Skidmore College - Scope Magazine Spring 2019

16 SCOPE SPRING 2019 T H E T A N G Trish Lyell, teaching professor of art This project provided a chance to work with people across campus, and once we got to some core ideas — fun, nostalgia, gender, power, health and the body — then we under- stood how we all fit together. I view my experience as practice in tak- ing a really big entity and pulling it into something concrete without thinking it has to be singular and particular. My co-organizers and their scholarship helped define what needed to be understood and what could be left as a series of questions. I learned so much from everyone! Monica Raveret Richter, associate professor of biology As a behavioral ecolo- gist, I research food choice and its consequences, for both eaters and their environments. In the language of plants, sweetness attracts pollinators and frugivores in a mutually beneficial process of gamete exchange and dispersal of progeny. My co-curators expanded my perspective on the rela- tionship between sugar and my own species. We humans are also shaped by those advertising sweet rewards. Recently, extended family visited, and I made a cake. I measured out 1/3 cup of cane sugar and froze, contemplat- ing its path to my kitchen and the consequences of eating it. Rachel Seligman, Malloy Curator at the Tang Working with these outstanding Skidmore professors has been tremendously rewarding. Collaborating with them to translate all larger themes and our ideas about sugar into a lively, engaging and thought-provoking exhibition was deeply satisfying. They taught me about their scholar- ship and approaches to teaching, and we explored together the ways that sugar was a connective thread among them. I saw how the process of experimenting with new forms of object-based learning created new energy and excitement in their practices of research, art-making and teaching. Sarah Goodwin, professor of English My scholarly work is in late 18th- and early 19th- century British poetry, and I hadn’t noticed that sugar was everywhere in those texts until this project. I suddenly saw the sugar trade — and slave labor — as a cornerstone of Great Britain’s empire and wealth. With the exhibition, watching the works go up was unforgettable. Everything looked like a commentary on everything else. The show is rich in ironies, tragedies, playfulness and contradictions. It has taught me how carefully chosen and arranged objects can change our thinking and transform us. SUGAR-COATED “Like Sugar” continues the Tang Teaching Museum’s tradition of faculty-curated exhibitions that cross disciplines to tackle urgent issues from multiple points of view. Combining contemporary art, historical objects, material culture and data visualizations, the exhibition explores the prob- lematic and the joyful aspects of sugar. Each exhibition organizer contributed unique ideas. Here they are in their own words: Christopher Massa