The Nature of Teaching Exhibitions

The Tricks of the Eye exhibition evolved out of a number of conversations between our office and other departments & offices on campus on how best to foster discussions around publicly engaged art practices at RISD. Given the intense project-driven nature of studio practice and students' busy schedules, I proposed that we create an exhibit that would connect classroom learning to examples of contemporary creative practice. By working with faculty whose courses explore similar themes, students would be offered the opportunity to engage in the work on many different levels, from the intellectual to the conceptual to the aesthetic.

ceramic bowls and poster prototype for Blue Hammer, Leon Johnson

Coming from a background in dialogue-based and performative public art, I was curious about how documentation of these kinds of practices would go over with RISD students. When introducing under-explored forms of art making, there needs to be some level of education around the practices - we chose to take a multi-faceted approach using descriptive wall text, visiting artists talks and classroom visits, and guided-tours with me as curator. Given that we were highlighting documentation of past projects, rather than original work, I was concerned with how to balance the need to contextualize the documentation without having the show become overly dependent on text. I tried to address this issue by including a number of different mediums - from textile to ceramic objects to vibrant poster art, and video to audio.

Meyers-Bitter Survey and Knitting Nation installation views

Does this kind of presentation of multi-faceted art practices work as an exhibition strategy? Even though we recognized the importance of combining object-based work that taps into our desire for craft and concreteness with more conceptual and relational practices. It was also important to, as much as possible, to create opportunities for the students to meet with the artists (or me as the curator) so their critiques and questions could be addressed in real, face-to-face, time.

These conversations - with Peter Hocking and Charlie Cannon's Use of Space:Place of Campus and From Studio to Situation seminars, Marie Cieri's Social Geographies class and Christopher Ho's Competition, Collaboration and Collective seminar - proved to be rich moments of contextualized learning. Sitting in on these classes and walking classes through the exhibit, I have found myself being asked to defend a number of the projects. It was important for me to articulate that I chose to include much of the work due to its compelling problematic nature. Rather than offering answers, the projects included in the show grapple with the complexities of representation and dissemination of socially charged information. The curator's role is one of navigating and interpreting for audiences that may be unfamiliar with the ways in which the highlighted projects fit within the artists' investigative trajectories or larger social practices.

To that end, I will be hosting weekly curator tours of the exhibit on Thursday afternoons from 12:00 - 12:30 starting March 19th and continuing through April 2nd. Please feel free to RSVP to me at ssakash@risd.edu. I also welcome comments to this post or via email.