Carleton College opens 2015 with a new exhibit in the Weitz Center for Creativity’s Perlman Teaching Museum. “A Collection Embodied” is a student-curated exhibit featuring recent acquisitions to the College’s Art Collection, offering over forty prints, photographs, ceramics and other works. The exhibit opens Friday, Jan. 9 with a reception from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Admission to the exhibit and the reception, as well as other related events, is free and open to the public.
“A Collection Embodied” raises questions about how we relate to others, and how we view ourselves. Carleton curatorial studies students mined the College Art Collection for figurative works that articulate the human condition—embodying identity, social connections, political allegiances, and notions of beauty.
“In an age when everyone is a self-proclaimed curator, students learned about the art of curating from a museum professional’s perspective, and considered the intersections between higher education and museum practices,” writes Perlman Teaching Museum Director and College Curator Laurel Bradley. Charged with choosing an umbrella theme for the winter term exhibition, the students identified the human figure as a motif both broad and deep. The human body, pervasive in art history, invites engagement with an array of competing perspectives about culture, class, politics, gender and sexuality, and aesthetics. This broad theme allowed the curators to celebrate collection strengths in Japanese woodblock prints, contemporary American prints, and international photographs.
“A Collection Embodied” reveals only a sliver of the 600 art works added to the College Art Collection since 2006, many on display at Carleton for the first time. Six students, seniors Camille Coonrod (Seattle), Nora Liu (China), and Nora Munger (Davidson, N.C.), along with juniors Claire Pennington (Mason City, Ia.), Evan Rothman, (Larchmont, N.Y.), and Moira Smith (Annapolis, Md.), enrolled in the fall term “Curatorial Studies “ (ARTH288), collaborated with Bradley to select works around a theme to effectively reveal this rich resource for teaching and learning.
“A Collection Embodied” will be on display January 9 through March 11, 2015, in the Kaemmer Family Gallery of the Carleton College Perlman Teaching Museum, located in the Weitz Center for Creativity (320 Third Street in Northfield). “A Collection Embodied” is presented with generous support from Pamela Kiecker Royall ’80 and William A. Royall Jr.
Admission to the Perlman Teaching Museum is free. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday-Wednesday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Thursday and Friday; and 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For more information, contact Laurel Bradley, director and curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum, at (507) 222-4342 or visit online at go.carleton.edu/museum.
