Visual Learning Conference

Saturday, September 29, 2012
1:30-3:00 PM, WCC 236

Laurel Bradley, Director and Curator, Perlman Teaching Museum, Carleton College
Lesley Wright, Director, Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College

Readings/handouts:

Beloit College Faculty Workshop: Visual and Material Culture Pedagogies
Carleton College Faculty Workshop: Curating the Curriculum
Grinnell College Faculty Workshop: Curating Across Campus
Mickey's 10 Commandments, by Martin Sklar, AAM Annual meeting, 1987
Hands-on Exhibitionary Practice Handout 

Exhibitions are a fertile format for publicly exhibiting knowledge. Highlighting “real” objects and artifacts loaded with multivalent meanings that reveal themselves through arrangements in space, exhibitions have great potential within a variety of disciplinary contexts in the liberal arts environment.  Further, didactic exhibition labels, demanding clear thinking, attention to audience, and eloquent precision, are useful writing exercises.

With the term “curating” cropping up in everything from discussions of hip-hop music dj’s to conversations with restaurateurs, the rhetoric of curating is infusing our culture. Thus the mechanics of doing it well--of choosing and combining material into a coherent whole—have also entered the liberal arts curriculum as a 21st-century skill. Creating a visual structure or narrative, independent of a verbal explanation, is not a fundamental skill in many disciplines; thus, it’s important that instructors as well as students have practice in the basics of curating.

This participatory session invited attendees, broken into small groups, to organize a mini-exhibition based on a fixed group of objects.  Each group made a selection and then developed and articulated an exhibition concept, which served as the narrative glue for the project.  The curatorial teams also produced texts, including the exhibition title, a “Big Idea,” and basic information about the objects.  Finally, the groups staged these mini-exhibitions, allowing space to articulate relationships and guide experience.

Laurel Bradley, Director of the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College, and Lesley Wright, Director of the Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, have both conducted summer curatorial workshops for faculty across the curriculum.  This session not only provided a dynamic learning experience for all, but allowed Bradley and Wright to share their different experiences conducting these workshops, and otherwise collaborating with faculty co-curators, through hand-outs, website references, and oral exchanges.

Laurel Bradley is Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College in Minnesota.  Since 1996, she has advocated for connecting museum programs to the curriculum, through collaboration, pedagogical experiments, and design as realized in the new Perlman Teaching Museum (opened fall 2012).  Former chair of the Minnesota Association of Museums Steering Committee, she regularly writes, lectures and consults on visual literacy, campus museum issues, and Victorian art.  She spent eight years teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism, and was the founding director of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  Her Ph.D is from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Lesley Wright oversees the staff, policies and exhibition schedule for both the Faulconer Gallery and the Print and Drawing Study Room. She currently supervises a professional staff of four, and a student staff of gallery desk attendants, docents, program assistants and an intern. She reports to the Vice-President for Institutional Planning.

Before coming to Grinnell College, Wright was the curator at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art for 6 years, where she curated over 20 major exhibitions and numerous smaller shows. She has taught courses in American and women's art history at Stanford University, San Francisco State, the University of Iowa, and Coe College. Her museum background includes work as the assistant to the director at the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley (now the Berkeley Art Museum) and a Luce Foundation internship at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

In 2004 she was asked by the Art Department to inaugurate a course on museum studies, taught almost every year, to complement the department’s exhibition seminar. The Gallery offers an internship each semester, in order to more fully bring the gallery and its operations into the curriculum of the college. Other student positions in education, gallery security, administration, and The Collection are available as well. Degrees: Swarthmore College, B.A.; Stanford University, M.A. and Ph.D. in American Art History.