Longtime Newark Museum Director Dies at 83

Funeral services will be held Friday in Newark for Samuel Clifford Miller, who headed the Newark Museum for 25 years beginning in the late 1960s and was serving as director emeritus at the time of his death.

Born to a ranching family in Oregon, Miller, 83, graduated from Stanford University and the Institute for Fine Arts at New York University. It was during a posting with the US Army in Japan that he began a lifelong love of of art collecting.  

His first museum appointment was as assistant to the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.  He was named the fifth Director of the Newark Museum in 1968, serving twenty-five years until his retirement in 1993, and was among the longest-tenured members of the Association of Art Museum Directors.

He is credited with expanding the museum’s activities and winning increased public support for the institution throughout its many communities.  With the trustees he spearheaded the Newark Museum’s nationally and internationally-acclaimed renovation and expansion, designed by Michael Graves, which opened in 1989.  

He also oversaw acquisitions and gifts reflecting the breadth of Newark’s collections in American, Asian, African, Native American and classical art and Decorative arts.   He began a major outdoor sculpture collection and undertook to enhance the museum’s strong holdings of 18th- and 19th-century painting, geometric abstraction, ceramics, folk art, work by African-American artists, and especially contemporary art, which remained his first love.  

Among accomplishments during his tenure, the museum created permanent galleries devoted to African art; restored the 1885 Ballantine House, subsequently named to the National Register of Historic Sites; and relocated the historic Tibetan Buddhist altar, which was then consecrated by the Dalai Lama, surrounded by a suite of new galleries showcasing this seminal collection.  In 1974, the Newark Museum was among the first to repatriate a work of art, a late-Roman mosaic that was found to have been stolen from the excavation of Apamea in Syria.

His funeral Mass will be held at St. Patrick’s Pro-Cathedral in Newark Friday at 10:30 am. Following the Memorial Mass, a reception with remembrances will be held at the Newark Museum.