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The Dennos Museum Center
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Share Your Passion. Share Your Collection.

Thank you for considering a gift to the Dennos Museum Center. Like most museums, the Dennos continues to build its art collection through the generosity of friends and donors like you. We consider it our responsibility to care for, exhibit, and interpret the nearly 3,000 works of art that the museum holds in public trust. Do you have an Inuit art collection? Learn why Bob O'Hara chose to give to the Dennos.

Please contact Craig Hadley at 231-995-1572 or chadley@nmc.edu to learn more about making a gift.

Give online now through the NMC Foundation »

Learn More About Estate, In-Kind, and Cash Gifts Here »

Collections Policy

As outlined in our Collections Management Policy (rev. 1/2020), gifts to the Dennos Museum Center typically go through the following steps before they are formally accessioned into the collection:

  1. The donor shares their desire to give a gift of artwork with the Executive Director of the Dennos Museum Center.

  2. The donor shares additional information with the Executive Director and curatorial staff to consider. This might include a third-party appraisal, photographs, and other types of documentation about the artwork, artist(s), and the object's history and ownership (provenance).

  3. Should the museum feel that the prospective gift aligns with its collecting plan and mission, staff may choose to execute a temporary custody agreement and assigning a temporary registration (TR) number to it.

  4. The Executive Director and the Registrar complete an accession proposal form for the Collections Committee to review. The Collections Committee, comprised of NMC faculty and staff, Dennos staff, and other community arts professionals, votes several times each year and ultimately decides whether to accession or (if applicable) return the object. The committee structure ensures that gifts made to the permanent collection are in the best interest of the museum's mission and its finite resources to care for, interpret, and exhibit the gift.

  5. Should the committee vote to accession the object, the museum will issue a formal deed of gift for the donor to sign.Once countersigned, the gift is now property of the Dennos Museum Center and Northwestern Michigan College and may be formally cataloged into the collection. Should the committee decide against accepting the gift, a temporary custody return form is executed and the object is returned to the donor.