1 Exhibition + 4 College Museums = Endless Possibilities

In what is likely a first, Skidmore College is collaborating with three other institutions to co-present a remarkable photography exhibition, develop curricula around it, and share new understandings of museum-based teaching and learning with each other and with the broader world of higher education.

This inventive inter-institutional approach to teaching and learning with museums is supported by a $225,500 grant from the Teagle Foundation. The catalyst is the exhibition This Place, a photographic exploration of the State of Israel and the Occupied West Bank currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, which brings together the work of 12 renowned photographers: Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Nick Waplington, and author of the project, Frédéric Brenner.

In the spring semester 2018, This Place will be divided and exhibited concurrently at the Tang Teaching Museum, Colgate University's Picker Art Gallery, Hamilton College's Wellin Museum, and the University at Albany's University Art Museum. With the schools' geographic proximity and myriad collaborative activities to be planned among them, faculty and students from each institution will have plenty of opportunity to move around and study the entire show.

The subject matter of This Place—exploration of a highly contested space that involves deep history, politics, religion, and more—is richly interdisciplinary, with broad points of entry for faculty across the arts, sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Faculty will be able to participate in workshops and develop anything from a single class to an entire course focused on the exhibition.

With several hundred images, This Place "offered the perfect opportunity for an experiment in museum practice across multiple venues," says Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs Rachel Seligman. Organizers had hoped to show the exhibition in educational institutions, so the innovative proposal was warmly embraced. "The process of dividing the exhibition will be collaborative," Seligman explains, noting there will likely be three artists represented at each museum, rather than a sampling from all 12. The photographers spent a great deal of time in the middle east making very different sorts of projects—from New York-based Wendy Ewald, who taught people in various communities to take their own self-portraits, to a large grid of photographs of contested land by New Yorker Fazal Sheikh, and a provocative single light box by Canadian Jeff Wall.

Members of Skidmore's working group—Seligman, Tang Dayton Director Ian Berry, and Art History Chair Mimi Hellman, who is overall project director—are collaborating with their counterparts to create faculty development opportunities and programming over the next two years.

The process gets under way in May, when partners will visit the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and then start brainstorming ways to support faculty from differing fields and institutions.

Hellman is particularly excited about the project's interdisciplinary possibilities. She says, "Think of environmental studies, or GIS; the history of the physical landscape, the material landscape; there's the possibility to respond through music, through dance, through theater, through the making of other images." Then too there are many kinds of skill-based learning—close observation, communication—that cut across disciplines for which museum-based pedagogies are ideal.

"This is a case study," says Hellman; "the idea is that the teaching and learning that get seeded and explored through the grant are then sustained in the four institutions." A shared website will be developed and ultimately lessons learned will be disseminated broadly with a symposium and a publication.

Says Hellman, "We hope people will do things we can't even think of right now."