Curating our Campus
Hello there, this is Mairin, senior Art History student here at MNSU in Mankato, introducing the process and progress of our ART 464, Art Museum and Exhibition Studies class. This website and blog will serve as our documentation as we methodically put together our very own art exhibition. This is an exciting venture!
There are 13 of us students and one amazing professor – Dr. Alisa Eimen, who is instructing, guiding, and mentoring us throughout the semester. We came into this class with a range of backgrounds: artists, grad students, museum studies, art historians, graphic designers … But we're all excited about this special course and the opportunity to learn about the art exhibition and museum collecting process - a valuable asset for many of us entering the professional arts world.
Since this class began in early January, we selected our exhibition theme from a pool of ideas proposed by each student. From those ideas, we narrowed it down to three proposals: Looking though a Fragment, Sensory: An Interactive Exhibit, and Curated Campus. We discussed each proposal and ideas for what types of works we could see in the space, what kinds of experiences we wanted visitors to have, and how to go about putting a call out to artists.
In the end we decided to go with the “Curated Campus” theme because the proposal called for artworks that are currently installed on campus. Because our exhibition date was quickly approaching, we decided it would be easier and save time to draw from works that are already close at hand rather than put a call out to artists and wait for a response.
We also decided in that meeting that we wanted to include “abandoned” works of art – finished and unfinished artworks that former students left behind in Nelson hall. We thought this would create an interesting juxtaposition next to artworks from the university’s official collection of art. This lead us to refine our theme to the value and meaning of art, ownership, and acquisition.
We named our exhibition Afterthought, a title which reflects the ambivalent relationship we have with art, as well as the relationship our university, fellow students, faculty, staff, and visitors have with the art on campus. How often do we walk past sculptures and paintings and never notice them? How many works of art have been left behind to gather dust in the Nelson Hall shelves? So often art becomes just an afterthought – something in the background or something forgettable.
Once we decided all this, it was time to curate! The first step was to divide up all the campus buildings amongst ourselves and we were each tasked with photographing the artworks displayed in those buildings. We included indoor and outdoor art – basically everything that looked official (or abandoned) and like a real piece of art.
Through this photo search we discovered some interesting things: for all the art we found, it was most concentrated in the Centennial Student Union, Nelson Hall, and the Library, and most artworks seemed to be either by alumni or current and former faculty. We noticed a general lack of artwork in all other buildings. We learned from Alisa that by law, whenever a new college building it being built, it must include a commissioned artwork, so most new buildings in campus that have been funded by the state include some sort of artwork or permanent installation – except for the new nursing building … which was not funded by the state, so no real artwork for them, which is too bad.
So, after our photo hunt we compiled all our images of official and unofficial art and proceeded to narrow our list down and begin to actually curate our show. During this time, we discovered that the CSU would not allow us to borrow any of their artworks for our show (sad day). They did allow a few of us to view works of art that are in storage – that was VERY interesting and worth another blog entry soon.
With the CSU artworks out of the picture, we narrowed down our list even further to about 50 works. We're considering how we were going to actually “curate” – such as, what criteria are we looking for? Do we want a range of mediums? Should we have something from each part of campus? Should official and unofficial artworks have some sort of relationship to each other? Color, line, size, year created?
Plus, how are we going to fit all these artworks into this cardboard box? Just kidding - the 410 Project is at least 10x this size, right?
