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."