First week of school!
The first class of the spring semester was, appropriately, long and exciting. We began with Curatorial Models II (a continuation of a course we began in the fall), for which our main project will be curating, as a class, the first solo exhibition of Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July's Learning to Love You More at MU in Eindhoven, Holland. Miranda and Angelique, MU's curator, came to class, and we began talking about how the show might take shape. I liked Miranda right away; she said she wondered whether we'd all picked out special outfits for the First Day of School, which was hilarious to me because I always do that. When I was little, my mom and I used to pick out a special outfit for every first day of school, complete with a matching backpack and lunch box.
The only difference now is that I try to make it look like I'm not trying so hard, but I've always been a sucker for the first day of school.... Anyway, I'm really anxious to see how the exhibition will take shape. Harrell will be meeting with us next week, so we'll be pitching ideas and thoughts to him then. We definitely have our work cut out for us. In addition to LTLYM, we'll also have a number of guest faculty for Curatorial Models, as in the fall, including Jessica Morgan (curator at the Tate Modern), Sean Snyder, Mary Jane Jacob, and Hans Ulrich-Obrist.
Our second class was Exhibition Practice II, another part 2, which will basically be split into three parts. For something like five weeks, we'll meet with Dominic Willsdon, Curator of Education and Public Programs at SFMoMA, who we met on Tuesday. Dominic seems like an incredibly smart, thoughtful person; we spoke really eloquently about ideas around the "public" and how they interplay with his own goals and ideas for SFMoMA. I have to say, I don't usually like the rhetoric around museum education (often a lot of stuff about wringing exhibition content dry to extract the bare bones essentials and take the intrigue out of everything), but I was really impressed with the way he conceived of his job within the institution. For Dominic, we'll be individually working on public programming proposals around an upcoming New Media exhibition. The other parts of the course will be split between Leigh Markopoulos, who we also had last semester, who's giving us the nitty-gritty in all aspects of exhibition planning and execution; and then we'll also do a huge project for Sandra Percival, director of New Langton Arts, for which we'll individually conceive of and propose a year's worth of programming for Langton.
So that's Tuesday... Then Wednesday, we'll have Professional Development II with Jens Hoffman, the new director of the Wattis Institute, who wants to work with us on the Bulletin Board project (something that Matthew Higgs set up during his reign here). Jens canceled our first class, but we met with him once last semester, and he seems like a really interesting person. Then we have Art History and Theory with Julian Myers, who taught the Detroit research course last semester. This course, "Discontents", will map the avant-garde from the early twentieth century through the late sixties and going a bit into the present moment, specifically looking at Dada, Russian Constructivism, Tropicalia, Algeria, and Islamic Vanguardism. It sounds rad, and it has a really great reading list. I also have a class on Mondays, Field Guide to Social Practice with Ted Purves, which will start next week....
SO, this semester is already shaping up to be really exciting and much more project-based than last semester; almost every project we work on this semester will culminate at the end, which will mean that we'll go more in-depth than with most things in the fall. And of course, it's great to be working on some real curatorial projects alongside the theoretical. Also, we're working as a class (outside of class) on a zine and exhibition called Faction, which is a series of collaborations with artists and curators around the idea of the blurring and clashing of fact and fiction in art and life. The zine will likely debut in April, hopefully alongside the mounting of the show at PLAySPACE (the graduate gallery at CCA). More later about my specific collaboration for that project...
The only difference now is that I try to make it look like I'm not trying so hard, but I've always been a sucker for the first day of school.... Anyway, I'm really anxious to see how the exhibition will take shape. Harrell will be meeting with us next week, so we'll be pitching ideas and thoughts to him then. We definitely have our work cut out for us. In addition to LTLYM, we'll also have a number of guest faculty for Curatorial Models, as in the fall, including Jessica Morgan (curator at the Tate Modern), Sean Snyder, Mary Jane Jacob, and Hans Ulrich-Obrist.
Our second class was Exhibition Practice II, another part 2, which will basically be split into three parts. For something like five weeks, we'll meet with Dominic Willsdon, Curator of Education and Public Programs at SFMoMA, who we met on Tuesday. Dominic seems like an incredibly smart, thoughtful person; we spoke really eloquently about ideas around the "public" and how they interplay with his own goals and ideas for SFMoMA. I have to say, I don't usually like the rhetoric around museum education (often a lot of stuff about wringing exhibition content dry to extract the bare bones essentials and take the intrigue out of everything), but I was really impressed with the way he conceived of his job within the institution. For Dominic, we'll be individually working on public programming proposals around an upcoming New Media exhibition. The other parts of the course will be split between Leigh Markopoulos, who we also had last semester, who's giving us the nitty-gritty in all aspects of exhibition planning and execution; and then we'll also do a huge project for Sandra Percival, director of New Langton Arts, for which we'll individually conceive of and propose a year's worth of programming for Langton.
So that's Tuesday... Then Wednesday, we'll have Professional Development II with Jens Hoffman, the new director of the Wattis Institute, who wants to work with us on the Bulletin Board project (something that Matthew Higgs set up during his reign here). Jens canceled our first class, but we met with him once last semester, and he seems like a really interesting person. Then we have Art History and Theory with Julian Myers, who taught the Detroit research course last semester. This course, "Discontents", will map the avant-garde from the early twentieth century through the late sixties and going a bit into the present moment, specifically looking at Dada, Russian Constructivism, Tropicalia, Algeria, and Islamic Vanguardism. It sounds rad, and it has a really great reading list. I also have a class on Mondays, Field Guide to Social Practice with Ted Purves, which will start next week....
SO, this semester is already shaping up to be really exciting and much more project-based than last semester; almost every project we work on this semester will culminate at the end, which will mean that we'll go more in-depth than with most things in the fall. And of course, it's great to be working on some real curatorial projects alongside the theoretical. Also, we're working as a class (outside of class) on a zine and exhibition called Faction, which is a series of collaborations with artists and curators around the idea of the blurring and clashing of fact and fiction in art and life. The zine will likely debut in April, hopefully alongside the mounting of the show at PLAySPACE (the graduate gallery at CCA). More later about my specific collaboration for that project...
posted by Jess Brier at 8:36 AM
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