

One day this summer at the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas University athletes could be spotted by paintings and sculptures, giving short presentations on each work.

After the athletes would give their presentation, their peers and museum staffers would pepper them with questions. Sometimes they agreed on the meaning of a work, and sometimes they didn’t.

The program is an example of the museum’s increasing effort to bring more parts of the university inside its doors, said Saralyn Reece Hardy, the museum’s director.

More than 50 departments across the campus involve the museum in their courses, she said. The museum fulfilled a $1 million fundraising challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which provided funds for the beginning of a new academic programs initiative that increases the museum’s involvement in interdisciplinary exhibitions and the university community.

“We see the museum as having a very special academic role,” she said, as it provides “real objects that create a whole different kind of learning experience.”

Susan Earle, curator of European and American art, said the wide variety of art available in the museum is part of its appeal.

“I think there’s usually something that would interest pretty much everyone,” Earle said.

The founder of the museum, Sallie Casey Thayer, “loved doorknobs and quilts and ceramics and paintings,” Earle said, and didn’t put a premium on collecting paintings, as some collectors might.

Thayer, a Kansas City art collector, donated nearly 7,500 art objects to KU in 1917 to form a museum. The objects came to Lawrence in two freight cars.

One area of strength for the museum is early Italian painting. Another is 19th century American art, she said.

The Spencer Museum was also the beneficiary of about 9,500 objects from the former KU Museum of Anthropology in Spooner Hall in 2007.

Today, the museum has more than 37,000 objects, which is roughly equivalent to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., Earle said.

Less than 5 percent of that collection, however, is on display because of space restrictions.

The undisplayed works are kept in storage on an upper floor of the museum. Many are kept in drawers, but others are hung on large sliding walls, where they can be easily catalogued and referenced for when they are to be displayed or pulled for the use of a class or other visitors.

Earle said the museum hopes to rotate out more works on paper in the future. The museum does have a frequently used print study room, where classes and other groups can get a peek at a specific work of art that may pertain to a topic of their interest, usually one that’s not on display.

For other materials, like textiles, the museum doesn’t have the equivalent of a print study room, Earle said. The museum has a large collection of textiles, and many people have an interest in seeing them, but museum staff members have to find space to put quilt racks so visitors can look at them, she said.

Groups come from all over the world to look at textiles, she said.

“We had quilters last summer from the U.K., we’ve had them from Japan. Many people from around the world will come to see quilts and other parts of the textile collection,” Earle said.

And Hardy hopes that a museum addition project that’s in the works will allow more of that kind of activity to go on.

“The thrill is when you’re in there with a small group of people and someone shows you something that they pull out just for you,” she said.