What was this process like for you?
We asked students to reflect on the process of curating these virtual exhibitions and what they learned. Below are a few of their respones.
One thing I have learned from this project is that creating a museum exhibition takes a lot more time and effort than just hanging some art on the gallery walls. I did not realize how much work happens before getting to the point where the art is actually hung up.
Initially, we had a lot of ideas with our own interpretations of the photographs and used them to fit a narrative that we constructed. However, once we learned about the history and context of the photographer and photograph, our understanding and usage of each item changed. Generally, it changed for the better as we worked to incorporate the content more accurately based on the historical and artistic circumstances. This more truthful understanding, while it may have compromised our initial ideas, allowed us to build out a more comprehensive exhibition. While it may have made us rewrite and rework our initial plan, the final product was a much more compelling story and a more accurate usage of the photographs.
ARTH 140 has opened my eyes to the world of studying photographs and of appreciating the deep rooted history that is ingrained in photography itself. This was my first art history class I have ever taken, so the process came with a learning curve! I have learned how to always ask questions when I first look at a photograph - what is outside the frame? What happened before and after this picture was taken? Where is the viewer placed? I am aware that photos have the ability to capture a moment of reality, but that moment captured is not necessarily the truth.
I have learned what goes into the process of creating an exhibition. I have only ever been an exhibition-attender, not an exhibition-maker. It feels like you are playing God because you are creating a physical space in which people will come and have an experience that you designed for them to have . . . But, as a painter, I think about my audience as I am creating my work and the thoughts and feelings I want to be associated with the piece. I saw many similarities between the two crafts (painting and exhibition-making) through this project.
From this class I have learned how to critically analyze elements of art and look at different photographs with a holistic perspective. I think that I learned how to become a better consumer of information and also further understand pieces of art that have underlying meanings or messages.
Because the scene in a photograph actually existed at some point in time, we have ingrained in our minds that photographs are neutral; the idea that the camera just reflects what’s in front of it. But that overlooks the very basic fact that the photographer first took the photo because the photographer saw something they considered worth seeing in perpetuity. … Viewers of the photograph see neither the scene directly outside the lens nor the social, historical, cultural, or political context in which the photographer took the photo unless the subject matter references it. So, though the photograph might respond to something happening at the time of its creation, this might not come through straightforwardly in the photograph itself. We, as people who view photographs every day, do ourselves a great disservice when we oversimplify their meaning to their aesthetic or compositional quality. For our own awareness, we must interrogate what happened outside the photo’s borders because we should know what the photographer wants us to see and what the photographer does not want us to see.
I have learned a lot about photography and self-expression in this class. If I could offer advice to myself, it would be to look at how photography in social media influences me and my perspective.
Even though I’ve written various kinds of papers through my English and Philosophy majors, I faced a new challenge with exhibition writing. First of all, the strict word counts for the exhibition labels meant that I had to be disciplined in what to include in my drafts. For example, even though I was really interested in analyzing the foreground [of this work], I needed to subtract my analysis during the editing stages of our writing to around 250 words for the sake of concision. Furthermore, and most uniquely, I needed to be intentionally vague in my writing by avoiding an explanation of every detail so that my reader could have room to engage with the pieces themselves. With my Philosophy major in particular, I always have to tell my readers exactly what a concept means in my paper to remove any cases of ambiguity for my professors and other informed readers. In an exhibition, on the other hand, I had to be more modest so the viewer can enter the space with their own ideas. In other words, I tried not to be a lecturer but more like a supplementary guide.