Given a modest budget, a year to work with our students, and complete access to the Fisher Museum staff and permanent collection, we sought to bridge the gap between academic art history and hands-on curatorial practice. Our course was conceived neither as a vocational exercise nor as a curricular requirement for art history majors.
Rather, it was designed as an experiment in critical and creative thinking. Educated citizens need to be able to dig beneath the surface of what is presented to them as authoritative—in museums, on the internet, and in every aspect of their daily lives.
Beginning in September 2009, a select group of undergraduates—David Evans Frantz, Raylene Galarze, Lauren Maldonado, Francisco Rosas, and Jayme Wilson—along with Cindy Robinson (the first Ronald Tutor Campus Center Art Fellow and a recent graduate of USC) began to explore museum practice throughout the Los Angeles region. They went to exhibitions and analyzed the underlying significance and effectiveness of different curatorial strategies. They met with museum directors, curators, and critics and reported on what they learned from these meetings in class.
Throughout the fall semester, the students also became acquainted with USC’s own collections of art and photography, including those housed at the Fisher Museum, the Architecture & Fine Arts Library, and Special Collections, Doheny Memorial Library. While closely observing the curatorial process undertaken by Fisher staff in creating the exhibition Four Rooms and View: USC’s Collection Highlights, the students began work on their major assignment for the spring semester.
Their project was to curate an intervention in Four Rooms and a View after the show had been on display for two months. With that in mind, each member of the class identified a specific work or group of works on which to focus. They investigated not only the individual artists at issue but also the broader social and economic conditions that shaped art practice and collecting at the time.
The students uncovered unknown histories and then fashioned strategies for making those histories visible in Fisher Museum. They introduced additional works of art into Four Rooms and a View, including a custom-ordered, hand-painted copy of a French Barbizon School oil painting, wrote new wall texts, designed special floor treatments, and produced a video documentary. Then they titled the resulting exhibition re:View.
The class also invited conceptual artist Susan Silton to contribute an intervention to re:View. Silton’s provocative banner on the exterior of Fisher Museum alerts visitors to the multiple histories, interpretations, and perspectives on display inside.
To make the banner, the artist photographed two nearly but not quite identical backdrops of a desert landscape which she rented from a Hollywood prop company. The message inscribed on these slightly discrepant backdrops reads, “We See It Differently, You And I.”
We hope that re:View provides a model for future curatorial collaborations between students, artists, and faculty on the USC campus, and, more broadly, between the museum, the contemporary art world, and the academic community.
- Selma Holo and Richard Meyer
Posts
